Daily Updates

On Monday night, we covered the embarrassing spectacle that arose from The Washington Post's decision to refrain from endorsing either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump for the 2024 election. Although the Post's editors had predictably prepared an editorial directing its readers to vote for Harris, the decision not to issue such an endorsement came directly from the Post's owner since 2013, Jeff Bezos. 

All of this led to a storm of melodramatic and self-righteous posturing from corporate media personalities and various liberal activists: two categories of people who have effectively merged. To hear them tell it, The Washington Post and outlets like it have enormous credibility with the public and perform an irreplaceable and noble function for all Americans. It is Bezos' directive not to endorse – rather than the endorsement itself – that will irreparably and tragically harm this august newspaper's credibility with the public.

In what dream world are these people living? This is utterly self-serving dreck, a self-flattering fairy tale, that is completely unhinged from any objective reality. Like virtually all corporate media outlets, the Washington Post has no “credibility” to squander. The opposite is true: the mass media is now held in the lowest esteem of any major American institution, somehow even lower than Congress. And the major reason why is that the public perceives – accurately – that large media outlets do not try to tell the truth, but instead lie on purpose to advance their political, ideological, and partisan preferences. 

This media uproar – combined with the non-trivial number of cancellations by subscribers to the Post: reportedly 250,000 individual subscriptions, or 8% of its overall subscription base – caused Bezos himself to write an op-ed explaining his rationale. In doing so, he began with a set of facts that are inarguable, yet ones that most people in corporate media simply refuse to acknowledge: namely, that they cannot continue to do things as they have been doing them because they have fully lost the trust of the public. Entitled "The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media," Bezos wrote:

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.

 

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

 

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

 

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. 

These are the indisputable facts that corporate journalists refuse to admit. Acting like spoiled and entitled children, they care only about what they want, but not about the realities that constrain those desires. They become infuriated

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It's Monday, October 28. 

Tonight: As we have covered many times, Kamala Harris does not have much of an affirmative policy agenda or even a discernible political identity. As a result, Democrats and their media allies have quite obviously decided to spend the last two weeks of the 2024 election depicting Donald Trump as Adolf Hitler and his supporters as the equivalent of Nazis. Trump's sold-out rally at Madison Square Garden yesterday, was instantly depicted as some sort of Nazi rally of the kind that Hitler often led in Germany and that American isolationists of a new Nazi stripe held in Madison Square Garden in opposition to U.S. entrance into World War II. 

Like the Trump campaign itself, Sunday's rally was a very peculiar gathering of Nazis. Like the support for Trump himself as a candidate, the rally was composed of a very multiracial audience. Many of its most prominent speakers were Jewish, Black, Indian and a whole range of other nonwhite identities who were wildly cheered by the crowd. Orthodox Jews celebrated Trump alongside American Black and Latino people from various boroughs throughout New York City. 

As I recall, none of that was particularly common at actual Nazi rallies led by Adolf Hitler but given that Kamala's hope for victory apparently rests on this “Trump is Hitler” narrative, the theme of the last 24 hours among liberal media elites and Democratic Party operatives was that this was a pure Nazi rally because its leader, Donald Trump, is Hitler. 

I don't know, I'm not a political consultant, but it seems difficult to convince Americans other than MSNBC members and NBC viewers who already believe this, that Trump, whom they've known for decades, as a celebrity, and four years as their actual president, is now suddenly Adolf Hitler, planning concentration camps and various holocausts, however, that does seem to be the overriding strategy. 

Then, Nathan Robinson is the founder and publisher of the political affairs journal Current Affairs. He is also one of the authors, along with Noam Chomsky, in a newly released book entitled “The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World.” 

There are many views of Noam Chomsky that people can and do reasonably object to – I often hear his comments during the COVID pandemic when he was 92 or 93 years old – but there's no denying that Chomsky has been among the most influential voices over the past six decades, not just in the United States but throughout the West when it comes to dissent over basic precepts of the bipartisan U.S. foreign policy. 

We will talk to Nathan about this book, which primarily focuses on Chomsky's views on foreign policy and how it relates to both ongoing U.S. wars and conflicts, as well as the imminent 2024 election.  

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now. 

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It's Friday, October 25. 

Tonight: On Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times announced that it would refrain from issuing an endorsement in the presidential election, meaning it would not instruct its readers to vote for Kamala Harris. Today, The Washington Post followed suit. In both papers, top editors were prepared to issue endorsements of Kamala. They had the draft written, but the owners of each paper, a family that runs the L.A. Times and Jeff Bezos of The Washington Post, decided that the paper should not explicitly choose sides in the 2024 election by telling people for whom they should vote. 

To say that liberal elites were enraged by this news and have gotten into a spiraling meltdown of hysteria and betrayal is to understate the case. Some of these journalists and editors actually resigned in protest, including one of the longest-time and most influential neocons, Robert Kagan, who resigned today from The Washington Post. If you don't know who he is, he has been Bill Kristol's writing partner for three decades. He's the co-founder with Kristol of the neocon advocacy group in the 1990s called Project for a New America, where they architected and advocated countless U.S. wars in the Middle East and he is also the husband of the United States’ effective ruler of Ukraine, Victoria Nuland. Unsurprisingly, yet notably, it is these kinds of warmongers – Dick Cheneys, Bill Kristols and Robert Kagans – who are the most passionate about electing Kamala and defeating Donald Trump and Kagan rage quit today over what he viewed as The Post's supreme betrayal in not endorsing his candidate, Kamala Harris. 

But in these events and the reactions to them, one finds many important revelations about the state of our corporate media, the real function they are expected to perform, and the genuine mania and hysteria now consuming the elite liberal class as polls become increasingly discouraging for them. Yes, I will confess there is great entertainment value in taking a look at all of this hysterical media reaction – and we will not deny that to ourselves, nor to you – but the events of the last couple of days are really a very clear mirror about how these people think and what they expect and what they believe the media is now for. So, we will hold that mirror up to them and to these events for educational purposes as well as entertainment. 

Then: It receives way too little attention that the United States, virtually alone in the democratic world, is utterly incapable of counting all the votes cast on Election Day and releasing a full, complete, reliable tally that night. Increasingly, in fact, it takes the United States and various states within the country not just days, but even weeks and sometimes months to count all of the ballots cast, all while most countries in the democratic world, including ones far less rich and far less technologically advanced than the United States, reliably count all votes and announce the results on Election Day just a few hours after the polls close. It's an expectation nobody would even think it would be a different way now, as American officials in various states again warn this year that they will be unable to count all votes for many days after what is called Election Day. The question again arises: what explains this unique inability in the United States, especially given how much distrust and doubt in the integrity of the electoral process this failure understandably engendered? 

And then finally: Niall Harbison is a fascinating and I think inspiring figure. The Irish-born 44-year-old had a difficult life of a lot of childhood trauma that led to alcoholism and addiction in his later life: an increasingly common story in the modern Western world. But then he found a mission, a reason to live, a spiritual connection, rescuing, caring for and saving as many street dogs as he possibly can in Thailand, the country where he now lives. As is usually true of people devoted to animal rescue, the dogs he's saved have done at least as much to save Harbison as he's done to save them. He has built an impressive and growing project, and we'll speak to him about what led him to this noble mission, the role it played in saving him from various demons, and some of the inspiring stories that he's encountered: not just an interesting but uplifting way to end the week.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.