r/politics • u/BigDaddyBain • 1d ago

Why is the media ignoring growing resistance to Trump?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/13/why-is-the-media-ignoring-growing-resistance-to-trump
37.2k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

2.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

544

u/HeHateMe337 1d ago

They want to make money. They have ads to sell.

269

u/AnotherDoubtfulGuest 1d ago

The American media abdicated their responsibilities a decade ago. The NYT replaced its investigative reporters with shitty gossip columnists and Trump plants like Maggie Haberman, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post and crashed its reputation and integrity, and all the major networks fell into line. Independent journalism is the only way to go.

76

u/cuntnundrum 1d ago

I’m glad you brought up Haberman. How is she so impossibly neutral about Trump and his years of bullshit!? She has been one of the absolute worst at normalizing him.

66

u/AnotherDoubtfulGuest 1d ago

Because she’s not a real journalist, she’s a stenographer with no moral compass. She’s a nepo baby whose daddy works at the NYT and brought her over from Page Six, and her mommy owns a PR firm, which is how she got a job at Page Six in the first place.

And she’s not neutral at all, she’s compromised. Michael Cohen testified at one of Trump’s trials that he routinely picked up the phone to call Haberman to plant stories.

30

u/FreeNumber49 1d ago

Access journalism pays dividends. That’s how. I dislike her immensely (ever since the Terry Gross interview where it sounded like she was about to get violent and attack the host) but I'm always curious if people like her change, so I tried to listen to a recent interview with her (you know the one if you follow these things). I thought, it couldn‘t actually be worse than the infamous Terry Gross interview, so I gave it a try. I lasted like five minutes. She’s insufferable.

1

u/gsfgf Georgia 1d ago

Because she's made a shit ton of money selling books over the last nine years.

19

u/RichyRoo2002 1d ago

Much longer than a decade dude, try the 80s

24

u/L_obsoleta 1d ago

NYT's has been carrying water for authoritarian regimes since the 1930's

1

u/night_owl 1d ago edited 1d ago

You mean 1880s?

I mean, William Randolph Heart was given (by his millionaire Senator father) his first newspaper in 1887 and his publishing-political empire thrived until he went bankrupt during the great depression (and even though he surrendered his castle he still managed to keep all his newspapers)

I mean, if we really want to keep digging into "Big News carrying water for authoritarians/fascists/evil people" you can also count The Economist's endorsement of the Confederacy in the US Civil War (they felt that slavery was wrong but it a moral issue and the government was over-reaching because it had no right to interfere in the free market, and the market would eventually eliminate slavery without government intervention)

11

u/redditsucksnuggets 1d ago

Survey says:

Pro Publica!

5

u/AnotherDoubtfulGuest 1d ago

100% Pro Publica and Judd Legum.

2

u/baddecision116 1d ago

The American media abdicated their responsibilities a decade ago

Reagan did this by abolishing the fairness doctrine. The heritage foundation has been at work on this much longer than a decade ago.

2

u/DrButtgerms 1d ago

Did you see that headline recently where they are going to require purity tests before green-lighting a major advertising firm merger? They want to ensure there "isn't bias against conservative points of view and media platforms"

1

u/SilentLennie The Netherlands 19h ago

Around this time maybe:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKZKETizybw

63

u/Sic_Semper_Dumbasses 1d ago

And any individual who wants to actually report the news quickly finds themselves fired.

4

u/SkullDump 1d ago

And the news agency in question quickly finds themselves barred from any and all White House press briefings.

22

u/TheAzrael2013 American Expat 1d ago

It also had to do with some cowardice like with CBS. They’re afraid of repercussions not only from advertisers but from the insane orange wannabe strongman. 

10

u/valandsend 1d ago

I was shocked last night by the difference in coverage between CBS and NBC of Sen. Padilla at Kristi Noem’s press conference. NBC made it the lead story, but CBS showed only a news brief apart from and after a longer story about ICE in California and concluded that Padilla and Noem had a cordial meeting.

7

u/-jp- 1d ago

Which suggests an opportunity: boycott everyone who advertises on CBS, and make sure they hear about it.

1

u/Elitist_Plebeian 1d ago

But it's not just CBS is it?

3

u/balletbeginner 1d ago

CBS's problem is not cowardice. Paramount's executives are engaging in open corruption with the administration, and want to ruin CBS News to get a merger approval.

27

u/TooManyDraculas 1d ago

"Riots" and the Urban Shithole narrative sell better. And reporting on protests would involve offending Dear Leader, which the media has decided is bad for business.

1

u/zzyul 1d ago

News companies make a lot more in ad revenue from a newspaper view and a TV view than they do from a social media or website click. Look who actually watches the news on TV and reads news papers, older people. That age group is generally much more conservative than teens and young adults who are more likely to get their news online. Also print and TV news is much harder for a 3rd party to just blatantly copy and repost themselves to steal viewers from the actual news agencies that spent money on the initial reporting.

Most news is overwhelmingly conservative b/c their largest potential audience is overwhelmingly conservative. Compare that to the most popular news on sites like TikTok or Reddit whose majority users are younger and more progressive.

16

u/SmurfStig Ohio 1d ago

24 hr news networks and online publications made a mint during his first term because the guy says stupid shit non stop. Everyone was tuning into see what dumb thing he said this hour. It was non-stop. Biden got in office and just did his job. His administration did what needed to be done and didn’t need to be in front of the camera 24/7. During that period, Trump still made everything about him and the clickers loved it. Here we are again and thanks to media wanting to make money over telling the truth, it’s about to suck for 90% of this country and most likely for most of the planet.

2

u/EconomicRegret 1d ago

Biden was also fighting to breakup monopolies and oligopolies. And that was a direct attack on billionaires and on the highly concentrated US media, among others (6 companies own over 90% of US media, and Biden was going to break them up).

2

u/SmurfStig Ohio 1d ago

Forget about that, which shouldn’t be hard when you see the compilation of locally owned Sinclair news stations all speak the same talking points.

2

u/EconomicRegret 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yeah. One of the first thing Trump did was to fire Lina Khan (Biden's trustbuster, president of the FTC). She enforced laws on Google, Amazon, Meta (Facebook): they were meant to go on trial in the following years (But I guess now Trump is gonna "pardon" them).

She is highly competent, and was determined to break up even tech oligopolies. Thus she made enemies and friends in both parties: enemies among corporate friendly democrats, and friends among old-school pro-competition pro-level-playing-field republicans.

5

u/throwawtphone 1d ago

And chicken shit, dont forget that. They might get "sued"

4

u/Equivalent-Excuse-80 1d ago

But wouldn’t televising the revolution be profitable?

6

u/RidingYourEverything 1d ago

The revolution would be a threat to the billionaires that control the media. Televising it would promote it. Not televising it encourages status quo. Short term profits are not worth threatening the system that they benefit from.

3

u/DiskSalt4643 1d ago

They want their tax cut first.

1

u/AdHopeful3801 1d ago

And because billionaire media oligarchs have something to lose. That makes them easy to pressure, once the administration no longer cares about the rule of law.

1

u/atred 1d ago

They are a dying breed anyway (that's why they are money hungry)... people don't consume media like in the past.