The transformation from phony "objectivity" to open one-party orthodoxy hasn't been an improvement
"I collect Soviet newspapers. Years ago, I used to travel to Moscow’s Izmailovsky flea market every few weeks, hooking up with a dealer who crisscrossed the country digging up front pages from the Cold War era. I have Izvestia’s celebration of Gagarin’s flight, a Pravda account of a 1938 show trial, even an ancient copy of Ogonyek with Trotsky on the cover that someone must have taken a risk to keep.
"These relics, with dramatic block fonts and red highlights, are cool pieces of history. Not so cool: the writing! Soviet newspapers were wrought with such anvil shamelessness that it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever read them without laughing. A good Soviet could write almost any Pravda headline in advance. What else but “A Mighty Demonstration of the Union of the Party and the People” fit the day after Supreme Soviet elections? What news could come from the Spanish civil war but “Success of the Republican Fleet?” Who could earn an obit headline but a “Faithful Son of the Party”?
"Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a “Right-Trotskyite Bandit,” a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue — 95% of most issues of Pravda or Izvestia were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like “glittering,” “full-hearted,” “wise,” “mighty,” “courageous,” “in complete moral-political union with the people,” etc.
"Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:" . . .
Full article, followed by this next: No, you're not imagining the media's Pravda-ization . . . "For Taibbi, the apex of the hagiography that is every major newspaper article today is the Washington Post's recent claim that comedians are finding it impossible to joke about Biden. You may recall, from the Obama era that the media claimed that it was impossible to parity Obama because he was simply too cool. According to Richard Zoglin, Biden cannot be parodied, not because he is too cool, but because he is too normal. His voice, insists Zoglin, is "devoid of obvious quirks," and his manner too "muted and self-effacing" to give comics anything to work with. Taibbi's response to these risible statements is the following video:
Years ago, I read an old cartoon showing a couple at the breakfast table. The woman says, "This article says don't believe everything you read." Her husband replies, "Don't believe it." That husband represents half the American public. They've been given proof repeatedly that the media are lying, but they refuse to accept that fact and, instead, continue to believe the garbage they spew. Now that this garbage has risen to the level of Soviet-style hagiography of a demented old man, America is in a deep dive and needs to pull out soon before it crashes.
