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They all do this. ABC and NBC news are just the same. You, the viewer, are a dull child, prone to evil thoughts, and you must be brow-beaten and relentlessly propagandized so you know which is the Good Guy Anti-Bad Guy Club and which is the Bad Guy Club.
Caught my mother watching ABC earlier today. They were interviewing some black descendant who was saying that Thomas Jefferson was a monster. The level of isolated demand for morality is just utterly disqualifying.
However much you hate journalists, it isn't as much as they hate America.
The white guilt and black worship will continue until morale improves.
If Jefferson's black descendants feel that way, they should take a page from Hitler's relatives and stop having children—to end an evil bloodline and stop Jefferson's monstrous legacy through the non-consensually formed Hemings branch.
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To play Devil's advocate a bit... isn't there a place for this in any realistic democracy? The average voter isn't an expert in economics, or international relations, or constitutional law. Yet we're still expected to vote on all of these things. The only way this system works is if someone else interprets and simplifies the key issues for us, and maybe that requires a funny pundit more than a technical expert.
In any realistic democracy the average voter is one of the best educated in his nation on these matters and this isn't a problem.
Universal suffrage can only lead to subversion precisely because the average man has neither the time nor the inclination necessary and has to seek the mediation of demagogues.
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Yes, the problem is that this is a sacred duty in support of democracy, that has to be held by a solemn and sworn priesthood. And its orders have been thoroughly infiltrated and its mission twisted, not that they were ever too resistant to influence. We are after all asking people to hold massive influence, by delegating them as our eyes, ears and voice, and expecting them to never ever use that power to further their own goals. And then we pay them poorly, fail to punish them when they fail their duty and even reward them when they do fail in a way that flatters us. It's no wonder that with human nature being what it is and incentives being this grossly misaligned, journalism ends up being what Hunter S. Thompson described as "not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."
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Do you ever watch any network TV news? The levels of condescension and contempt they sometimes reach is astounding. I've gotten mad at my own mother for talking like that to an eight year old.
To the greater point, sure. This is why progressives used to love Jon Stewart, so much that he eventually cooked their brains. Even most experts in those things low-key kinda suck, and that's the real problem. TV news goes so horrendously bad about it because their remaining audience can barely imagine turning to someone else. They're boomers who've spent 60 years thinking the TV was a respectable source of information.
For all the flaws of influencers and twitter pundits, they produce a more chaotic "laboratory of democracy" effect. They can't go full ABC News without getting pushback, or turning into lolcows.
The funny part is that he more or less got one of the biggest political shows of all time cancelled:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Stewart%27s_2004_appearance_on_Crossfire
It is true, and I used to think of that a lot. He was the youngish upstart who disrupted the big name, and then he became that. I don't think that "my show was led into by puppets making prank phone calls" was as good as a defense at the end of his career as it was at the start.
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