In a dangerous time, they showed cowardice and greed
For decades, newspapers, television networks, cable news and what used to be radio networks have beat their collective chests and crowed they are the defenders of freedom, the speakers of truth to power. Those days are gone.
One word describes today’s Big Media in America: cowardice. A second word might be greed.
There are five newspapers which set the news agenda in the United States: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. Other newspapers and TV stations decide what’s news based on what the Big Five decide is important.
So, it’s tragic for our nation that the Big Media have shown varying degrees of cowardice and greed in coverage of a major issue in the most important presidential election of modern times.
Avoiding a major story of our times
Let’s begin with the New York Times. To this day, the Times refuses to put the words dementia and Trump in the same sentence. The Times has ignored the warnings of hundreds of mental health experts that Trump is suffering from advancing dementia.
They’ve only mentioned the word dementia once—in 2018—and that was in an opinion piece suggesting Trump did not have dementia. But the writer, John McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University. He has no training or experience as a mental health professional. The headline would lead us to believe he knows something about dementia. His university bio says otherwise.
McWhorter’s Times opinion piece was published four months after the publication of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a book which shot to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list. The book was authored by over two dozen psychiatrists and mental health professionals.
One of them was Dr. John Gartner a psychologist and psychiatrist a former member of the staff at Johns Hopkins University hospital. This is what he said on the David Pakman video podcast about President Trump in the summer of 2018: “…he’s not demented but he might, he’s probably in a state we call pre-dementia.”
Ignoring experts
The New York Times ignored what Gartner and the other mental health experts said in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
Fast forward from 2018 to 2024.
Donald Trump is clearly suffering from dementia. The oldest presidential candidate in American history can’t finish sentences. He can’t pronounce words. He claims legal Haitian immigrants are eating family pets. He speculates about putting arch-critic Liz Cheney before a firing squad. Sometimes Trump thinks he’s running against Barack Obama. Dementia runs in his family. Donald Trump’s father died from Alzheimer’s complications.
Here’s Dr. Gartner again, this time from earlier this year: “The kind of memory problems that Trump is showing are clear signs of dementia.”
Irresponsibility masquerading as ethics
The New York Times knows about such assessments. But the Times has gone to great lengths to avoid reporting on Trump’s brain problems in plain, blunt reporting.
Recently, the Times ran a long story, an opinion column and a podcast about Trump’s mental decline, but not once did they use the words dementia or Alzheimer’s.
This matters because the copycat U.S. media herd has ignored Trump’s dementia because the New Times has ignored and downplayed his mental decline.
In recent times Trump’s dementia and mental illness has become obvious to anyone willing to pay attention.
Shortly before the election, Trump simulated an act of oral sex at a rally in Milwaukee. The New York Times buried Trump’s shocking and raunchy pantomime incident seven paragraphs into a routine election coverage story.
The New York Times gets an F for failing to inform America about Trump’s dementia and mental illness. History will record this as an epic media failure.
The New York Times has cowardice compatriots
The New York Times isn’t the only major media outlet to disserve the American people during these dark times.
Shortly before the election, the Los Angeles Times owner refused to allow the paper to endorse Kamala Harris for president.
The LA Times is owned by billionaire Patrick Soon Shiong, who made his fortune in the pharmaceutical business after inventing a drug to treat pancreatic cancer. Did he block the LA Times Harris endorsement to curry favor with Trump, who has threatened big changes to healthcare? We can only guess.
Then there’s the Washington Post—the paper of Watergate fame—the paper with the motto that Democracy dies in darkness.
As the Washington Post was preparing to publish an endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, days before the election, the paper’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, quashed the endorsement.
Bezos also owns Amazon, the mammoth online retailer, and he owns Blue Origin, a big money space exploration firm in competition with Elon Musk’s Space X.
Selling out for profits
The same day Bezos killed the Harris endorsements, executives of Blue Origin met privately with Donald Trump.
Private space exploration companies like Space X and Blue Origin will make billions of dollars from government contracts in the coming years.
Did Bezos nix the Harris endorsement to suck up to Donald Trump in the neck-and-neck presidential campaign? Is he hoping to cash in on multi-billion-dollar space contracts? It sure looks that way.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times—these former giants of journalism in America now look weak and craven. Each paper is fully aware of Trump’s dementia. Each in its own way has failed miserably at warning the American people.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summed the road ahead for followers of Donald Trump: “I think people who are thinking about voting for him have to know that he can’t last for four years with his brain deteriorating at the rate that it is, and it’s clearly evident, and they may be voting for President Vance, which would be a horrible thing for our country.”
Freedom of the Press is a sad joke
In 1960 a press critic named A.J. Liebling wrote: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”.
That observation is as true today as it was 64 years ago. And We, the People, are poorly served by the billionaires who control what we see, hear and read that is called The News.
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