Chickenshit Mainstream Media: The Dim Star of the Information Age

It seems self-evident to many Americans right now that our country is suffering the bewildering and terrifying beginnings of an all-out information war for the American conscience.

It’s a war dominated by the most effective ringmaster and manipulator of the mainstream media in modern times, a president who has managed to turn news into a blather of fibs, flabbergasting baloney, bald-faced lies and staggering sins of omission, all of which the mainstream press laps up like the lap dogs they’ve shamefully become.  

The president and his firmament of stooges would not be in power if it weren’t for corporate mass media and, yes, public radio and public television, acting as the president’s PR department. Companies and talking heads who sanctimoniously proclaim themselves to be “objective” have spent almost a decade acting as his megaphone, shouting down alternative views with his ultra rich, xenophobic populism, rank misogyny and ludicrously disrespectful theatrics like portraying himself as the Pope on social media days after the death of Pope Francis.

The “professional” corporate media has even let him get away with deregulating environmental protections and upturning decades of public health initiatives, proclaiming corporate America’s divine right to pollute the world so thoroughly that climate change might transform the blue sphere of Earth into an apocalyptic Martian desert in our lifetime.

This war of conscience is portrayed, if addressed at all, as a mano a mano between the glorified mindset of a no-holds-barred conservative minority in America, and what’s presented as the still largely demobilized, reeling, despairingly ineffectual sleeping giant of the American liberal-progressive majority.

It’s not easy to find news that counters the tsunami of rubbish we’re fed every day.  Still, it’s not impossible. If you look past the obvious, activate your curiosity, and delve into the nether world of AI search engines and aggregators, using your own questions to open them up, you’ll find a very different story, one that is inspiring and empowering.       

Far from being enfeebled and dormant, the liberal majority is working tirelessly behind the news to defend and promulgate its values and oppose the treachery of the unconstitutional treats of political reprisals for daring to counter the blowhard bullying from the White House.

Mostly, though, I’m finding evidence of a clear-headed understanding of what’s at stake right now. It has to do with preventing conservatism from descending into its darkest and most dangerous mode, becoming unabashedly totalitarian. The liberal majority is starting to build a case for what conservatism in America is really all about, heartless Social Darwinism and health-destroying pollution for profit.

We get a clear view of this, paradoxically, from a Dutch conservative political philosopher, Andreas Kinneging and his book “The Geography of Good and Evil.” Kinneging sees the political hell of anarchy leading to the brutal purgatory of tyranny. Only governments guided by checks-and-balances constitutions, which distribute power among multiple branches of authority, can avoid complete chaos or despotic rule by one monster or a monstrous ruling class. Kinneging is a rigorous conservative. He describes the conservative mindset as being at odds with the Enlightenment philosophy that informed many of our founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence. Conservatives tend to believe, he writes, that all people are NOT created equal and that human nature is inherently evil and must be constrained by religion, class and traditions based on hierarchy. He has a modest tolerance for what he calls the “minor tyrannies” of nepotism, overweening greed and corruption so common in our current politics, but is suitably appalled by “major tyrannies” which use terror and murder to cement their power.

The liberal-progressive majority in America today is, I think, acutely aware of how the minor tyranny of the current White House could slip restraint and turn into a major tyranny, the murderous police state Americans of good conscience have long feared could happen here.

Compared to the jester-in-chief in the White House, the courageous voices of the liberal majority’s loyal opposition in Congress are barely heard at all in the compromised mainstream media. Yes, we hear in passing about Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy’s bold accusations that the president is dismantling our democracy. We know that Rep. Al Green of Texas is a bravehearted, much abused, anti-Trump warrior. We hear of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s courageous, history-making 25-hour filibuster protesting White House operative Elon Musk’s demolition of federal agencies. We know quite a bit about Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders New Deal battle cry and Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s relentless defense of civil rights, but not much about the outspoken courage of Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen opposition to the president’s immigration policies or Pennsylvania Rep. Brendan Boyle opposition to the president’s moves to weaken or destroy Social Security.

