#rebecca jarvis

[hannahwatcheshorror]

THE RESORT - SUNK COST FALLACY

5:05

I have tried twice to watch this movie and twice I got five minutes in before I couldn’t take the cheese factor anymore. I think this is a movie for people who like bad movies but I don’t like bad movies. 

(1)

First of all, why does the security guard say he is going to have a heart attack “again?” Does this man have a history of heart problems? This little slip was sign number one that the script hadn’t had that nice little once over because I found myself saying out loud, “again?” Second, they pack so much information into the next scene it’s comical and overwhelming as all get out. Seriously, a character walks into her own home, doesn’t see all her friends waiting in the dim light (even though they have candles lit), turns on the lights, they yell surprise, she is surprised (idiot) and says some long exposition line about how they already bought her a trip to Hawaii for her birthday so she couldn’t believe they were doing something else for her birthday. They remark about how much packing they have to do (for the birthday trip to Hawaii) then have the birthday girl blow out her candles (on her birthday). If anyone thought of that Tyler the Creator gif, yes. She blows out the super bright candles and then flashes to a hospital where the third and final straw of the very professional investigator coming in to talk to her and he was just so unserious with his hands on his hips so I just said, “nope,” and turned it off.

[cinematicmasterpiece]

fish tank (2009)

[organdon3r]

hi!  I am desperately in need for help. I need my insulin to bring my blood sugar back down. It’s $300 That’s all I need. I’m not asking for a windfall, just a little help, please.

Be blessed 💓🙏🙏💓

            DONATE AND SHARE.

OFC OFC!!❤️❤️

I'm so sorry atm my financial situation is horrific😭 BUT ILL SHARE ACROSS ALLL MY FANDOMS ND TAGS🫶🫶

:) I hope from the bottom of my heart that everything gets so much better for you

-

HEY CHAT!! POLL TIME BECAUSE PEOPLE LOOVE THESE RIGHT? :D

[silly-audio]

Thinking about Rebecca being Peggy's secretary and sometimes she watches Tony and Sharon when Jarvis is on vacation or busy with Peggy She gets to be what the Howlies were to her and oughh

[highlifeboat]

Resident Evil Transgender Support Group, but it's just Mia, Ethan, Clancy, Leon, Luis, Ashley, Rebecca, Bela, Billy, and Barry all sitting around playing various card games and drinking for like 6 hours.

[cinemuki]

Fish Tank (2009) - dir. Andrea Arnold

[gammacousin]

Howard Stark: “It’s like, ‘Cup of Tea’ ‘Kind of you’ say ‘Cup of tea’…”

Rebecca Banner: “Cup-ah tea.”

Howard Stark: *groaning* “Ohhh no.”

Edwin Jarvis: *napping under a newspaper* “Give it a rest, California. You do not sound, any better.”

[wanderingandfound]

So on one hand rereading all this MCU fic does make me wanna finish, edit, and publish the fic I had so much inspiration for back in, oh, summer of 2016. On the other hand, it turns out I just completely forgot about some characters from AoS, which is fine because I don't need them in my fic, but like this is just reminding me of how I don't really wanna rewatch that show.

[mariacallous]

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions ��have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”

These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.

They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.

In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.

In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)

Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”

While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs”, but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.

Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”

Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.

It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.

Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.

A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

[victusinveritas]

From Rebecca Solnit:

Yes, they want to steal your healthcare and rights and the rest for good, and they stole a lot of people's healthcare for the day. Also the White House press secretary seems to be lying about that. Don't buy the lies. Striking to see redder as well as bluer-state politicians in these tweets. And yeah, the attack is on hold BECAUSE of the huge pushback, but of course they're pretending they never intended this huge overreach.

It gets worse below the cut...

Martin Heinrich

@SenatorHeinrich

·

4h

Now Trump is blocking New Mexico's access to the Medicaid portal!

This won't just hurt the 714,422 New Mexicans on Medicaid. It threatens to shutdown our entire health care system.

I'm calling on Trump to undo this chaos IMMEDIATELY.

Rep. Nadler

@RepJerryNadler

·

1h

Make no mistake, this happened because Donald Trump ordered it to happen.

Many states still face Medicaid portal outages, and his reckless order continues to freeze critical services like food aid, cancer research, and FEMA relief—lifelines for Americans in every zip code.

Senator Beth Liston

@Liston4Ohio

·

1h

The Medicaid payment portal is currently frozen. Our healthcare system relies on these funds for over 3.5 million people. Hospitals, doctors, dentists - all providers are not getting paid. Ohio loses ~$73,000/minute if the federal government does not release the payments they owe

Rep. Terri A. Sewell

@RepTerriSewell

·

2h

My office has received reports that Alabama’s Medicaid portal is shut down.

