Dear Journalism,
You have one job: defend democracy. And you fucking suck at it.
Now, I know you like to think your job is simply to report the facts and that you have some sort of sacred obligation to remain “neutral” and “objective” and “fair and balanced,” and if this unbiased brand of nonpartisan journalism unfortunately results in the election of “America’s Hitler” (Trump’s running mate’s words, not mine), well, first draft of history and all that.
Oh, grow the fuck up.
The facts are, you made this rapey orange monster, and now it’s your job to unmake him, and if that means putting your calloused thumbs on the scale in opposition to, let’s be honest, a literal fucking fascist, then fuck your journalistic ethics and lean into it. Ours is a two-party system currently consisting of a democratic party and an undemocratic party, and if you’re not wielding all your power and privilege toward preserving our democratic institutions and norms, then you aren’t doing your fucking job.
I mean, why the fuck do you think the Founders put freedom of the press right up top in my First Amendment? Because they enjoyed the whimsical musings of Silence Fucking Dogood? Fuck no. It was because when you spend four sweltering months at a yellow fever lockdown party like the Constitutional Convention, endlessly debating Enlightenment ideals like how many fifths human a black person is, you really get to know your fellow “patriots.” And so the slave-owning hypocritical assholes who wrote me sure as fuck knew that the fragile democracy they just crafted had zero chance of surviving their own elitist ambitions let alone those of the slave-owning hypocritical assholes across the aisle, without a free fucking press to keep everybody the fuck in line.
And by “free press” I mean free to write whatever the fuck it likes no matter how viciously partisan or slanderous. As Alexander Hamilton famously rapped about Thomas Jefferson, “I’ll use the press, I’ll write under a pseudonym, you’ll see what I can do to him,” and holy fuck did he ever. Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison—hiding underneath those stately powdered wigs were motherfucking gangsters who’d sooner fuck you up the ass with a rolled up broadsheet then give you the time of day. (Fun fact: also hiding underneath those powdered wigs were unsightly patches of syphilitic alopecia, because nearly everybody had syphilis back then as if you couldn’t tell from their absolutely deranged implementation of an Electoral Fucking College. But I digress.)
The point is: the Founders couldn’t have imagined a democracy guided by objective and nonpartisan journalism any more than they could have imagined one in which the 585,000 residents of fucking Wyoming would each have 67 times more representation in the U.S. Senate than 39 million Californians. (Thanks again, syphilis!) No, the Founders’ intent was the journalism they practiced: an unapologetically partisan press beating the crap out of each other in the court of public opinion. In the American system, the only way you get “fair and balanced” is by balancing the other fuckers out! That’s how our democracy was designed to work. But when one side unilaterally disarms—when, for example, the New York Times curls up all Vichy France-like while Fox News gleefully goes full Goebbels—democracy doesn’t stand a goddamn chance.
And BTW, neither does journalism.
What? You think once orange Putin seizes the dictatorial powers the Supreme Court just promised him that somehow I’m coming to your defense? Sam Alito already wipes his bony white ass with me, so put one or two more Federalist Society Elders on the bench and New York Times v. Sullivan? Dead! New York Times v. United States? Dead! Hustler Magazine v. Falwell? Dead! I mean, wake the fuck up. Without a functional democracy to back me up, my First Amendment isn’t worth the brittle old parchment it’s scribbled on, so best of luck clinging to your precious journalistic ethics while stripped naked at Gitmo as Elon sues into bankruptcy one news outlet after another for every imagined slight.
Look, I’m not asking you to lie or anything. (Though to be clear, I’m not asking you not to.) I’m just saying that if all that stands between the survival of the world’s oldest democracy and the imposition of white nationalist authoritarian rule is a little good old fashioned partisan muckraking, then, like it or not, journalism, it’s your fucking job to rake some muck in defense of the candidate who doesn’t promise to dismantle the Constitution. Then, if we still have a democracy come January 6 (normally I’d say November 5, but, you know), by all means feel free to morally cleanse yourself in a paroxysm of this pretentious both-sidesism you call “journalistic ethics.”
And if democracy doesn’t survive this election? Well… given Trump’s open admiration of Putin and his tactics, I’d be awfully careful when standing near any open windows.
So get to it, journalism, before it’s too late. As Aaron Burr ominously asked of Hamilton, “Why do you write like you’re running out of time? Write day and night like you’re running out of time?” Why? Because he was running the fuck out of time!
