A quote from the play Inherit the Wind has always stuck with me. "It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted... And afflict the comfortable."
That comes from the motto of the old Scripps Howard News. I worked as a political cartoonist and outdoor/environmental writer at one of their newspapers, The Albuquerque Tribune. It would have been wonderful if they truly believed in that, but they didn't. My editor loved going to lunch at a place called the Petroleum Club every week which was perched atop a downtown bank and where he got to rub elbows and chow down sirloin steak with oil company executives, insurance industry bigwigs and real estate developers. While the paper did do some good work, there were lines you didn't cross. One of them ended my editorial page cartooning gig: https://demockracy.ink/the-power-of-the-political-cartoon/
I had an uncle who was an executive who helped with the sale and acquisition of newspapers. He was instrumental in getting Rupert Murdoch established in the US. When I got my job at the Tribune I was all excited and beyond naive and talking to my Uncle about freedom of the press and holding power to account, yada, yada.
He looked at me and said, "Never forget it is a business."
"Um, yeah, well, I guess so, BUT it's a different kind of business!" I replied.
There are many blatant falsehoods and conveniently one-side conventional wisdoms being laid bare as the absolute status quo preserving bollocks it has always been.
Institutions and laws are proven to be arbitrary, capricious and often illusory. Something black, brown, indigenous and poor people have been telling affluent white people for time immemorial.
Where once being able to repeat NYT headlines or WaPo talking points meant you were a liberal in good standing now paints you as the out of touch sycophant for oligarchs you unwittingly always were.
We are in the realm of monsters, ruled by pedophiles and their enablers. There is, however, freedom and opportunity in the ability to leave comforting or at least static fictions behind and deal with the world as it actually exists.
And let us always remember the ongoing slaughter of journalists in the US/Israel genocide in Gaza. As of late August 2025, some 270 had been targeted and killed by US/Israel intel and military. Another three were murdered two weeks ago. More journalists have been killed than in all the wars from WW I combined. We will begin seeing the same thing here. As we see every day, the weapons and tactics of colonization are always brought home and turned inward on the exploited citizens as corrupt, rotted-out, rickety empires collapse. Just this morning the Trump regime SS Gestapo ICE has targeted Meidas Touch News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqi-9kCvFuk
Every citizen needs to be a reporter: "ALERT! Preserve Evidence Of ICE Crimes At Demonstrations To Help Future Prosecutions" ... Information & evidence protection is the first step on the road to justice. ... https://mark192.substack.com/p/alert-preserve-evidence-of-ice-crimes
Reality skews left. That's why the right is so interested in capturing media. The Breitbart Doctrine doesn't go far enough. It's not "politics is downstream from culture; if you change someone's culture, you change their politics." That silences the crucial part. Instead, it's "politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from reality; change someone's perception of reality, you change their culture, and you change their politics." You change someone's perception of reality by grabbing their news media. Here we are. They're cancelling reality.
Most common "journalism" model in practice today: PR firm or internal hack from corporation or governmental department dispatches press release containing what those in power want you to think and believe > "journalist" receives press release > "journalist" copies and pastes contents of press release and attaches their byline.
Do you genuinely feel that the current incarnation of “The Press”… an entity privately owned and operated for profit, offers a solution rather than a force complicit in creating and maintaining our current dilemma?
Sure, there are outliers than can claim to be independent and ethical servants of the public, but by and large… the silencing and complicity of the major US press institutions has been happening since the Reagan administration.
Pointing at the Constitution and finger wagging at encroaching authoritarianism has long been a favorite of the center left. So long as the Dems had their own dysfunctional version of Fox, they thought everything would work out.
Good luck finding any political will to legislate on behalf of a “Free” Press. Shrugmaster Hakeem and Limp Chuck are declaring funneling a boatload of money to a GOP operative to purchase Body Cams for Brownshirt style thugs a major Dem victory. You think we’re going to get an independent press from this crowd?
I mean, who still remembers the nonsense that the NYT pulled during the Iraq War? Bret Stephens still has a comfy job when he needs to be sent to prison!
I. F. Stone is credited for the quote “…Governments lie…” he understood the truth doesn’t come from press releases and lapdog journalist. He wasn’t referring to a specific political party either.
Seymour Hersh wasn’t too concerned about DC’s feelings when he exposed the My Lai massacre. A news anchor for CBS, Walter Cronkite "the most trusted man in America" announcement back in ’68, on television, that the US was not winning the Viet Nam war, and it looked like a stalemate. It may have had more impact on the country’s psyche about the war than anything any politician could of said at the time, except maybe the president.