More than 1 million Alabamians rely on Medicaid along with the providers, hospitals, & clinics that serve them.

The Trump Administration needs to restore it NOW!

Aaron Fritschner

@Fritschner

·

1h

Virginia civil servants are being placed on leave or fired, businesses and non-profits that rely on grants are preparing to close or lay off workers, the Medicaid portal is down, hospital funding is frozen, and all the Governor can muster is this blame-shifting twaddle? PATHETIC

Quote

Brandon Jarvis

@Jaaavis

·

2h

Youngkin’s statement on pause of federal grants

Image

Senator Chris Coons

@ChrisCoons

·

1h

Delaware's Medicaid payment portal was turned off, just like dozens of other states.⁣

⁣

One in five Delawareans and nearly 80 million Americans are on Medicaid.⁣

⁣

I don't know if this is cruelty or incompetence. I do know Trump is playing with people’s lives.

[contemplatingoutlander]

Given what recently happened with the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times preventing their editorial boards from endorsing Harris for president, it seems this excellent column by The Guardian's Rebecca Solnit is quite appropriate. Here are some excerpts:

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer. Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”. Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.” Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”

[See more excerpts under the cut.]

[...] They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it. In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight. [...] Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?” [...] It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary. [...] A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

[robocatfan]

An angry summary of Speak the Ocean by Rebecca Enzor -Part 1

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

(well more of a combination of a summary, a rant, a critique/review and nitpicking, but you get the idea)

Because in my eternal search for more books about dangerous mermaids, I found this little book with such an interesting premise (it’s essentially mermaids in Seaworld) that i just had to read it. And since those sorts of stories don’t tend to be pretty good, I had high hopes for this story.

However, not only did it waste such a cool concept, but it disappointed and pissed me off so much that I decided “you know what? If I had to contend with this thing, I will bring everyone else down with me!”

… and also to spare anyone who doesn’t want to read it, but it’s curious about it , from suffering the same (not good!) brain rot I have thanks to this.

I’ll be doing this two or three chapters at a time because I noticed that my summaries… ended up a bit long.

Anyway. Lets begin.

Preface 1

The book starts by showing us an in-universe training manual for employees about interacting with the mer, as well as what to do if someone falls into the tank with them.

It tells us that unless they are doing a certain task (like using an electroshocker- yes, that’s its name), personnel must remain at least 3 feet from the water - which contradicts what we see a few chapters later, but we’ll get to that eventually - and if they need to work near the water, 4 personnel must be present and the water must be cooled and spiked with sedatives if necessary.

It follows up by saying that if someone falls into the tank with a mer inside, the person closest to the electroshocker ™ should place it in the water, and if the mer doesn’t react to it, they should shock them… while the person is still in the water. Yeah sure, that will help a lot with keeping them alive!

Meanwhile two people should use a net to separate the mer from the person while a third (the one with the shocker or the one in the water? Idk) keeps an eye on them. If they can’t trap the mer however, they are allowed to use the electroshocker ™ liberally- while again, the person they are trying to save is still in the water!

I get it’s a quick life or death situation, but come on! Tranquilizer guns and darts exist for a reason!

Chapter 1- Finn

This chapter introduces us to Finnegan Jarvis aka Finn, our human protagonist and a worker in Oceanica, the only mermaid marine park in the world. Also as you will see from this point forward… I hate his absolute, bigass di-

The story starts with Finn’s narration telling us that contrary to what Corporate - aka Delmara/ Aunt D, the owner of the place - tells the public, the mer they work with are very dangerous. which is proven by the fact that one of them killed Craig, one of the trainers, just the night prior. Which is why they are now preparing to euthanize it.

His friend Serge notices he’s nervous about it and tries to reassure him by telling him that Bismuth the mer (they name them after the elements of the periodic table) and his companions, the twins Fluorine and Chlorine, were already chilled. It doesn’t help much.

In his narration he says that six years have passed since humans have discovered merfolk, and in four of those years he’s been forced to kill six mers after they killed an equal number of his companions. Though in spite of his nervousness and current sadness for Craig, the fact that he can bring up the death of people he knew about so casually means that he’s pretty desensitized to it.

They both go to the room where their practice tank is stored and meet with two of their coworkers Madison and Natalie (Maddy is the only important one here, trust me). And since the mers have already been placed there, they get to work.

Btw all that i have summarized so far takes place within 8 paragraphs (one of which is just for one of the character´s dialogue), none of which give us a clear idea of how the characters or most of their surroundings look like.

