Posted on 02/01/2025 8:32:16 PM PST by lasereye
This is Abe Greenwald, in the Commentary magazine email. I don’t think there is a link, so I will quote extensively:
Here’s a current-events quiz aimed at regular news consumers: Why did Los Angeles officials ignore dozens of warnings about the county’s failing water system in the run-up to this year’s wildfires? What caused the Dali cargo ship to crash into the Francis Scott Key Bridge almost a year ago? Who was the captain of that ship? Why were security bollards not in place on Bourbon Street when a terrorist attacked New Orleans on New Year’s Day? What was the ISIS-inspired jihadist who carried out that attack doing in Egypt and Canada in the summer of 2023? And why did a gunman shoot and attempt to assassinate Donald Trump last July in Butler, Pennsylvania?Don’t feel bad about not knowing the answers. You never got them.
As I wrote in a post on COMMENTARY’s website almost two years ago, “We Don’t Get Answers Anymore.” I was then talking about official public mysteries such as what intelligence the Chinese spy balloon may have obtained in its flight over the U.S., who leaked Justice Alito’s draft opinion on Dobbs, and the origins of Covid. Two years later, and our public officials have still provided no conclusive answers to those. Yet the catalog of mysteries grows before our eyes.
We could easily add many more unsolved mysteries. Such as, what was the deal with Stephen Paddock, who carried out the worst mass shooting in American history, at a country music concert in Las Vegas? And how did a completely fictitious “dossier,” conceived and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, turn into the country’s biggest news story for two years or so? Well, we have some idea how that last one happened, due largely to dogged work by a couple of House committees. But in some ways, the whole affair–the biggest political scandal in American history, by far–remains murky.
Why are there so many unsolved mysteries?
We don’t get answers because those who should know them are either too incompetent to find them, protecting their political standing, or both. And these categories apply to the media, as well. Reporters have become bad at their jobs, defensive of their political tribe, or—what’s most helpful to their partisan sources—both.
I think the pervasive incompetence of reporters is probably the chief cause, with the political bias of reporters and editors a close second. Reporters, as a class, are both lazy and not very bright. And it seems like the higher up the food chain you go–i.e., national vs. local, New York Times vs. Sheboygan Journal, CNN vs. Channel 5, the more true that is.
It is something to consider: why do so many news stories go down the memory hole, never to return? This, no doubt, is part of the answer:
Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn't know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.— jimtreacher.substack.com (@jtLOL) August 18, 2014
But another level of incompetence is at work, too, I think.
When leaders are falling apart before our very eyes and every long-standing norm is turned on it’s head, it’s not surprising the failure and incompetence become evident everywhere else.
Entropy.
Looks like a possibly very interesting thread- However, I am not real sure that the cumulative reportage was ever any better in the days of Walter Cronkite.
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