The media is not covering this

"The media is not covering this," the influencer breathlessly exclaimed into the camera as they recorded a TikTok with a headline from the news in the background behind them.

This sight breaks me, watching people lie directly in front of the evidence of their lie; them referencing reporting they claim does not exist is proof that reality is crumbling.

When I go to Google and start typing 'why is the media not covering' I get back suggestions, including:

• Iran
• protests
• Sudan
• Iran Protests
• North Carolina
• 3i atlas

However, that is nonsense; the media is covering all of those. There's a ton of articles that Google will helpfully suggest to you if you follow through on any of those searches.

Similarly, people will sometimes claim that the media is failing to cover Trump's corruption, and in one sense, they are, and we will return to that, but in a far more mundane sense, they are absolutely covering his corruption.

His business arrangements have been largely documented, his nominees were investigated, (some of) his tax returns were exposed, his connections to Epstein were detailed, and his crypto projects were so obvious that can you even pretend to have plausible deniability?

The problem with the media is not that things are not covered

The problem with the media is that things are covered, but no matter the significance of the news, there are a certain number of column inches, a certain number of cable news segments, and a certain number of breathless BREAKING short-form videos you need to post to your audience.

What this means is that if you have the leader of a nation who is willing to engage in unprecedented looting, destruction, and corruption, you fill the 24-hour news cycle with the activities, each flitting by.

If instead you have a leader who is an elderly "progressive" who stumbles over his speeches and relies heavily on his advisors, then you fill the 24-hour news cycle with the activities, each belabored.

The fewer scandals you have, the more time the media has to spend on following up on your scandals and discussing your scandals.

If you are a pundit, a cable news panelist, an opinion or Substack columnist, or a short-form video creator, you can probably get your arms around a single scandal. You can start to learn the characters and the names and the figures. You can reference them, and they become an almost shared language and part of inside jokes and allusions between you and your colleagues.

If instead the scandals are multitudinous, the numbers stolen beyond any person's ability to grasp, and the destruction never before seen, then the pundits and the posters and the writers and the creators cannot truly understand any of them. They never become part of the language; they never become part of the shorthand. They contribute to a vague sense of corruption, but each scandal far beyond Billygate has less staying power than Billygate because it cannot enter this interpersonal understanding.

It is far easier to remember 'Biden-Burisma' than it is to understand the relationship between various cryptocurrency memecoins with proceeds routed through shell corporations, which seems less significant than the bribery jet, which seems less important than the looting of the US Treasury, which seems less important than his threat to take over the Federal Reserve, which seems less important than his intent to run for a third term, which seems less important than his desire to become a dictator.

Thus, even though the corruption of $TRUMP, USD1, Trump Trading Cards, World Liberty Financial, and Trump Media and Technology Group is far beyond even the fevered imaginings of Burisma-boosters, it can never be proportionally covered.

Due to layoffs, if anything, the media have fewer journalists still employed under the Trump administration than the Biden administration; each journalist is a human with a finite amount of time and capacity, and they are expected to file ~same amount of material now as before. So when there was less news, they followed up on old scandals; now there is always a new scandal.

What I think people mean when they say the media is not covering this

I believe that people are trying to say, 'I just learned about this; it seems important, and I am shocked that I did not know it before.'

The number of people who get their news from the daily newspaper is still falling; the number of people who get their news from a regular magazine is still falling; the number of people who watch broadcast news is still falling; the number of people who watch cable news is still falling.

Insofar as people are still news consumers, they tend to either:

• have certain articles come across their algorithmic feed
• consume news as entertainment in the form of a small number of podcasts/streamers/newsletters/morning show
• have short-form content about the news come across their algorithmic feed

In all these cases you are selecting or having selected for you things that you are ALREADY likely to have an interest in. You are not getting a broad view of the news but more and more hyper-specific as the algorithms desperately seek your attention and your interaction.

People have chosen to have the news pushed to them in this way and thus have very little idea what the media is covering.

The media HAS failed

There is a cultural expectation in large swaths of the media that 'news' coverage is supposed to have a tone that is always 'neutral.'

The media is not well-suited to covering systemic problems and harms caused by systems.

It is far easier for the media to tell you about the number of GIs who overdosed from heroin in Vietnam than it is for the media to discuss the various sociopolitical reasons that we have GIs in Vietnam in conditions that led to these deaths of despair.

Much of the "discourse" (separate from the actual coverage) especially fails at this! Pundits and panelists make their living by returning to the ultimate arbiter in the United States, the upcoming elections, and so we end up with endless horse-race coverage.

But, in some sense, it makes sense to care deeply about how things are going to affect the next election. The autocrat was elected twice; there are a huge number of voters who supported the autocrat and wanted the autocrat to win; there is a large pro-autocracy contingent in the US, and that makes every election supremely important. There is an audience for horse race coverage; people want to know who will win and to project their hopes or resentments onto what that implies.

Perhaps it is easy to imagine that the media should try to keep their media coverage more proportional to the harm being inflicted, but in some sense this is compatible with the 'new' in 'news.' There should be more discussion of the incredible harms inflicted by DOGE on the Constitution and on the pure number of deaths they inflicted on the world, but there is still active news coverage of exactly those things, and the pundits cannot get any more juice out of it. Those who clearly saw the harm and spoke about it early have little to add, because there are only so many times you can proclaim, "Look, I have been proven right. I was right, you were wrong," and for those who supported DOGE, there is no reason to reengage with that topic and remind their audience of those mistakes.

There is also the problem that media that spent proportionally as much time on harm would have no audience. A media outlet that spent as much time proportionally on the deaths caused by the woodchippering of USAID in comparison to deaths caused by Benghazi, that spent the proportional time on the constitutional harms of DOGE as the constitutional harms of allowing Biden to forgive a portion of student loans, would have no audience; it would seem insane to the viewer. The harms from one side are so much larger that proportional coverage of the harms fails. That media outlet would fail unless it were sustained by generous donors who were not interested in return on investment.

Perhaps you imagine that on these panel shows you imagine these pundits calling each other out for past mistakes, offering a chance for people to grapple with the reality of these situations instead of the endless abstraction, but would you call your friend out in front of millions (or thousands at least, cable news ratings can be brutal)? Also, if you travel too far down this path, you end up recreating Crossfire, and I cannot believe that we need to reinvent Crossfire.

None of this excuses the many examples of the media going out of its way to avoid describing the simple reality of what Trump has said and done and the implications of those things. Huge swaths of the media still have a pathological need to adopt an above-the-fray voice that tries to describe things, even insane things, in a way in which they do not sound insane. If, for example, they introduced Donald Trump in their articles as "Donald Trump, president of the United States, felon, and sexual predator," it would sound insane, despite the reality. If half the American voters love getting pissed on and being told it's raining, how much time can you spend discussing the fact that they are being pissed on?