Jeff Childers has an epic Take on the “Main Stream” media’s apocalyptic collapse happening now in real time . This is the Sunday edition of Coffee and Covid . It is Paywalled . I encourage everyone to support Jeff’s Blog by Joining . Here is the full Monty for Goldtenters. This guy is a Gem !!

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As the world spun into 2020, the news business already faced an unrelenting drizzle of bad news, largely thanks to competition from the Internet. The bad news had haunting names like YouTube, Tik Tok, and Instagram, and it often looked like James O’Keefe-style ‘citizen journalism.’ The media industry held swanky conferences chattering about innovative strategies, putting up paywalls, employing think tanks to craft new media products, and lobbying lawmakers for protection of their news product from promiscuous publishing on social media platforms.

Everything was trundling along fine, and then the pandemic crushed the world. In the mad confusion of early covid events, Big Government swept Big Journalism right off her feet, showering her with gifts and promises of luxury and offering to take care of her forever. Big Journalism believed Big Government’s lies, even believing they were engaged to be married. As the pandemic raged in the world outside for everyone else, it was sweet, peaceful pre-marital bliss for Big Journalism and her lover, Big Government, who’d moved in together in a luxury condo in the Greek Isles somewhere.

The happy lovebirds quickly became partners in crime. Big Journalism, swooning over the prospect of a new family, happily conspired with Big Government to push Covid fear and despair on all her former friends and her now-discarded relatives, and even helped Big Government arrange for grandma to die alone, locked away in a cold nursing home closet.

But then one morning in 2023, Big Journalism woke up naked and alone — Big Government was gone, leaving only a cold depression on his side of the bed. Not even a note. Panicked, Big Journalism ran helter-skelter through her luxury condo, desperately searching everywhere for Big Government but finding nothing except a terrifying silence.

You get the idea. Big Journalism prostituted itself to Big Government, taking boatloads of pandemic cash as payment for lying to us about everything related to the so-called novel coronavirus, and for manipulating us using the government’s military-grade propaganda so we’d slavishly comply with every bizarre notion health bureaucrats cooked up; from masks to lockdowns to virtual school to vaccine passports, every one of which turned out to be exactly the foulest, ill-founded, most expensive, and most destructive possible idea, every single time.

Big Government debased and dishonored Big Journalism and threw her away like a stack of old newspapers, and now no one wants her and she can’t even understand what’s happening. Which updates our sad story through yesterday’s anguished Politico headline:

Haha, reader fatigue. True, we’re fatigued with fake news and made-up narratives. Anyway, I could go on. Corporate media is bursting with similar headlines. But this time, the new News Narrative is not made up, it’s based on real, breaking events.

Politico’s article sadly ticked off this month’s bad news for the news:

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire publisher of the Los Angeles Times, laid off 20% of the newsroom, 115 reporters and editors, throwing the newsroom into “chaos” and “mayhem.”

At Time magazine, its billionaire owners, Marc and Lynne Benioff, laid off 15% of unionized editorial employees.

Sports Illustrated collapsed into catastrophic layoffs with most staffers rudely receiving their pink slips by email.

Business Insider (whose parent company Axel Springer also owns POLITICO) yeeted 8% of its staff.

Workers at Condé Nast, Forbes, the New York Daily News, and others walked out in a one-day protest of announced reductions in force at their papers.

Looking at the longer pandemic timeline — a time when you’d think the news business would boom — we find canaries lying dead amongst the liberal media darlings:

CNN, The Washington Post, NPR, Vice Media, Sports Illustrated, Vox Media, NBC News, CNBC, and other organizations have all cut swaths of their reporting staff.

The Huffington Post shrank over 70% since late 2021.

Buzzfeed News died early last year.

Jezebel’s plug got pulled then partly reinserted in a firesale acquisition.

Gawker died, was briefly resurrected, then died again.

FiveThirtyEight, Grid News, and Fusion are all on the chopping table.

The articles threw dozens of possible explanations for the cratering news business like an armful of blame-dodging confetti — and every explanation pointed the accusatory finger of blame every way but inward. It’s Twitter’s fault! It’s because Trump called the media the enemies of the people! It’s because stupid modern readers have such short attention spans! It’s NOT OUR FAULT!

Here. I’ll show you just one chart that completely explains the pathetic state of the traditional news business. Nobody trusts them:

Just look at that post-pandemic plunge among the only people left who trusted the media. When the pandemic started, Republicans were already scraping the bottom of the journalistic trust barrel. But because of their grotesque pandemic performance, the Media even lost support from democrats and independents.

Since democrats don’t listen to him anyway, media can’t blame this on Trump.

CNN’s article quoted “media expert” Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University. Rosen admitted that media has a trust problem, but he still wants to blame that loss of trust on cunning conservatives. “To say that trust in the news media has declined is correct, but too vague,” Rosen admitted. “The reality is that destroying confidence in the practice and products of journalism is a potent and successful political strategy,” he suggested.

What a dumb thing to say. If the media were fair and even-handed, it wouldn’t help anybody to destroy confidence in the practice and products of journalism. Associate professor Rosen fails to understand that trust is something that must be earned. Trust isn’t handed out like lollipops at a drag show.

Trust can be lost, too. Not only did media not earn any trust during the pandemic, it’s chucking off what little trust it had left faster than Nancy Pelosi selling stock in Taiwanese semiconductors. For instance, just now Big Media is busily helping Big Pharma bury all the bodies.

At the same time media platforms have been frantically flushing their final trust down the toilet like a drug addict getting ready for police to break down the door, they have also been shedding their best products as fast as they can. Take, for example, Fox News’ firing of Tucker Carlson, now thriving in his new Twitter format. His most recent video, where the popular news host interviewed Texas Governor Greg Abbott about the border crisis, has quickly garnered 4.2 million views, which is millions more than he’d get on Fox:

It’s better than that, because Corporate Media has garnered no views, since they aren’t even covering the story, much less reporting anything Governor Abbott said, despite consumers obviously wanting to know about that. As of this morning, none of the “big three” papers have run anything about the border, except one lonely article way down The Washington Post’s home page headlined, “Biden willing to shut southern border to help secure funding for Ukraine.”

Media’s current collapse should be viewed as a fully-earned, self-inflicted injury, a flock of pandemic chickens finally coming home to roost. They will try to blame it on politics and evolving technologies, but the truth is it’s a sordid tale about squandered trust. And the moral of the tale is as old as the story about the Boy Who Cried Wolf.