Look at where we are now
The purpose of a system is what it does
The other night I was laying on the couch in the dark resigned to the fact that there would be zero trick-or-treaters when a knock finally came. I popped up so fast to grab the bowl of candy that I got lightheaded and started to faint just as I was getting to the door. I thought these kids are going to watch me die.
I didn't realize I was merely fainting until after the fact. It was such a peculiar feeling. Something like drowning. Although I've admittedly never done that. Then as I knelt down as a last animal instinct to usher my body closer to the ground before it collapsed I hit my head on the banister of the stairs.
But the thing is it was somehow by chance such a soft hit. More like a boop. No bruise or pain or consequences whatsoever. I came to and opened the door to a group of expectant children oblivious to the struggle transpiring mere feet away and said take as much as you want. Take all of it.
I did think after they left with the bulk of the KitKats that if I had really been having a heart attack or something and I tried yelling out for help that they would have assumed it was a Halloween bit and left me to die.
Anyway I'm also endorsing Mike Rogers now.
The nice folks at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism interviewed me about New England Week, the thing I was working on all last week at Flaming Hydra.
It was all so good and I'm very happy with how it turned out. I loved them all but especially this piece by Jennie Rose Halperin about Blanche Ames Ames, an extraordinary renaissance woman in turn of the century Massachusetts. Rax King was great as usual on Shirley Jackson’s time at Bennington in Vermont and the real life origins of her famous story “The Lottery.” Maria Bustillos did an extraordinary piece on Oscar Wilde and Okakura Kakuzo and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and David Roth was also unsurprisingly good on the concept of being "from away" in Maine.
Here is what happened: we were buying a coffee mug, which my wife mentioned recently is her favorite of our coffee mugs, at this coffee place that we love, because she thought it would be a nice souvenir of our visit. The person charging us for the mug—and also a piece of banana bread with black sesame seeds on it, and a cheddar jalapeño biscuit, and our two coffees—said something like “this will be a nice souvenir of your visit.” On the merits, there was no argument to be had there; we all agreed on that. The issue was not that my wife, who grew up in Maine and went to high school in a Portland that was not remotely ready for things like banana bread with black sesame seeds on it or honestly even jalapeño peppers, disagreed. The issue was that she had just been mistaken for someone who was not from Maine, as if she were one of those souvenir-collecting pinnipeds that bounce honking off the cruise ships all summer, or some leaf-peeping goober from (and I am sorry to use this kind of language) Connecticut. And so she corrected him. The word “actually” was used. She really snapped into it.
Those pieces are all for subscribers only but you can also read something for free from me at the top of every post including the top 26 songs about Boston/Massachusetts and my audio pronunciation guide for how to pronounce 80 or so cities here.
We all know this but it has been on my mind again lately watching the way the New York Times has covered the bullshit investigation into Ilhan Omar and the bullshit investigation into Mary Peltola and the spectacular crashout of Haley Stevens and their lack of coverage of the new rape allegations against the president of the United States. To reiterate: this is a rightwing publication staffed top to bottom with rightwing operatives. The New York Times is not alone in this – it applies to the vast majority of all major media outlets in this country – but they remain the exemplar of the state of journalism. Just not in the way they would like you to believe.
I almost respect a blatant rightwing partisan hack more than a supposed neutral journalist because their motives are made plain. A neutral journalist will look you right in the eye and tell you that the rightwing outcomes they are obviously agitating for are neutral and, in fact, noble of them to pursue. This is a lie.
Choosing what to cover and what not to cover is a political act. Deciding when to publish a story and how frequently to follow up on it and how it is framed as significant or not is a political act. The headline and photo choice and selection of sources interviewed, or not, and which parts of their comments you print, or do not, are all political acts. The arrangement of information on the page in a story is a political act. The social media packaging is a political act. And perhaps, above all else, denying that any of this is happening, and insisting upon your apolitical bonafides is, you guessed it, a political act.
Every hour of every day journalists decide extremely important things happening in the country and the world do not merit concern. Sometimes this is because they seem pedestrian and lack novelty, such as the routine suffering of tens of millions, or the massive and blatant all-consuming corruption of Republicans. Other times stories are ignored because it would be impossible, even for them, not to point the finger at rightwing actors as the causes of said suffering.
The point is that any motherfucker who tells you that they are simply reporting the news, fairly and professionally, is lying to you. Every single story is the result of a political choice and every single story has an intended political outcome by the people who write it and publish it.
I’ve written something similar to this in the past, largely focused on the Times and other outlets’ coverage of trans issues. Another bullshit crisis of the media’s making.
Luke O'Neil
Many people will bristle at this sort of thinking. Maybe, although it seems unlikely, even some of you. Some will agree in part but bargain with something like “it’s just the politics desk” or “they have a lot of really good reporters doing good work.” That may be true but I do not give a fucking shit. The United States will bomb the hell out of your country then come back around a couple months later with some sacks of rice. Or at least we used to I don’t even know if we’re doing that sort of thing anymore. The purpose of a system, as the saying goes, is what it does. And what our media has done for most of my life, and certainly in the era of Trump, is pave the way for fascism. And it has surely worked. Look at where we are now.
Either way we all still gotta vote and I hope we serve these fucking fascists the heaping plate of shit tomorrow that they so richly deserve.
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Let us shift gears now to a story that is only partly true and only some of which happened to me. It is not journalism because I am admitting upfront that I am lying.