And so are you, journalism. So are you.
Sincerely,
The U.S. Fucking Constitution
‘But others say…”
From the original document:”
First Amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
And some commentary:
The first ten amendments to the Constitution are known as “The Bill of Rights.” These amendments were passed to meet the concerns of many that the Constitution did not provide enough protection of individual rights. When written, they were designed to provide protection to individuals for actions of the federal government. The 14th amendment was passed as the Civil War ended. It provided the framework for extending these protections (cited in the Bill of Rights) to the actions of state and local governments. Over the course of the 20th century the Supreme Court slowly extended the guarantees of the Bill of Rights, to cover all levels of government.
The first amendment states that Congress may not do anything that regulates or establishes any religion, nor can it do anything to stop people from observing their religion. This amendment guarantees freedom of religion in the United States. The government may not limit freedom of speech; meaning people may say almost anything. The limit being the famous opinion of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, when he gave the example that no one could falsely cry “fire” in a crowded movie theater. Thus you may not say anything that brings immediate danger to people.
The Constitution gives almost absolute freedom of the press. When the government tried to stop the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers, the Supreme Court refused their request. The Constitution gives the people the right to protest, which is the right to peaceably assemble. Finally, this amendment protects the work of some of the most criticized groups in Washington: the lobbyists. The amendment specifically states that no laws may be made to stop people from petitioning the government and that has been interpreted to include paid lobbyists.”
Mr. Constitution, you’re not all that great (Slavery, Electoral College, Senate, Second Amendment, et. al.), so why the fuck should I defend you? Anyone who really believes in small “d” democracy would rather rewrite you. I don’t need to point out your flaws, because you already did it for me. I can’t speak to the character of the characters who wrote you, but you seem to have a handle on that. You’re implying they’re not defensible (syphilitic slaveowners who hated each other, etc.), well big parts of you aren’t either (consider the source). So why are you making this big fuss about us poor ink-stained scribes?
3
If you feel that way, you should start a movement with people of similar ideals and form your own country.
Then, you can write whatever you like into your Constitution.
I’m convinced sexual orientation has something to do with the failings of journalism and with the downfall to humanity and civilization…..yeah, just my opinion. But an opinion that is backed by daily articles on the Neanderthalism of the heterosexual.
Go gay, save the Day.
Please stop using this decision and that quote in your analysis. It’s wrong. It was reversed. It is no longer the law.
The court on which Holmes served was terrible in plenty of ways, but in particular it was reactionary, authoritarian, and racist AF. Ring any fucking bells? Schenck involved a draft protester distributing leaflets protesting the newly enacted law creating compulsory conscription.
That my friend is the activity for which Charles Schenck was arrested and imprisoned and that Holmes compared to endangering lives by shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater. The leaflets Schenck handed out made no threats, violent or otherwise. They did not incite others to violence or to any imminent lawless course of action. Instead the documents advised inductees to lawfully assert their legal rights to the maximum extent in order to resist being inducted against their will.
The legal standard articulated in Schenck “clear and present danger” was completely rejected in Brandenburg v. Ohio. The stupid example Holmes used and that is so often quoted is dishonest insofar as it is unrelated to the facts of the case, either in the particular or as an analogy. And it’s stupid because it fails to make or clarify the law. It was already very illegal to shout “fire!” in a crowded theater in 1919 and that was never in any dispute. The question ought to be why is it illegal to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater?
The answer to that question gets you straight to Brandenburg without the fifty year detour and the five decades of political repression and state sponsored political terrorism unleashed by Schenck.
2,
Seriously, as “The Constitution” when you saw that the Holmes quote you were going to use described limitations the court was placing on you did it really never occur to you to maybe, possibly look up precisely what those limitations might be? And weren’t you the least bit curious about the ensuing history of how those limitations were then applied?
Schenck unleashed decades of federal and state political repression targeting socialist leaning political groups, civil rights organizers, union organizers, student groups, war protesters, environmental activists, and even tax protesters. Hundreds of thousands of people went to jail for political expression under Schenck. Of course most were non-whites, or socialists, or gay men, or lesbian women, or labor organizers. Did it never occur to you that among many other wonderful things, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat she was expressing an important political idea? Aren’t those precisely the kinds of things you were written to protect?
Aren’t you even a little bit curious about yourself and who you really are?
