Week 39 - Is the Dwindling Media Losing Track of Some of the Most Important Stories?

Noteworthy this week is that several of the most important stories received little media coverage and attention. Part of this is the continued gutting of U.S. journalism, not only in our public broadcasting, but also in mastheads taken private by billionaires. For example, the Washington Post, an important source of breaking stories about the first Trump regime, has been rendered a shell of itself by owner Jeff Bezos. We are also being continually bombarded with news and crazy antics, even in the slow summer month of August with Congress on recess. At times, the Trump regime seems to float lawless ideas, until the media catches wind, reports on it, and then suddenly the moves are reversed. That happened twice this week.

Trump has still largely maintained his ability to drive the news cycle, throwing shiny coins to distract from what he is getting away with. The exception being the Epstein files, which continue to dog him, and to be one of the few issues on which Americans across the political spectrum can agree, albeit for vastly different reasons. Trump is very purposefully trying to distract from the Epstein files, with his Justice Department convening a grand jury investigation of the Obama administration, without any clear charges. Notably, he has already investigated the so-called ‘Russia Hoax’ (recall, John Durham), and Congressional committees have been here as well.

Alarming stories this week related to not only the economy, of which Trump has assumed unilateral control with his trade war, but also with the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over a report showing the impacts of his first months in office. The firing follows the playbook of authoritarian leaders, Trump being one, who dismiss data they don’t like as scams or hoaxes. Trump also ordered Texas Republicans to redistrict their Congressional seats, another broken norm happening mid-decade, setting off a gerrymander war, that even the conservative WSJ Editorial Board referred to as “mutual assured political destruction.”

The stories not getting enough coverage, but of great import, include Trump’s DOJ and CFTC quietly closing their investigations of Polymarket (I wrote more about it here), the Smithsonian rewriting history by altering an exhibit on the “Limits of the Presidential Power” to hide Trump’s impeachments, a continual degradation of our federal agencies, and just the continual shift of the feel of our country and what is permissible.