Media

Joe Biden had barely finished his acceptance speech on Saturday when journalists, tired and weary of four years of mean tweets, started congratulating each other. Jake Tapper was dropping 'Bye Felicias' on Twitter like a catty mean girl to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Jim Acosta could finally take a break. It was no longer a dangerous time to tell the truth in America. ​Members of the national media seem to be under the impression that the result of the 2020 election was about them and their adversarial relationship with Donald Trump. Margaret Sullivan, writing at the Washington Post exhaled, 'The media never fully learned how to cover Trump. But they still might have saved democracy.’ At ease, soldiers.

American journalism has lost its bearings, and we are all paying the price. For the past four years, egged on by President Trump, mainstream news swiftly descended past the first circle of hell — subtle partisanship — and reached a far darker, hotter one: blatant favoritism, stories killed for purely partisan reasons and occasional propaganda masquerading as solid news.Journalism’s decline mirrors that of other American institutions, but it has compounded the social damage. A thriving democracy depends on free and open debate and informed debate depends on trustworthy news. For most Americans, that trust has evaporated.The Washington Post is exactly right when it says, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.

There is a harrowing ritual of childhood that far too many youths in our Amazon, Instacart, and Seamless-equipped world may never need to suffer (especially post-COVID): grocery shopping with your parents. Let me tell you, kiddos. This sucked. You’d get dragged around through the aisles without being allowed to play hide-and-seek, met with rejection every time you asked whether you could have the new flavor of PopTarts or your favorite heart-stoppingly sugary breakfast cereal, and if you did anything like excitedly scream ‘LOOK! DEAD SNAKE MEAT!’ you’d be hushed and told it was just spicy Italian sausage and you should be using your indoor voice anyway.

The national media is now less trusted than President Trump to provide accurate information and analysis about COVID-19, according to a CBS poll of registered voters. Think about the sheer hubris and raw effort that must have taken! All those months of politicizing public health, downplaying the spread of the virus through protests and riots, doubting coronavirus treatments, and trying to get Anthony Fauci to bad-mouth the President, have finally paid off. Take a bow everyone. In terms of trust, the national media ranked dead last at 35 percent, behind the President, the CDC and the governors of those polled in individual states. Trump, a man who essentially suggested people go stand out in the sun for a bit to help treat a COVID infection, came in five points higher.

Is there nothing Karlie Kloss can't do? The Midwest-born supermodel and minor member of the Trump Expanded Cinematic Universe has proven herself to be something of a polymath since hanging up her Victoria's Secret Angel wings in 2015. The 29-year-old heads up a coding program to get more young women involved in STEM, hosts the Bravo show Project Runway and, as The Spectator revealed earlier this year, helps craft government healthcare policy through her father Kurt and brother-in-law Jared Kushner. But besides fashion, Kloss's true passion is investing. It's something she must have picked up from her husband, Josh Kushner. Clearly Kloss has an eye for a canny deal, as she's set to splash the cash in the famously lucrative world of legacy print media.

The summer ritual of A-level results day is so well known it's easy to forget the thousands of students receiving their BTec National results. That’s the intro to a BBC News item on vocational qualification results issued today. It’s also the story of British culture and economics, told in a single, unwittingly revealing, sentence. Around 250,000 kids will get BTEC results today – that’s almost as many as the 300,000 or so who get A-level results. But of course, media and political attention paid to the latter group is vastly greater than the former. Why?

Just as we were getting used to the headlines about hospitalization and mortality rates, the really bad news arrives. Meghan and Harry are back. After scuttling to California before they were isolated in the hell of a luxury rental in Vancouver, the unemployed ex-royals are loose on the streets of Los Angeles. Disguised as two Postmates workers, they’re delivering bags of food to already vulnerable members of the public and making sure to be filmed doing it. Think Candid Camera, without the candor.Like everything this spontaneously warm and down-to-earth couple does, this stunt combines a cold whiff of careful planning with their signature aroma, a complex blend of farce, vanity and self-destruction.

There must be a quote from Shakespeare for this, but so far I haven’t found it. It’s the way we all of us contrive to see in cosmic events the evidence, the signs and portents, for what we already believed even before the cataclysm had occurred. These are the days of miracle and wonder, sang Paul Simon… The way we look to a distant constellationThat’s dying in a corner of the skyThese are the days of miracle and wonderAnd don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry… Somehow there never was a plague, earthquake, flood or epidemic that was not also a sign that the human race must mend its ways according to wisdom we had long recommended, even during less extraordinary times.

The media has not covered itself in glory in its response to the coronavirus crisis, it’s fair to say. Yet one well-known journalist who really has excelled has been the Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Not only was he one of the first major TV pundits in the world to take the threat of the virus seriously, he also intervened with Donald Trump by visiting the president at his house in Mar-a Lago to discuss the gravity of the situation. I caught up with my friend Tucker yesterday on my podcast, and we talked about the media’s failings, Trump’s response, how the Democrats are going to junk Joe Biden, and not killing iguanas. Most of all, we talked about death and the theological implications of this terrible problem.