Has Trump succeeded at this? He has sued members of the Fourth Estate, threatened, demanded, bullied and screamed loudly. Is the Fourth Estate shivering in its boots? Have any newspapers or TV networks given up reporting the actual news or warped the news to praise Trump and his doings? Have they banned critical opinions from their pages?
And when they seem to accede to Trump demands, do they kill the news about acceding to Trump’s demands? Do they sue any other journal or individual who critically reports the news about such accession?
Short answer: no. (Long answer is…no.)
I learned how to read newspapers when I was in high school. It was the most glorious lesson I’ve ever had and I apply it daily. I read my two local newspapers, the New York Times and the Daily News and articles in The New Yorker and Harper’s.
Then I head to my major social medium, Bluesky, where I get a precis and sometimes a full read of the news in other papers and journals.
Which ones? Below is a partial list — in no particular order — of the specific media I saw in one hour on Bluesky. Each one provided me with news, factual news, critical news. News that reported freely about the rabid absurdities and potential criminality of our current federal government administration. If there was a minced word, I didn’t spot it.
The partial list:
ProPublica, Mother Jones, Raw Story, NPR, The Guardian, Washington Post, Democracy Docket, CNN, Al Jazeera, Freedom of the Press Foundation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Wired, Axios, The Intercept, L.A. Times, Forbes, The Kyiv Independent, Bloomberg News, Mississippi Free Press, Politico, The Economist, The Associated Press, Hell Gate (NYC), PBS News, Newsweek, Liberal Currents, The Conversation, Minnesota Star Tribune, Irish Star, Decrypt, Reuters, Prism, The Hill Times (Canadian), The Mirror (UK), Dublin Inquirer, The Salt Lake Tribune, Global Voices, Euronews, The Nation, The Toronto Star, QueerAF, The Colorado Sun, Manchester Evening News (UK), The Wall Street Journal, The Triibe, RNS (“covering the world of religion”), Arkansas Advocate, NBC News, Salt Lake Tribune, Cascadia Daily News, Business Insider, Sky News, The Tennessee Holler, The Bulwark, Rolling Stone, The Chicago Tribune, The Times and Sunday Times (UK), The Trace (gun violence), The 51st (D.C.), Bolts (courts), The Onion…
…and photos and videos of cats and dogs. And gamboling baby goats.
Then I shift to individuals I follow and get their opinions about the news. My experts are journalists, lawyers, scientists, wits, economists, politicians, pundits, professors, political cartoonists and fellow citizens. Several of them put themselves in harm’s way by watching Fox News and telling us what’s going on there. (I hope someone is giving them hazard pay as well as free Pepto Bismol and Immodium.)
The theme among my fellow citizens over the last week has been, “Is he dead yet?” They’ve got a lot to say about Trump and they don’t sound scared of him.
Finally, there are all the people who, unlike me, have cells phone with cameras and who are all over the country and in immigration courts documenting and transmitting the activities of Trump’s masked police-state thugs. I see those on Bluesky, too.
So is Trump succeeding in his desire to be the Compleat Totalitarian by killing the real news? A better question: Is he dead yet?