Journalists have been lousy watchdogs
Depending on who's been in power, and with many worthwhile exceptions, our fellow journalists generally and historically have been lapdogs for the local and national people in charge.
Don't tell anyone who is lamenting the serious decline/death of journalism and its harmful effect on our democracy (republic), our print and electronic media caved a long time ago.
Depending on who's been in power, and with many worthwhile exceptions, our fellow journalists generally and historically have been lapdogs for the local and national people in charge.
Kind of forever. Kind of everywhere -- for sure in LA and Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, where I worked in newspapers.
Long before Donald Trump and his gang came along, both major parties did great harm to the country and its people while the local and national print and electronic media and their journalists either didn't notice or didn't do anything to expose their malfeasances and crimes.
Let's skip major national topics like Jim Crow, whose 75-year career in the South was barely noticed by the North's greatest print institutions and rarely criticized until TV’s brutal imagery made it impossible for them to ignore reality in the mid-1950s.
Let's also skip the major media's complicit silence during the never-ending chain of bloody and protracted and unnecessary wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine that the Ds and Rs in DC instigated, prosecuted and ultimately wasted hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on.
Meanwhile, where was the important legacy media while the government's war on (some) drugs lasted more than 40 years and ruined the lives of millions of Americans, white and black?
Except for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice and maybe John Stossel on ABC, there was nary a peep of outrage about the obvious loss of people's freedom and civil liberties from the media, print or electronic.
Locally, the media -- newspapers and electronic -- don't have such a great record of public service, either.
In the 1950s they blew it on urban renewal (aka Negro removal) by cheering on the destructive redevelopment projects as 'blight removal' and ignoring the poor and minority victims who had to move to make way for the bulldozers.
Newspapers have been cold civic boosters and protectors of their favored public and private power-brokers since ink was invented.
How many newspapers blew the whistle on their failing public schools or mounted a crusade against their racist and corrupt police force -- a chronic problem in cities since the early 1900s?
Examples of local and national media caving in on important economic and social and government problems are endless. Most are still with us. They existed long before Trump showed up.
His deranged haters can him a dictator all they want, but he's not responsible for any of our most serious problems. He's probably not going to fix any of them in a substantive way, either.
Casually adding the highly partisan opinion that Trump is a dangerous Mexican-lite dictator in the making who is attempting to politicize "every facet of democracy to run through party operatives" as a fact, is an easy way to signal your political virtue to your soulmates.
But no matter how many more dumb or scary things Trump says or does, he's not going to become a real dictator anymore than his predecessors did.
All presidents have wielded their executive powers to get their way and have installed their pals and cronies. FDR, JFK, Clinton, the Bushes, Obama and Biden all did.
Given the many serious problems we already have as result of his predecessors' many stupid mistakes and genuine crimes, Trump's alleged but so-far un-convicted crime spree is pretty minor league.
Dumb or mean or blustery talk doesn't count; actions do. As long as Trump doesn't get us into a new war in the Middle East or a proxy war, and as long as he doesn't tank the economy with something like his dumb tariff games, he will have to say and do a lot of truly awful stuff before he reaches his predecessors' level of failure.