Far from being silent and muddled, the loyal opposition is loudly and continually standing up to the White House. Take, for instance, the outspoken criticisms leveled by Texas Rep. Greg Casar, Maryland’s Rep. Glenn Ivey, Georgia’s Rep. Hank Johnson, New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New Mexico’s heroic Melanie Stansbury.

Rep. Casar, a longtime worker advocate, has call the president’s tariff crusade “an ego trip” that will break the bank of modest-income consumers trying to keep their families afloat while making the president seem like a righter of wrongs allegedly committed by our competitors in the global economy. Far from growing and protecting American jobs, Casar contends, tariffs eat into small savings while turning the super rich into the mega rich. Casar supports immigrant rights in the face of the brutality of mass deportations. He accuses the ruling class of a vast array of hidden corruptions and insults to the concept of economic justice. Casar is an economic populist who supports the rights of low-paid workers and the middle-class over the enormous self-serving economic advantages of the non-working elite.  He also points out the hypocrisy of Republican double standards in opposition attempts to impeach the president while seeming to look the other way when confronted with white collar crime.

Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson, a longtime attorney and magistrate judge, has been in the forefront of opposing the president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in his home state. He championed a bill to “censure and condemn” the president’s efforts to intimidate Georgia election officials into overturning President Biden’s victory, depriving Georgia voters of a fair election. He claimed convincingly that such moves were part of a criminal conspiracy to invalidate lawful election results.

Maryland’s Glenn Ivey, a well-respected attorney with a long history of legal public service, has been particularly vocal in opposing the president’s 2025 MAGA agenda, saying his administration is practicing a “scorched earth policy” in shrinking the federal government, damaging the lives of federal workers and the communities they represent. Ivey calls out the hypocrisy of the administration’s tendency to flaunt due process when it comes to immigrant rights, saying that “Nobody has gotten more due process than Donald Trump,” who he describes as a convicted felon living in “public housing” otherwise known as the White House. He accuses the president of undermining the rule of law, ignoring the legal protections given to ordinary citizens by the Constitution and being a powerful negative and divisive force in American politics, all at the expense of the rights and peace of mind of “ordinary” people.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (AOC) passionate defense of undocumented workers and articulate attacks on oligarchical right-wing policies to enrich the elite are often obscured by the mainstream media’s loathing of what they consider to be her self-serving flamboyance and political theatricality. For many of us, though, her championing of a living wage for all, her efforts to reveal the depth of America’s housing and homeless crisis, and her defense of Medicare and Medicaid make her not a “shrill” narcissist but a devoted and effective spokesperson for the ever ignored liberal-progressive majority. 

New Mexico’s own Rep. Melanie Stansbury has distinguished herself in opposition to the MAGA president’s policies and demeanor, decrying efforts to portray the current moment as a “normal” political upheaval. “This is NOT normal,” she declares. She calls cutting essential social programs such as Medicaid and food stamps “Donald Trump’s great betrayal” of the needs and hardships of “ordinary Americans.” She raises the issue of insider trading with the presidents’ social media advice to buy stocks just after major tariffs were set in place and just before they were temporarily lifted. She is also outspoken about what she considers to be the “lawless and harmful” dismantling of federal agencies. Stansbury exerts her leadership as the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is part the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

If the mainstream media were doing its job, we’d be hearing constantly about what these brave Americans have to say. They have been marginalized and made obscure only because the shameful neglect they, and tens of dozens of others like them, have been suffering, including environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, which has filed more than 300 under-reported lawsuits against this administration’s gutting of environmental laws and regulations.

The liberal majority in the United States IS rising up in defiance of threats of retaliation and accusations of political, intellectual and legal impotence. To gloomily treat such opposition as less significant and unnewsworthy than every rant and outrage issuing from the White House is to contribute to the disempowerment and dismemberment of American democracy.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it