In the grand theatre of American dysfunction, where the script is written in thought bubbles and the props are recycled from 2020, the media plays the role of hapless understudy – nodding along to every soliloquy of balderdash without so much as a heckle. Picture this: It’s October 2025, Republicans hold the White House, the House, and the Senate like a poker hand they can’t fold. The government shutters its doors on October 1 because Congress – their Congress – can’t pass a budget. Yet there they are, Donald Trump, JD Vance, Speaker Mike Johnson and any Republican with a social media presence – finger-wagging at Democrats like kids blaming the dog for the missing biscuits. “The Schumer Shutdown!” they crow (a line borrowed from Fox News), as if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer personally welded the locks on the IRS vaults.
And the press? Crickets. Not a single interviewer – or even the fair-and-balanced fever swamp of Fox News – leans in with the obvious gut-punch: “Hang on, fellas. You control everything. The Oval Office? Yours. The gavel in the House? Johnson’s. The Senate majority? Thune’s got it on speed dial. If the government’s dark, that’s on you – not the minority party playing goalie from the bench.” Instead, we get softball tosses and follow-ups that might as well be scripted by the Republican National Committee. Fox News, that bastion of “straight talk,” is gleefully amplifying the “Schumer Shutdown” meme, as if it’s not their ideological cousins who tanked the funding bill. Vance warns of “painful cuts” ahead while blaming Democrats for the pain already here, and Johnson accuses the opposition of not being “serious” about negotiations they were never invited to lead. It’s like watching the arsonist sue the fire department for slow response times.
This isn’t journalism; it’s a hostage negotiation where the reporters are zip-tied in the corner. Are they afraid? Of access? Of Trump’s tweet-storms (or whatever X-rants he’s firing off now)? Or is it simpler: laziness, the kind that lets a lie bloom unchecked because fact-checking feels like work? Whatever the excuse, it’s eroding the republic faster than a shutdown furloughs federal workers. Without pushback, these gaslighting gems become gospel: Democrats love shutdowns! (Never mind that the previous two were also under Trump’s watch.)
But wait – there’s more absurdity where that came from. Enter Portland, Oregon: the city that’s allegedly “burning to the ground” in Trump’s fever-dream dispatches. “You’ve all seen the pictures,” he harrumphs, trotting out viral clips of one torched block like it’s the fall of Rome. Shops shuttered! Residents fleeing! Anarchy in the streets! Never mind that the “protests” he’s hyping are mostly contained ICE demonstrations – fiery rhetoric over federal raids, sure, but hardly the Mad Max apocalypse he’s peddling. Local officials are debunking it left and right: No widespread fires, no mass exodus, just Trump dredging up 2020 footage to justify shipping in the National Guard like it’s a sequel nobody asked for. Portland’s wrestling with real issues – protests, sure, and Trump’s threats to federalise the response – but it’s not Caracas. It’s a city functioning, albeit tensely, while the president plays arsonist and alarmist in one.
When does a reporter – any reporter – cut in with the cold splash of reality? “Mr. President, with respect, Portland isn’t ‘burning.’ Here’s the fire department log: three small blazes, all contained. Shops open? Most are. People fleeing? Tourism’s up 5% this quarter. Care to walk back the hyperbole, or shall we fact-check live?” But no. They let it slide, nodding like bobbleheads at a demolition derby. The Daily Show’s skewering it with satirical “real footage” montages that blend Trump’s dystopia with actual Portlandia vibes, but that’s comedy, not accountability. The Oregon AG is calling it out as targeted political theatre, yet the Beltway press treats it like weather chatter.
"The following is REAL footage from Portland, 2025. Viewer discretion is advised." (Daily Show Social Media)
byu/JamiroFan2000 inDailyShow
So here we are: a government in lockdown because the majority party can’t adult, and a city painted as inferno fodder to score culture-war points. And the media? Complicit enablers, too timid or too embedded to call the bluff. Good governance thrives on truth-tellers who puncture the balloon before it floats away with the facts. Right now, the country is left with echo chambers and empty pockets – furloughed workers unpaid, Portlanders profiled, and democracy’s watchdogs chasing their tails.
