Criticizing American journalists, using Anne Applebaum as an example.
Writing at The Atlantic this week, Anne Applebaum has a stunning piece of brand-new insight, and my goodness is it a brilliantly fresh idea:
See, Trump is JUST LIKE HITLER! Didn’t see that one coming, right? Imagine how excited she was to have that amazing new thought, living inside such a fresh and original mind.There are writers who try to see something clearly, and then to show it to other people, and there are writers who are…Anne Applebaum. The prevailing model in American “mainstream” media is to go plow the same row again and again and again, because plowing where everybody else has already plowed is, I don’t know, safe? Consensus journalism, the 9,746th journalist ringing your doorbell to announce that Trump is a lot like Adolf Hitler. Looking wonderfully proud of themselves, like they just shat a cookie. All day, every day, all messages are the same message. Idea for a new movie: Groundhog Minute.And I’m just done with it. David Brooks, Tom Nichols, William Kristol, and Peggy Noonan have all written the most amazingly refutable piles of nonsense in the last few days, being professionals at the task, and I kept asking out loud if David Brooks hears himself, because every paragraph clashes and refutes all the other paragraphs around it. But no. For me, barring some miraculous act of banality that just can’t be ignored, the election is over.
Indeed, there is a dearth of insight, knowledge, and self-awareness among legacy mainstream media journalists. All much of a muchness, and not much of that.
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