In the UK, if you say something that is not favorable about a person, you can be sued – even if what you say is true!
It’s a good thing we have a writtenConstitution and do not have to rely on the whims of the day as to what our rights are.
The rise of Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” conservative renaissance and even its imminent death in violent unrest and political mayhem can be traced in no small part directly to the Schenck decision.
For more than fifty years in America the status quo interests of the military, big business, and centralized political authority were well served by the limitations imposed by Schenck. J. Edgar Hoover’s intrusive and political FBI could barely have existed without it, nor would it have served much purpose. For decades beginning in World War 1 federal, state, and local authorities joined forces with military industrialists and giant corporations to actively and at times violently suppress almost all effective dissent from their interests in concentrating power and wealth, expanding the American empire at the expense of workers, crushing organized labor, curating the propaganda fed to us by our educational system, eliminating alternative voices and points of view, dividing workers along lines of religion, ethnicity, race, class, and sexuality, and enforcing conformity through the culture and laws everywhere.
The slow, steady, but inevitable overturning of those interests is ultimately what a movement like MAGA is intended to oppose. Focusing on whatever immediate grievance the conservative movement conjurs up next is nothing more than useful distraction. It keeps us debating the details of swimsuit inspections of 12-year-old middle school students and “how Black is Kamala?” And it keeps us from focusing on the real point of it all.
Most people just don’t want to live like this. They don’t want to raise their kids into a world where the choices are so limited and dismal. They don’t really want to agree to enslave themselves for life to labor endlessly for an ever-receding horizon of security and prosperity. So they have to be kept angry, afraid, and frustrated to prevent them from changing all that. They must be constantly disappointed in government and filled up with a sense of futility about it. They must be taught to shrug and head back down into the mine again.
Once government and business institutions lose the effective ability to control the culture and supress dissent, to fill us all with nihilism and despair, then the change becomes inevitable. That’s why billionaires buy newspapers and why Fat Midget passes laws to rewrite public school text books. They aren’t trying to turn back the clock. They are trying to resist and supress that change.
Which I suppose brings us back to the subject of this thread, The U.S. Fucking Constitution. It’s a living document. It’s not “the e plebnista”. It’s supposed to be understood and put into action. It’s supposed to welcome change as should we all. And that’s precisely why MAGA Republicans now find themselves fighting to destroy the system based on it.
8,
Please stop. You keep posting these things about yourself that are patently false.
There is absolutely nothing in the United States Constitution that would prevent one private party from seeking to supress expression of another private party, whether by civil suit or otherwise.
The First Amendment applies to government. It does not apply to a private individual nor to a private business. Elon Musk is probably right this minute actively suing a hundred people for saying true, but unfavorable things about him. He is perfectly free as we can all see to block, cancel, and otherwise supress posts and accounts on his shitty discount Nazi platform for saying things HE alone doesn’t like. You, “The Constitution”, do nothing to stop that. Please just shut up. Your ignornace makes me sad.
The New York Times is washed
https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/new-york-times-washed-19780600.php
“Harris is winning this election right now in large part because she has avoided legacy outlets, the Times foremost among them, altogether. Her team understands that it behooves these outlets to have a close race, which means that they’ll seize on any gaffe Harris makes if it gives them a chance to falsely equivocate her remarks to those of Trump screaming, “THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS!” to kick up a racial holy war. Team Harris has no interest in helping the Times sanewash Trump more than it already has, so they’ve decided that the only way to win the game is not to play.”
>> There’s no crazy shit on the Republican side that they’re not willing to water down and normalize, yet there’s no criticism of Kamala that’s too small, petty, or unimportant to highlight.
Relevant Cartoon
https://boingboing.net/2024/03/13/tom-the-dancing-bug-one-day-in-january-2025-in-the-new-york-times-newsroom.html
8. It doesn’t matter what’s written, what matters is the intent of the people who act on those words. The Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal, but people enforced slavery.
11,
Another way to look at it was brought up recently by an analysis done by Media Matters.
Harrison Ray examined media coverage of President Biden’s June 18th actions directing DHS to provide additional protections for U.S. citizens with non-citizen spouses and minor children to prevent family separations. The orders were limited to families with a non-citizen spouse who had resided continuously within the United States for no less than 10 years (with an average residency of 23 years). The orders also provided improved pathways to recognized immigration status and work visas for DACA immigrants currently residing in the United States who have completed four year college degrees and have received an offer of employment.
