Fucking hell, this enrages me with the whole system of law enforcement:
A former sheriff’s deputy admits to murdering his wife and another woman in 1979. Reading between the lines, it seems pretty clear that the cops knew it (or at least heavily suspected it) at the time, but did nothing to investigate him. They certainly had all the pieces by '86, and did nothing with them. And he was, unsurprisingly, also a rapist who admitted to the murder and used it to silence his victim(s). Who knows how many other victims he had in his stints in various departments before he left law enforcement.
I often wonder how many unsolved murders were committed by cops. I suspect the number is staggering. Hell, I wonder how many solved murders were committed by police officers who then framed someone, either doing so themselves or relying on their colleagues to do so as unwitting abettors.
What I’m seeing over and over again from left wing content creators is the need for a left wing, reality based media ecosystem to battle the right wing, imagination based media ecosystem.
Wasn’t that tried once upon a time? AirAmerica or some such? I like to think that we in the “Fact Based Community” are less interested in partisan bullshittery like what the various fascist outlets peddle. There is also less of a “forced uniformity” on our side, and lots of us disagree vehemently with others of us on some topics. I suspect it’s easier to make that work when you are making the world up out of whole cloth rather than trying to deal with it as it is.
Maybe the time wasn’t right? I watched the interview Politics Girl did with Heather Cox Richardson (which someone posted on the Heather Cox Richardson thread), and Richardson was pointing out a lot of parallels with the end of the Gilded Age, when the press was being strangled by the ultra wealthy and there was a huge gap between them and the rest of the population. At that time, organically, new, local newspapers sprang up, and new technologies were becoming available, like radio and the telephone. She thinks the time is ripe for the same thing to happen now.
I wonder if the current iteration of this might be the interwebs? Interesting thought that we might be on the cutting edge of this new reality. A lot tougher, but by no means impossible, for the megarich to snuff out the various web discussions as they have the mass media.
Indeed, and it has occurred to me more often lately that some podcasts and YouTube channels and so on have larger audiences than some of the “famous” mainstream media figures, like Maddow, or Maher, or Morning Joe. Despite drastically dwindling audiences, corporate media “news” purveyors and commenters retain some residual legitimacy, but far less so for young people.
I’ve been listening to Politics Girl, David Pakman, Occupy Democrats, the Bulwark (although they’re conservative?), Brian Tyler Cohen,etc. and I hope their audiences are growing. There’s still a place for the Maddows and the traditional media, although I can see Maddow transitioning to podcasts. She does deep dives and very incisive analysis, which is very valuable.
I just heard about Counterpoints, which has two established journalists, one right and one left, discussing various issues. I’m intrigued, because Ryan Grim is the leftist and he used to do good work at The Intercept, and because (as he pointed out in a Brian Lehrer episode about Counterpoints), we on the left can end up caricaturing the right if we only hear about them in our silos.
