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Good evening. It's Thursday, January 25.
Tonight: it is not an exaggeration to say that major parts of the liberal corporate media are now in complete freefall. Just in the past few weeks, some of the most recognizable media brands have suffered massive layoffs or even been brought to the brink of extinction, including the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, NBC News, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, and Business Insider. BuzzFeed, months ago, completely abolished its news division. Just this week, the L.A. Times laid off 25% of its already decimated newsroom in just one day, just months after it laid off 13% of its workforce. It is hard to put into words just how extreme and complete is the implosion of Brooklyn-based liberal digital media over the last several years. Given that difficulty, I am forced to rely upon one of the giants of American journalism, a prophet of digital media, and a true pioneer in how to report on teenager influencer TikTok houses, The Washington Post Taylor Lorenz, who, in a video this week about all these events, said: “Pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem that myself and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in has been completely hollowed out.”
Indeed it has. There is no doubting the truth of that statement. But what is missing so conspicuously and revealingly from all of these discussions by these failing journalists, not just the dean of digital media, Taylor Lorenz, about the collapse of the industry around them is what role they themselves have played in generating this massive failure. They love to whine and cry in public when their jobs disappear. They're very adept at blaming others for why nobody cares about what they write and say anymore. They're very passionate in condemning and heaping scorn on the sectors of the media that are actually growing and thriving, namely independent media, where free discourse and political heterodoxy are permitted rather than crushed. But the one thing they will never, ever, do is look in the mirror and ask what they did to contribute to the destruction of the large sector of media to which they belong.
It is hard to blame them for refusing to look at that. If your face were covered with unsightly boils and open wounds and oozing infections and unidentified unsightly growths, you two would be reluctant to gaze upon your visage in the mirror. You'd do anything to avoid that. But the irrefutable truth is that except for a few media giants—such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—most of the liberal corporate media is in full-scale collapse. The public hates them to the extent that they care about them at all. Every poll shows that the American mainstream media is held in lower esteem than just about any other group in America, with the possible exception of pedophiles and telephone marketers—and even there, they're just barely ahead of those groups.
I really do try hard not to take pleasure in other people's misery and suffering. It is, in my view, unhealthy for one soul to do that often. However, I do take pleasure in the destruction of industries and companies that I regarded as deeply harmful and toxic to society and that absolutely includes the vast majority of these failing media outlets, which have become little more than servants of establishment power and deliberate dissemination of disinformation and propaganda for Partisan ends. The collapse of trust and faith in mainstream journalism is an important development in American life and one that is really worthy of examination and yet it so rarely receives that examination because the guardians of our discourse are the ones who most want to avoid it. And so today is what we will do. To help us engage in that analysis, we will be joined by the media analyst and commentator Hannah Cox, whose response to Terry Lorenz's State of the Media address was bold, scathingly hilarious, but also deeply illuminating.
Then: the journalist who has done among the most important work in exposing many of the lies and deceit surrounding the mythology and official narrative of January 6 has been Darren Beattie, the political scientist from Duke, the former Trump speechwriter and the founder of the news site “Revolver News.” From the beginning, Darren has exposed all sorts of inconsistencies and unproven claims in the state's narrative about January 6, from the FBI's role to the mysterious involvement of people like Ray Epps and especially the still unsolved case of the alleged domestic terrorist who was said to have planted pipe bombs near both the DNC and RNC headquarters, including one near Kamala Harris, one of the central allegations that made January 6 seem far scarier and more menacing.
Newly discovered video evidence has enabled Beattie to break down much of what we were told about these pipe bombs and has raised serious questions about who it is, who planted those, and why. We would talk to Beattie about this and about the latest in the January 6 investigations.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