He found that the majority of broadcast and cable networks employed b-roll video taken at border crossings showing crowded entry points, river crossings, barbe wire fences, machine gun turrets, and armored vehicles to accompany their reporting on the new policy actions that are entirely unrelated to the border or to border security. The use of this imagery extended to MSNBC, Good Morning America, NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, CBS Mornings, And FOX News Sunday.
The misleading video and imagery was used to misinform and conflate. But it was also deemed more interesting and engaging by producers when compared to footage of USCIS administrative officers reviewing applications, students walking in their college commencement, or families attending Sunday church services together.
The enduring problem we face, beyond the failing and dwindling of conservatism, is that a failing and dwindling corporate media will increasingly turn to misinformation as a way to sensationalize and antagonize in order to drive engagement. And where white people are concerned that is almost always a welcome distraction that allows them to turn away from what’s really bothering them about legal Black and Brown immigrants having success.
Take a minute to examine and consider that the fable about cat barbecues began in a private, front porch conversation between two Springfield neighbors. Setting aside the fabricated white nationalist narratives about “impacts”, the actual turth about Springfield is that the immigrants who have settled their to accept vacant jobs in factories and start businesses over the last ten years have mostly thrived. The real “impacts” such as they are have been those one generally associates with economic growth and expanding prosperity. That is the reality that those two neighbors were confronting that day when they shared that racist fable attacking the prosperous Brown and Black people in their community.
@12 – You’re a deluded little cocksucker.
@14. Chortle. That was some mature insightful commentary there. Your parents must be so proud.
Something in what I wrote triggered you. What do you feel I got so terribly wrong?
@13 The misleading video and imagery was used to misinform and conflate.
That’s another reason why viewership and readership is declining. There are so many more options for information that are more accurate. I stopped watching traditional media because it was getting less and less truthful and more yellow journalism. I seek out Walter Cronkite, not Fox News.
16,
It’s a little exhausting sometimes. But perhaps the old model of journalism has outlived it’s usefulness.
That’s one of the hardest topics to broach successfully with most of those who call themselves journalists. But I think that’s because one way or another they’ve been told a rather false story about how that model came into being in the first place or what kept it alive for a hundred years or so. Suffice it to say it was not “ideals”.
Well, up until you pointed that out, his 3″ Penis measured 3 1/2″.
@8 “It’s a good thing we have a writtenConstitution and do not have to rely on the whims of the day as to what our rights are.”
It does look to me awfully like our rights depend on the whims of the day. See, e.g., Dodd.
For most of the 20th century, and well into this one, the dominant media narative held that the political left was the primary driver of political violence in America. That was the narrative framing almost always adopted by all mainstream journalism.
When companies during the early labor union movement sent hired gangs of thugs to beat and murder strking workers journalists described it as “labor strife” and “labor violence”. Throughout the civil rights movement, when local and state police in communities all around the country intervened with incredible violence to prevent peaceful protests and jail people for expressing political dissent, journalists routinely and universally described these events to their readers as “race riots”, “racial unrest”, and “radical protest”. When vast numbers of returning veterans joining with religious leaders and student groups to oppose the war in Vietnam were met with murderous live fire from National Guard troops it was described as “radical protest gone amok” and “political terrorism” by journalists.
You’ll look long and hard and come up empty trying to find examples of journalists at the time describing things like police aerial firebombing an entire residential block in Philadelphia to root out protesters as “terrorism” or even as “political violence”. The forces imposing “order” as it is defined by the dominant political in-group on those outside it, often with terrible violence and bloodshed are never described in such terms. And that’s true throughout the 20th century heyday of modern journalism. Even when it came to forcibly driving people from their homes and businesses and imprisoning them in desert concentration camps, so-called “respected” journalists described this as “imposing order and security”.
And it’s really only recently, in this era of coroporate media decline and the Republican Party’s open embrace and enshrinement of political violence that this dominant narrative has just begun to finally shift.
