This was an actual headline in Die Zeit, one of Germany’s biggest newspapers yesterday. No, I did not fake this screenshot. This is why journalism is going down the drain right now. You look at the website of one of the most influential examples of the corporate news media for an analysis of the US presidential election and their take is “fuck”?

These people are doomed. Not only didn’t they see the most likely outcome of the election coming, an outcome that anyone with half a brain and who was paying attention to the situation on the ground could easily have predicted correctly, they then proudly go around displaying their own ignorance to their readers. They fucked up their analysis because they are so far up their own arse that they don’t understand what actual people experience out there and now they proudly announce this to everyone? That’s like a mechanic being proud about not being able to fix your car. “Yeah, can’t do it. Says here in the manual it’s easy to fix, but fuck it, I guess you were meant to buy a new one anyway.”

What really takes the cake is that they expect me to subscribe and pay for the amazing insight that their editors are morons and don’t know what they are doing. Guys, I wouldn’t read your idiotic articles if you paid me! I’m wasn’t surprised by the election result, because unlike you I’m actually in touch with reality. You should be paying me. I’m apparently a better political analyst than the experts you employ.

No wonder these so-called Leitmedien (“leading media”, as we call these guys in Germany) are losing all trust with the public. The only leading they are doing is to lead their readers off the cliffs of self-delusion to smash their heads on the rocks of madness below.

Huffington Post, 1 July 2024:

New York Times, 13 July 2024:

I can’t think of many headlines that aged quicker and aged worse than that Huffington Post one.

“Objectivity is only possible in a vacuum of emotions. But since nature abhors a vacuum, true objectivity is never achievable for human beings.”

I propose this as Fab’s Law of Journalism.

I have refocussed my daily newsletter, which hasn’t been daily in quite a while now anyway, to concentrate more on what I seem to be spending most of my time doing: analysing and criticising the press and its reporting of the news. To better reflect what the publication is about, I’ve also rebranded it to Eye on The Press.

→ “The Sleepy Fox” Is Now “Eye on The Press”

When I became a journalist over a decade ago, I did so because I love writing and because I thought I could do a better job at it than most of the people I saw covering the news at the time. A lot has changed since then. And not for the better. Journalists of all creeds and colours have become obsessed with writing about what should be, instead of what is.

The press is enormously powerful. In many ways, what becomes recorded history is not what actually happened, but what was reported to have happened. Journalists shape not only the opinions of society, in the information age, they shape reality itself. Like everyone else, politicians and leaders get their view of what happens around them from the media. If the press is convinced that a problem exists, or that something that is happening is a danger to society, sooner rather than later, so will everyone else. Including the ones who have to power to do something about it — as misguided as that may be.

That is why I think it is only prudent that someone should watch what the press is up to. And report on it. This publication exists to, in my small way, do my part in this. I might not see everything and I might not have enough time to cover all the things I do see, but I feel it is very important to at least try. And as someone who has had intimate experience in the trenches of daily news journalism, I at least know how the game is played and what irregularities to watch for.

I guess there are as many idiots in journalism as there are in any other profession. But in a job mostly consisting of writing down your innermost thoughts on an issue for everyone to see, being an idiot is especially embarrassing. Usually, you have colleagues, including editors, to prevent you from making embarrassing mistakes, but it more and more feels like these people often aren’t much smarter than the person writing the story. Which is why we more frequently get dumb coverage like this story in The Atlantic.

→ Elon Musk’s Text Messages Explain Everything

The texts make it clear that these men are fundamentally alienated from the rest of the world by their wealth. “In one sense, the texts show that billionaires are just like us – they’re not doing advanced calculus; they’re in their DMs talking smack, making jokes, and trying desperately to get their way,” Lauren Pringle, the editor in chief of The Chancery Daily, told me recently. But she added: “These are absolutely not normal people with a normal understanding of the world.”

Who are these people writing this shit? What did they expect? Did they, until they read Elon Musk’s text messages, really believe that rich people were somehow more intelligent or better people? Why? By virtue of being rich? And is it honestly news to you that rich people don’t operate like you and me, who have to hold down a job and struggle to put food on the table every day? What exactly makes you think that someone who has more money than a human being can even properly conceptualise would have the same problems as us? Why does it surprise you that people who literally have more money than they know what to do with would treat that money callously?

Elon Musk isn’t the first billionaire. How can you claim to write books, articles and even a newsletter called Galaxy Brain with authority on topics such as technology, media and “big ideas” and not understand the most obvious facts of life on this planet? Where do they get these numbskulls? And why does nobody notice the crud these people publish?

Remember Private Internet Access and their SEO scams? Well, guess what, they are still at it! This time, they are using a shady outfit called CyberWebPros. These guys are such pros at the CyberWeb, that their website is a broken launch countdown.

“The investigative journalist is the propagandist’s natural enemy, as the former serves the public interest , while the latter tends to work against it."

— Mark Crispin Miller, introduction to the 2005 Ig Publishing edition of Edward Bernays' Propaganda

We have now reached a stage of collective madness where a drug that could potentially save thousands of lives is actually seen as bad, because it doesn’t fit the accepted propaganda line. Or as Matt Taibbi puts it so eloquently:

Since the start of the Trump years, we’ve been introduced to a new kind of news story, which assumes adults can’t handle multiple ideas at once, and has reporters frantically wrapping facts deemed dangerous, unorthodox, or even just insufficiently obvious in layers of disclaimers. The fear of uncontrolled audience brain-drift is now so great that even offhand references must come swaddled in these journalistic Surgeon General’s warnings.

• The Cult of the Vaccine — “The jab” is just the latest story to be reported as mantra

The Wall Street Journal once again very good at pulling people into a story, even if the story is largely just what anyone with a modicum of common sense would expect:

• These People Who Work From Home Have a Secret: They Have Two Jobs — When the pandemic freed employees from having to report to the office, some saw an opportunity to double their salary on the sly. Why be good at one job, they thought, when they could be mediocre at two?

I mean, why are you surprised? The reason for this is obviously that many people are only working half as much when they are working from home. I can’t possibly be the only one who noticed productivity tanking across the board with all kinds of organisations last year – from Ikea’s invoice department to all kinds of support hotlines to governmental offices and even regarding teachers in schools (from what I hear from people who have kids.)

There are clearly people who work well (and a lot) when left largely to their own devices. I’ve been a freelancer working for myself for almost three years now, I ought to know. But these people are clearly in the minority. Most people just work less, the less supervision they have. And it should surprise nobody that some of these people have figured out how they can work just the same at home, just for two employers making bank twice. Especially in America. Come on, you don’t have to be a genius to figure this out!