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the media is successfully covering up a scandal worse than Watergate.
“The media” is such an amorphous term. Specifically, it is journalism - national journalism, really Associated Press journalism - which is promoting its own interest at the expense of the public interest.
What is the interest of the Associated Press and its membership newspapers? That lies in attracting the interest and admiration of the public. Journalists don’t provide food, clothing, shelter, or security - yet they are determined to command more respect than those who do. So they systematically engage in cheap criticism and second guessing of the people who provide for our necessities. This slant of journalism produces a powerful propaganda wind down which opportunists sail. The result is that an entire political party has dedicated itself to getting along and going along with journalism’s self-interested propaganda. Journalism rewards them with positive labels such as “liberal,” “moderate,” or “centrist” - and punishes their opponents with negative labels such as “right wing” and “conservative.”

That tendency inheres in journalism as such - but the critical change which united journalists, and has prevented ideological competition among journalists since the memory of living man runneth not to the contrary, is the wire service. Adam Smith warned in 1776 that
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Wealth of nations, Book I, Ch 10
Since the middle of the Nineteenth Century, the Associated Press newswire has constituted a continuous virtual meeting of the significant people of the trade of journalism. The AP calls journalists “objective,” and does so with such a powerful propaganda campaign that people never stop to think how ridiculous a conceit that actually is. The only way to even attempt objectivity is to be candid about any and all reasons why you might not be objective - but doing so is precisely the opposite of claiming actually to be objective. Hence, all window dressing about giving “both sides of the story” notwithstanding, journalists aren’t even trying to be objective. In that state, they are in no position to even truly understand that there is another side to the story than the one which journalists find congenial. Much less, to understand that that other side of the story actually is usually right.