Did you spend the weekend like I did, looking for a new reason to hate the legacy dinosaur media? I’m kidding, of course. Nobody needs more reasons to hate the legacy dinosaur media, and yet they’re always coming up with new ones.
I have a hypothesis about why that is. First, a quick refresher.
We spent the last four-plus years together here at PJ Media detailing how the media acted as willing accomplices — co-conspirators, really — in the Great Biden Senescence Cover-Up. Adding insult to injury, now those same co-conspirators are cashing in on their professional malfeasance as I’ve covered here, here, and here.
I came of age when the media tried to convince us that Ronald Reagan was an “amiable dunce,” so propping up Biden as Super Septagenarian was the same flex, using different muscles. That the cash-in books would quickly follow the end of the Biden Regency was as obvious as it was predictable.
As soon as Biden was gone, the legacy dinosaur media smoothly shifted gears from covering up for Biden and into just making up stuff about Trump. Earlier this month, the legacy dinosaur media cooked up some BS about Trump issuing a same-day ultimatum to Ukraine, NPR that Trump was about to fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and there were a slew of stories about how tariffs collapsed the economy.
The latest was the blue suit scandal, covered yesterday in hilarious detail by PJ’s own Robert Spencer: Brace Yourself: New Trump Scandal Could Be the Biggest of Them All!
Here’s the VodkaPundit version.
You know those embarrassing dreams that everybody has where they’re naked someplace in public, usually at school? I have that same dream — I wake up with night sweats, I swear — except I’m at a nudist colony wearing a tux and my martini is warm.
The details vary, of course. Sometimes I’m drinking scotch, but it’s been watered down.
[shudder]
Anyway, you can imagine President Donald Trump’s embarrassment when he showed up at Pope Francis’s funeral on Saturday wearing a blue suit in a sea of blue suits. “Outlets like Fortune seem to have,” he wrote with legally plausible deniability of malice, “actually altered the photos.”
So here’s where my new hypothesis comes in.
Partly, I’ve come to expect that the dinosaur legacy media — the same folks who used to brag about their “layers of editors and fact-checkers” — will hop on board with whatever goes viral on social media, editing and fact-checking be damned.
“Somebody posted a cropped picture of Trump making it look like he’s the only wearer of a blue suit at the Pope’s funeral! Quick, make this into the etiquette version of Watergate!”
Mostly, though, it seems like now they view their job as something out of Orwell’s 1984.
It isn’t about reporting the facts and hasn’t been for a long time. It isn’t even about peddling particular narratives, since false ones get blown apart almost instantaneously on X. At this point, it’s not about news — it’s about ritual.
Turn on the news and it’s a 24/7/365 version of Oceana’s Two Minute Hate, meant to keep the true believers whipped up into a frenzy against enemies of the state — or to at least convince the Great Unwashed that they’d best put on a public display of conformity.
The media is no longer in the business of reporting the news — and if that’s news to you, you might be new to PJ Media. This company was born in Rathergate’s wake, and it’s been our business to tell the truth about the media for 20 years.
The sad truth is that the legacy dinosaur media can’t finish dying quickly enough, which is an odd thing to conclude about a suicide.
Recommended: Trump Might Be About to Make Reagan’s Dream Come True
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