That said ,I don’t know what these guys political affiliations were, but they certainly were political animals. They understood that there is almost nothing in our lives that isn't the result of a political decision made somewhere up the ladder. Unlike so many "journalist" today, they understood speaking the truth matters.
The press as a whole has always cared more about selling product than speaking truth. Material profit is the central organizing principle of Western Civilization, and a media grown out of it will inevitably have great difficulty questioning that.
A very, very low percentage of media do what is supposed to be critical to a democracy, questioning power. The examples of this, like Watergate, stand out in history because the press, normally very happy in its clubby alliance with the powerful, together with them controls history. And together, they delude us by crowing about the rare examples of reigning in power, and ignore the fact that well over 90% percent of news organizations, well over 90% of the time, go hand in hand with concentrated wealth. They talk about freedom and human rights, but they rarely walk it. Liberalism in a nutshell.
So while Trump is extreme, and his fascism is overt rather than the omnipresent veiled version of corporate dominance heartily supported by liberals and Democrats, he's just an extension of what has been happening a long time, accelerating since Reagan. The notion, all the rage now in the midst of Trump's chaos, that things have been much better in some misty golden era of the past, is a delusion. The United States was founded on genocide and slavery, and as the modern day agent of diseased European colonialism, seems fated to follow that path to its tragic conclusion.
So if you want to talk about truth, stop imagining Trump is so different from what's always been true, and talk about actually changing a country and a whole way of life, the norm of which is destroying the biological viability of life on earth for the value of a Wall Street share, and murdering non-white people all over the globe who interfere.
I guarantee that if Trump gets replaced by a Democrat, within a year everybody will be either bitching about all the same shit, or pretending that performative virtue is an ok substitute for the real thing.
A quote from the play Inherit the Wind has always stuck with me. "It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted... And afflict the comfortable."
That comes from the motto of the old Scripps Howard News. I worked as a political cartoonist and outdoor/environmental writer at one of their newspapers, The Albuquerque Tribune. It would have been wonderful if they truly believed in that, but they didn't. My editor loved going to lunch at a place called the Petroleum Club every week which was perched atop a downtown bank and where he got to rub elbows and chow down sirloin steak with oil company executives, insurance industry bigwigs and real estate developers. While the paper did do some good work, there were lines you didn't cross. One of them ended my editorial page cartooning gig: https://demockracy.ink/the-power-of-the-political-cartoon/
I did not know that—thanks!
I had an uncle who was an executive who helped with the sale and acquisition of newspapers. He was instrumental in getting Rupert Murdoch established in the US. When I got my job at the Tribune I was all excited and beyond naive and talking to my Uncle about freedom of the press and holding power to account, yada, yada.
He looked at me and said, "Never forget it is a business."
"Um, yeah, well, I guess so, BUT it's a different kind of business!" I replied.
He was right.
I was wrong.
NICE!
There are many blatant falsehoods and conveniently one-side conventional wisdoms being laid bare as the absolute status quo preserving bollocks it has always been.
Institutions and laws are proven to be arbitrary, capricious and often illusory. Something black, brown, indigenous and poor people have been telling affluent white people for time immemorial.
Where once being able to repeat NYT headlines or WaPo talking points meant you were a liberal in good standing now paints you as the out of touch sycophant for oligarchs you unwittingly always were.
We are in the realm of monsters, ruled by pedophiles and their enablers. There is, however, freedom and opportunity in the ability to leave comforting or at least static fictions behind and deal with the world as it actually exists.
We shall see if humanity is up to the task.
On those white people, and leaving the fictions behind:
https://twvme.substack.com/p/white-people-are-learning-what-intersectionality?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=4211715&post_id=186509609&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=eov1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Thanks for sharing the excellent link. Brilliant.
Excellent read
And let us always remember the ongoing slaughter of journalists in the US/Israel genocide in Gaza. As of late August 2025, some 270 had been targeted and killed by US/Israel intel and military. Another three were murdered two weeks ago. More journalists have been killed than in all the wars from WW I combined. We will begin seeing the same thing here. As we see every day, the weapons and tactics of colonization are always brought home and turned inward on the exploited citizens as corrupt, rotted-out, rickety empires collapse. Just this morning the Trump regime SS Gestapo ICE has targeted Meidas Touch News: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqi-9kCvFuk
Every citizen needs to be a reporter: "ALERT! Preserve Evidence Of ICE Crimes At Demonstrations To Help Future Prosecutions" ... Information & evidence protection is the first step on the road to justice. ... https://mark192.substack.com/p/alert-preserve-evidence-of-ice-crimes
“The executive branch…has declared all of its opponents to be domestic terrorists”.