A CNN SSRS poll this month now shows that more Americans are concerned about political violence emerging from Trump and the right than from the left:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25172742/cnn-poll-harris-and-trump-locked-in-exceedingly-close-presidential-race.pdf (page 74)
And this gives some evidence of how the journalist-approved media narratives are weakening as the major corporate media decline in importance and in impact. But it also probably shouldn’t really surprise us if the media, and journalists, double down on the false framing. For example, do you really think journalists will share with their readers the fact that for all Americans who suffer some kind of violent attack from a stranger, one third of them were attacked by a police officer? Journalists make a good living describing to Americans the terrible risks they face of being victimized by a stranger. But do they also describe to them that statistically that stranger is more likely to be a police officer? Nope. That’s just journalism doing its job. Which may not be what you think it is.
@9 “Most people just don’t want to live like this. They don’t want to raise their kids into a world where the choices are so limited and dismal.”
And they’re expressing it by not having kids, and so MAGA is responding to that with measures to force women to pump out babies, whether they want to or not.
@11 Speaking of eating dogs, an Ohio Haitian group is seeking criminal charges against Trump and Vance for the inciting bomb threats version of yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater.
https://thehill.com/latino/4897028-haitian-immigrants-springfield-ohio-criminal/
In other political news, MAGA Mike is postponing the government shutdown until after the election, but before Christmas so furloughed federal workers won’t be able to buy presents for their kids.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4896433-mike-johnson-december-omnibus/
@12 The Constitution is the social contract we live under today, that spells out how we organize and govern our society. Without it, we’d just be a gaggle of clans and tribes. It has to be adapted to today’s social and political needs, otherwise it doesn’t work, and is just an interesting historical artifact of no practical usefulness.
@14 You’re a pipsqueak speaking to your betters. You should be more respectful.
@20 “For most of the 20th century, and well into this one, the dominant media narative held that the political left was the primary driver of political violence in America. That was the narrative framing almost always adopted by all mainstream journalism.”
The fact that nearly all political violence in America today comes from the right has become impossible even for the corporate media to ignore. Both of the would-be Trump assassins were Trump supporters. And the gunfire that ripped into Harris’s Tempe, Arizona, campaign office last night didn’t come from “the left.”
https://www.aol.com/news/harris-campaign-office-damaged-gunfire-182814575.html
@ 19
It does look to me awfully like our rights depend on the whims of the day.
Indeed.
Boxcheck Momala’s silly whim today could fuck tens of millions of women in the ass for generations.
·
silly whim today could fuck tens of millions of women in the ass for generations.
i.e. something you’ve always wanted to get (at least on your birthday) but never have experienced once unless the other party was drugged unconscious by the frat’s jungle punch.
And what happened to the phony compassion for the lives of the unborn? A mere ass fucking couldn’t compete with that could it?
yawwwn.. asswipe..
When Sinema first sold herself to giant global pharmaceutical companies in exchange for the purchase of a Senate seat she would have laughed in your face if you told her both of Georgia’s Senators would soon be Democrats.
For two straight days the major indexes have closed at record highs. For two straight days the FOX News business report has made absolutely no mention of it on their nightly newscast. And for two straight days Scotty P has babbled incoherently about COVID and pagers.
@27 No one on our side believes Republicans wouldn’t ditch the filibuster at their convenience in order to enact a nationwide abortion ban, or that any GOP senators would vote against it, so it’s just a question of who pulls the trigger on the filibuster first.
@27. Well that’s one old fashioned way of avoiding pregnancy. And given that Republicans and project 2025 wants to outlaw contraception it may come to that for tens of millions of women for generations.
Given that the Republicans twisted the rules into pretzels to install Federal society supreme Court justices, allowed an insurrection, gave the elderly convicted felon a pass twice on impeachment, they would negate the filibuster in a heartbeat if it gave them more power.
And in keeping with the theme of the thread, the media just keeps ignoring that.
Someone should ask: Why do Republicans want Zelenskyy assassinated on American soil?
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2024/09/24/congress/probing-zelenskyys-pa-visit-00180794
34,
If Putin’s regime falls there’s a pretty massive risk that all the crooked support and connections to the GOP will spill out into the open.
35
All that Russia shit is a fucking lie, but you continue to believe it because it “fits” your narrative. It’s the Biden Crime Family that has really benefitted from establishing ties to foreign operatives and working those ties for “family” enrichment.
#36. You are funny. Do the russians pay you or are you so stupid you are posting their propaganda for free?
36,
Steve Bannon was getting skull fucked in a prison bathroom at the exact same time you were composing that response.
@15 – Triggered? You have far too high an opinion of yourself, RedReefer. You’re just a little fag.