The Growing Stench of Surrender Emanating from the US News Media.
Nha Trang, Vietnam, December 19th, 2024.
Salaroche

I obviously underestimated the naked gall, the shameless insolence shown by the incoming wannabe-dictator in his resolve to silence any form of dissent from him disseminated through the American News Media. I had sort of naively thought it would be a slow but steady pro-censorship war of attrition that would take some time for the wannabe-autocrat to win, but I was obviously too optimistic.

One month before the Republican Führer has even been shamefully sworn-in as the first-ever convicted-felon, sexual-offender, unrepentant-insurrectionist President of the United States, the war against open dissent from his authoritarian mandates has already been declared and it is a straightforward, frontal, head-on assault on the 1st Amendment. No holds barred.

ABC already caved-in to a lawsuit for defamation that could have been won in court and J. Ann Selzer, the famous pollster who wrongly predicted in October that Trump would lose the election, has already been sued for “election interference”, along with The Des Moines Register, the Newspaper that published the poll (see here).

The wannabe-despot is waging a war of intimidation against the American News Media and not only is he thus far winning it, it looks like pretty soon the whole industry will be at his service. And these are not farfetched assumptions. This is no joke. A dark, China-like environment of state censorship is clearly visible in the future. Not today, not in January, but maybe a year, maximum two years down the line.

And maybe I’m being too optimistic again, maybe a state-sanctioned, nationwide censorship will be officially or de facto implemented sooner than that, for if Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s Boss, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, Sergey Brin, a Google founder, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, are all already on a bended knee kissing the ring of their new master (see here), who will be left there to stand up in defense of the First Amendment? How long before the New York Times folds too?

I have lived in authoritarian, one-party, undemocratic China for years at a time and I have witnessed first-hand the repressed fear that all Chinese people show whenever most government issues are brought into the conversation. They immediately admonish you not to talk about it. You think it is an exaggeration to imply something similar could happen in America?

Have you recently talked to any of those diehard Maga fanatics for whom Trump is some kind of Messiah? Have you? Can you picture how emboldened those guys will become once Trump has managed to silence all dissention from the US Media?

Freedom of expression is an essential, irreplaceable right for the survival of Democracies. Getting rid of that right is the first aim of any dictatorship-in-the-making and it is the most zealously demanded imposition all despots enforce as the vital measure upon which rests the survival of their dictatorships.

The stench of surrender emanating from the American News Industry already reeks of country-wide compliance with authoritarianism. Donald Trump is already tilling the US news environment so as to ensure that not long after January 20th, the seeds of censorship he is already sowing across the land may soon produce and materialize his dream of becoming the first dictator in the history of the United States of America.

Salaroche