And to think, just a couple of months ago, its opponents were merely “radical left wing lunatics”.
Yep. Been screaming this shit for a decade - https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/45-facts-that-have-become-debatable-in-2017-thanks-to-politics
Reality skews left. That's why the right is so interested in capturing media. The Breitbart Doctrine doesn't go far enough. It's not "politics is downstream from culture; if you change someone's culture, you change their politics." That silences the crucial part. Instead, it's "politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from reality; change someone's perception of reality, you change their culture, and you change their politics." You change someone's perception of reality by grabbing their news media. Here we are. They're cancelling reality.
You cannot escape politics. It is like trying to jump off the earth.
Great fuckin line.
Great fuckin piece.
✅️💯✅️💯✅️💯✅️
Thanks, Hamilton!
great article. everyone donate to the reporting fund. here is hoping its not needed in springfield!
What is the "reporting Fund?"
Most common "journalism" model in practice today: PR firm or internal hack from corporation or governmental department dispatches press release containing what those in power want you to think and believe > "journalist" receives press release > "journalist" copies and pastes contents of press release and attaches their byline.
Do you genuinely feel that the current incarnation of “The Press”… an entity privately owned and operated for profit, offers a solution rather than a force complicit in creating and maintaining our current dilemma?
Sure, there are outliers than can claim to be independent and ethical servants of the public, but by and large… the silencing and complicity of the major US press institutions has been happening since the Reagan administration.
Pointing at the Constitution and finger wagging at encroaching authoritarianism has long been a favorite of the center left. So long as the Dems had their own dysfunctional version of Fox, they thought everything would work out.
Good luck finding any political will to legislate on behalf of a “Free” Press. Shrugmaster Hakeem and Limp Chuck are declaring funneling a boatload of money to a GOP operative to purchase Body Cams for Brownshirt style thugs a major Dem victory. You think we’re going to get an independent press from this crowd?
I mean, who still remembers the nonsense that the NYT pulled during the Iraq War? Bret Stephens still has a comfy job when he needs to be sent to prison!
"A true journalist has no friends." -Jake Highton, 1931-2017
He was my brilliant, irascible journalism First Amendment law professor at the University of Nevada.
I. F. Stone is credited for the quote “…Governments lie…” he understood the truth doesn’t come from press releases and lapdog journalist. He wasn’t referring to a specific political party either.
Seymour Hersh wasn’t too concerned about DC’s feelings when he exposed the My Lai massacre. A news anchor for CBS, Walter Cronkite "the most trusted man in America" announcement back in ’68, on television, that the US was not winning the Viet Nam war, and it looked like a stalemate. It may have had more impact on the country’s psyche about the war than anything any politician could of said at the time, except maybe the president.
That said ,I don’t know what these guys political affiliations were, but they certainly were political animals. They understood that there is almost nothing in our lives that isn't the result of a political decision made somewhere up the ladder. Unlike so many "journalist" today, they understood speaking the truth matters.
The press as a whole has always cared more about selling product than speaking truth. Material profit is the central organizing principle of Western Civilization, and a media grown out of it will inevitably have great difficulty questioning that.
A very, very low percentage of media do what is supposed to be critical to a democracy, questioning power. The examples of this, like Watergate, stand out in history because the press, normally very happy in its clubby alliance with the powerful, together with them controls history. And together, they delude us by crowing about the rare examples of reigning in power, and ignore the fact that well over 90% percent of news organizations, well over 90% of the time, go hand in hand with concentrated wealth. They talk about freedom and human rights, but they rarely walk it. Liberalism in a nutshell.
So while Trump is extreme, and his fascism is overt rather than the omnipresent veiled version of corporate dominance heartily supported by liberals and Democrats, he's just an extension of what has been happening a long time, accelerating since Reagan. The notion, all the rage now in the midst of Trump's chaos, that things have been much better in some misty golden era of the past, is a delusion. The United States was founded on genocide and slavery, and as the modern day agent of diseased European colonialism, seems fated to follow that path to its tragic conclusion.
So if you want to talk about truth, stop imagining Trump is so different from what's always been true, and talk about actually changing a country and a whole way of life, the norm of which is destroying the biological viability of life on earth for the value of a Wall Street share, and murdering non-white people all over the globe who interfere.
I guarantee that if Trump gets replaced by a Democrat, within a year everybody will be either bitching about all the same shit, or pretending that performative virtue is an ok substitute for the real thing.
Grateful for the independent journalists on Substacks and other platforms. They need our support now more than ever.
It has always been so…a cornerstone of Democracy is a FREE PRESS.