And as expected, this chapter also shows us the mer for the first time, with barely, if any build up to their first appearance. And much like the humans, there are no noteworthy descriptions that could help us visualize how they look like save for specific details that apply to just one individual, with those being Bismuth’s dark green scales and the twins’ icy blue eyes and hair.

Speaking of the twins, apparently they are part of Oceanica’s second most famous show, and are only here to watch their companion die so they’ll be discouraged from misbehaving like he did. According to Finn that strategy worked on previous mers… although sometimes it just backfires completely.

As they prepare the net and electroshocker ™ (the process being described in just one paragraph btw), Finn says that euthanizing a mer isn’t easy since they are huge, they are many regulations with dealing with them and, according to him, they are the perfect predator… although there are no scenes in the story to support that idea, nor at the very least shows us why he has come to such conclusion.

Anyway, in the span of just four paragraphs that look more like a draft listing actions rather than a proper final scene, Serge electrocutes the trio, allowing the other three to trap Bismuth in a net and lift him from the water while his tank companions swim around and do nothing to help him.

And after snapping at Maddy for not moving with him by reminding her to pay attention or she’ll end up like her recently deceased companion — Finn injects Bismuth with a liquid that kills him instantly, which also causes him to dissolve into foam.

However, as he’s dissolving faster than my initial hopes for this book, one of the lines holding the nets unravels, and in the chaos Finn slips in a puddle of the mer’s remains , hits his knee, and falls into the tank with the twins. Like he deserves.

He tries to flee, but the mers hold him down with their claws. But instead of immediately going for that soft, vulnerable throat, Chlorine, this supposed “perfect predator”, just pierces his shoulders, giving Finn the opportunity to reach for her gills and fucking rip them off. And before her sister can retaliate, Serge electrocutes them both.

Unsurprisingly, this has consequences.

Finn ends up comatose for two days, and even though his mother is worried sick - since she has lost her husband who disappeared while in a trip to find the merfolk, and is justifyingly worried that her son also works with them - and the doctors told him to not swim while he still had the stitches from his shoulder wound, this guy insists on going out for a swim in a reef in spite of Serge’s protests.

Oh and he also says that “he can’t let his sister make fun of him for getting his ass kicked by girls.”

… oh and those living family members he has have almost no importance in the story. They are just. There.

As they are traveling in the fishing boat that used to belong to his dad, Finn asks Serge what became of the twins. And he casually, very casually, reveals that the stars of their second most popular show are now fucking dead.

There’s no talk about how the public is gonna react to this, nor how this very huge loss will affect their finances, not even if they held a funeral for their recently deceased coworker. Just that they gotta pull more mers out of the ocean to replace the twins and they’ll need a new trainer for them. Which Finn, in spite of his current medical orders, plans to become.

Though he does bristle at the memory of killing Chlorine… And also says that this isn’t the worst way in which he has killed a mer.

…WHAT-

Oh and also it’s revealed to us that Delmara used to be his father’s teaching assistant, and Finn has been working for her since he was fifteen years old after helping her document the existence of the first mer they’d found.

On their way, the pair come across a beach that has been vacated due to a recent mer attack the night prior. The reasons as to why it happened, nor the attack itself are ever explained or brought up again. Not even in the chapters with the mer pov, where we see where their kind - which should include the attacker - lives.

Finally they arrive on the reef, and as he swims through it, Finn muses that if the stories about people becoming mer were true, he’d stay in the water forever. But as it stands, working with them is the closest he’ll ever be to being a part of the ocean … even though he recently killed and constantly tortures the same creatures he says he wants to become.

[the-bi-library]

Happy pride month!! Here are bisexual books out in June! 🩷💜💙 Books listed: Saints of Storm and Sorrow by Gabriella Buba The Fall of Elijah Gray (Moonlight Falls, #0.5) by Colette Rivera The Bound Worlds (The Devoured Worlds, #3) by Megan E. O'Keefe Pole Position by Rebecca J. Caffery Digging for Destiny (Dragon Circle, #2) by Jenna Jarvis The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron But How Are You, Really by Ella Dawson Shadows Dark and Deadly (Red Society Series Book 1) by Andrea Marie Johnson Hot Summer by Elle Everhart All Friends Are Necessary by Tomas Moniz Where Willows Weep by Luna Fiore Dandelion by Merlina Garance One Killer Problem by Justine Pucella Winans Napkins and Other Distractions (Teachers in Love, #3) by M.A. Wardell Bi-Partisan (District Love #1) by Dallas Smith Furious by Jamie Pacton and Becca Podos Blame It On The Stars by Elle Bennett Ballad for Jasmine Town by Molly Ringle Old Enough by Haley Jakobson (paperback edition) Accidentally Dominating the Vampire's Assistant by Cat Giraldo Running Close to the Wind by Alexandra Rowland Breaks Volume 2 (Breaks, #2) by Emma Vieceli and Malin Rydén

