This is Still Not Normal

Fascists attempted to violently prevent a legitimate election, they're criminalizing giving water to people, recreating Jim Crow era voting laws, and our national media can't get off its addiction to presenting "both sides" as a way to shield themselves from those same fascists manipulation of their fears by calling them bias, and the need to infuse a variety of competition drama which they believe drives people to keep coming back to their news outlets etc.

Everything in our economic, political and social systems is designed around the idea the people who are working for and running these very prominent, far reaching outlets are "the best of the best." This is now a years long recommission of the same mistakes, daily. It's just a failure of basic recognition of the reality the facts present. Mind you, the number of overall journalistic outlets is shrinking, rapidly, which also means fewer and fewer other voices, and fewer and fewer positions for people to make even a basic living in journalism, which is going to leave these outlets with even more power and prominence, until any faith in the entire undertaking is lost, which is what fascist want. They want faith in anything like a journalistic perspective which can describe and react to reality to be lost, because then they get to completely manipulate every aspect of the public discourse. We're going to have to ask some questions about the fundamental structure which is meant to demonstrate competence, because this is a failure, and it's helping fascists, immeasurably. 

Trump may be gone from the White House, but we have not been magically transported to a pre-Trump normalcy(which despite so the collective yearning to return to, is exactly what gave us Trump). Journalism is the first line of defense against authoritarianism of every variety, if anything like a pluralistic democracy is going to exist. The level of failure being demonstrated by the most prominent and far reaching journalistic institutions is abjectly dangerous, It's also a very bad sign about how much further fascists can move their agenda forward without a major sense of alarm and self preservation being inspired in legacy media. 

Edit: I published this piece, and went to go post it on social media, at which point this story popped up, and is another demonstration of exactly what is behind the failure of our legacy media to assess and present the reality of our currently moment.