Wake up, press corps. Your silence isn’t neutrality; it’s surrender. Next time Trump or his chorus line spins this yarn, don’t transcribe – interrogate. Because if you won’t hold the powerful to account, who will? Certainly not the guy who’s too busy building walls around his own reality to notice the house is on metaphorical fire.
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Excellent commentary Michael,this site is killing it.
Unless someone stops this shit,America is rooted.But I guess most of us know it.
Leavitt? Many would leave it, as she is a female with blue bruises from forty foot poles, surely. The face of shittery, crookery, Trumpery.
That’s a double thank you, Harry.
It drives me up the wall. I’m glued to my political podcasts – some from big-name media outfits, others from scrappy independents – hoping for clarity in the chaos. They dissect every Oval Office whopper with surgical precision: “Why doesn’t anyone challenge these lies?” the hosts lament, voice dripping with indignation. And I’m sitting there, jaw on the floor, screaming at my earbuds: You’re doing it too!
These self-appointed truth-seekers are quick to point fingers at the White House’s fib factory but never turn the lens on themselves. When was the last time someone stopped mid-rant to say, “Hang on, we let that ‘Schumer Shutdown’ line slide last week without a fact-check”? Never. They’re too busy chasing clicks with spicy takes to notice their own blind spots. It’s not just laziness; it’s hypocrisy dressed up as analysis. If you’re going to call out a lie, start with the one you didn’t catch in your own studio.
If media outlets want to be the antidote to Oval Office fiction, they need to grow a spine and fact-check themselves first. Because if they won’t call out their own misses, they’re just another voice in the noise.
Very well said, Michael, in both the lead essay and your above comment. The media, putatively, if truth-telling was the standard they adhered to, could set the scene by example and call out the flood of lies and obfuscations with diligence and rigour. But they don’t, and must be judged accordingly, as deficient, as failing in their principal duty to objectively inform on a factual basis, without fear or favour.
Unfortunate that those that do speak the truth often have limited audiences.
Trump, in late September, told the UN in New York that the climate crisis is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He ought to have been howled down, parodied, called a fool, ignoramus, liar, buffoon, or worse, a very stupid man, but he wasn’t. Yes, his words were reported, but then the 24hr news cycle moved on and not much more was made of this man’s denialism. To paraphrase (shudder) Alan Jones, Trump should be thrown out to sea in a chaff bag.
Thanks, Canguro. It’s frustrating.
I just caught the last of John Lyons’ 4 Corners on Trump and will be catching a later edition.
In the meantime, Michael Taylor’s comments on msm: people should identify with that comment after the last two years of BS by MSM in our own back yard.
Sharri Markson wears her religion on her sleeve and that’s alright unless like her you are posing as a journalist in which case it is essential that she and others maintain standards of impartiality and objectivity.
The standards for journalists require that they ‘Ensure that factual material in news reports and elsewhere is accurate and not misleading, and is distinguishable from other material such as opinion’.
Markson and others at SKY need to pay attention, they are failing us and their profession.
Leavitt and Markson.
What a “cohesion” here!
And another thing: Biden had a better Press Secretary.
A country of escapees turned freebooters & opportunists that on every social and economic front enter a dance that pumps lies, myths, brutality and celebrity from those on the ground through to the lofty heights of commerce, government, religion and defense (lately, ‘war’).
Masters of hubris, self-righteousness and exceptionalism, despite their scientists and academics, they have conned themselves via consumerist bling, money and linguistic strangulation in a dysfunctional and hypocritical polity and Constitution.
In their fullest participation, it’s been mandatory for them as individuals and collectively to turn a blind-eye and fashion excuses that have no bearing on earthly realities. Accordingly they have damaged their minds, hearts and souls.
And for that, they’ve now got T-Rump and a decimated news media that may have once attempted to be a ‘fourth estate’, but to what?
It has been evident for 50 years that their compulsive self-serving largesse and obsession with supremacy would lead to their ultimate disintegration. Their practice of coercion and deception caused global damage, and staved off the inevitable, but now it’s upon them.
They now vainly maintain their suicidal blindness and deception, as they try to make us all pay. Just like they made Julian Assange, and thousands of others who expose them, pay. Meanwhile, it seems their xenophobic mainstream news media stays with the homegrown cultural mythologies and political sway, whilst ignoring global realities.
What else could one expect from the ratcheted-up absurdist America?