Only Fan Service by Cat Giraldo Something to be Proud Of by Anna Zoe Quirke

Heirs of Destruction (The Crownkiller Saga, #1) by T.N. Vitus London on My Mind by Clara Alves The Pecan Children by Quinn Connor A Divine Fury (Cesare Aldo, #4) by D.V. Bishop The Unrelenting Earth (Rages, #2) by Kritika H. Rao

[lgbtqreads]

I've been getting a lot of shit lately for mostly dating men, I'll spare you the comments but like. Wow. Anyway, any recs with a female main character, bisexual, m/f relationship? I'm partial to fantasy and sci-fi, not super into contemporary romance or anything too fluffy. Also weirded out by most of the nicknames that MMCs give FMCs in fantasy these days so none of that if it can be avoided?

I'll be honest that things like nicknames are details I absolutely do not retain so forgive me if I miss any of that, but try Melissa Blair's The Halfling Saga, Inkmistress by Audrey Coulthurst, the Shatter the Sky duology by Rebecca Kim Wells, The Lights of Prague by Nicole Jarvis, and Best Hex Ever by Nadia El-Fassi could be called fluffy - it's a paranormal romance - but her bisexuality is a pretty relevant element, so I did want to mention it. (Also, everyone giving you shit can suck it.)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”

These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.

They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.

In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.

In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)

Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”

While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs”, but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.

Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”

Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.

It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.

Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.

A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

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💖 Sapphic Books Coming Out June 2024

🩷 There's something especially sweet about a sapphic romance. Here are only a few of the amazing sapphic books hitting shelves in June 2024. Which ones are you adding to your ever-growing TBR?

💖 Which ones are you adding to your TBR?

Contemporary 💖 But How Are You, Really - Ella Dawson 💖 Hot Summer - Elle Everhart 💖 Pony Dakota - Nat Burns 💖 Wish You Weren't Here - Erin Baldwin 💖 Something to be Proud Of - Anna Zoe Quirke 💖 London on My Mind - Clara Alves, Nina Perrotta (translator) 💖 Please Stop Trying to Leave Me - Alana Saab 💖 Looking for a Sign - Susie Dumond 💖 Triple Sec - T.J. Alexander 💖 Pages from the Book of Broken Dreams - Kat Jackson 💖 Director's Cut - Carlyn Greenwald 💖 Furious - Jamie Pacton, Rebecca Podos 💖 Cicada Summer - Erica McKeen 💖 Tehrangeles - Porochista Khakpour 💖 Women - Chloe Caldwell 💖 Experienced - Kate Young 💖 Liddy-Jean Marketing Queen and the Matchmaking Scheme - Mari SanGiovanni

Paranormal/Horror 💖 The Pecan Children - Quinn Connor 💖 Private Rites - Julia Armfield 💖 The Deep Dark - Molly Knox Ostertag 💖 The Science of Ghosts - Lilah Sturges, El Garing (ill.), Alitha Martinez (contrib.) 💖 Wolfpitch - Balazs Lorinczi

Fantasy 💖 Mirrored Heavens - Rebecca Roanhorse 💖 The Fire Within Them - Matthew Ward 💖 Digging for Destiny - Jenna Jarvis 💖 Saints of Storm and Sorrow - Gabriella Buba 💖 Markless - C.G. Malburi 💖 Sleep Like Death - Kalynn Bayron 💖 The Afterlife of Mal Caldera - Nadi Reed Perez 💖 The Pale Queen - Ethan M. Aldridge 💖 The Unrelenting Earth - Kritika H. Rao 💖 Ballad for Jasmine Town - Molly Ringle 💖 Six of Sorrow - Amanda Linsmeier

Historical 💖 A Bluestocking's Guide to Decadence - Jess Everlee 💖 A Divine Fury - D.V. Bishop 💖 The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye - Briony Cameron 💖 Hall of Mirrors - John Copenhaver

Mystery/Thriller 💖 One Killer Problem - Justine Pucella Winans 💖 The Last Note of Warning - Katharine Schellman 💖 Shanghai Murder - Jessie Chandler 💖 And Then There Was One - Michele Castleman

Sci-Fi 💖 Lady Eve's Last Con - Rebecca Fraimow 💖 The Stars Too Fondly - Emily Hamilton 💖 Moonstorm - Yoon Ha Lee 💖 You're Safe Here - Leslie Stephens