Doom roundup - The media is failing this moment

People are heralding a new age of American authoritarianism but you wouldn't always know it by reading the news.

One of the dreams I had the other night involved being in a newsroom and holding the last edition of a newspaper as people mourned its demise. The other dream was too violent and disturbing to mention here, but was probably the result of reading too much about war and its effects in Gaza and the Ukraine. I guess both of them could be thought of as nightmares, except I didn’t wake up screaming because this is just what my brain works on while I’m sleeping. It’s normal — for me, at least.

That’s because my job is to read all day. I also think all day about what I’m reading and what it means in a variety of contexts, its effect on things like national politics and global affairs, future and past events, and on and on until I go to bed and my brain stays up in zombie mode working on all these events and developments even when I’m asleep. But most people don’t have that luxury — and it is a luxury, even if it sounds in these last two paragraphs like I’m losing my mind. It’s a luxury because information is power, and all I do all day is consume information. But many people don’t get to do that. Many people get a few headlines or a TV news segment about what happened that day before they relax from a long day at work and focus on something fun and enjoyable. That’s why those headlines, those snippets of stories or Tik Tok reels or brief TV news segments are so important: we are all busier and more distracted than ever before and many of us have only a few crucial moments each day to figure out what the hell is going on in the world.

In recent weeks, it’s become more apparent than ever that legacy media is failing in this respect (in addition to exploding job losses and shuttering publications). The concise and informative distribution of news that is required by modern life has largely missed the point recently. The country’s most prominent publications are making the same mistakes as those of the recent past — like the breathless coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails and the unfounded claims of weapons of mass destruction that led us to war in the Middle east —  and of longer ago, like the London Times editor who wanted to ensure his publication was being fair to the rising authoritarian Adolf Hitler. They make these mistakes by covering Biden’s gaffes or a stumble on a flight of stairs seem as dire a warning of the president’s age as anything Donald Trump does, which is to say, blatantly tell everyone who will listen that he plans to usher in a new violently authoritarian American age. 

As I go through my days I collect links that point to a very disturbing future for this country that is not always explicitly explained in the information we consume. Here is your Doom Roundup: