Monday musings: The mainstream media can't find their way from their heads to their asses with their hands.

A rant on the incompetence, misplaced values, and general failings of the mainstream media.

My view of the mainstream media landscape

I came home this morning from my daily run into town and turned on the TV while I fixed lunch. This has become a less rewarding exercise over the years because, despite a thousand channels coming into our home, perhaps a half-dozen of them at any given time have anything worth paying much attention to. The news has generally slid to the bottom of that austere list.

When I turned on the news today, there were ubiquitous reports across several networks that King Charles III of England had received an unspecified cancer diagnosis. This was the lede on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC, all of whom spent the better portion of each hourly segment discussing it. This is also a headline on most major newspaper’s websites.

Now, cancer is terrible, and my sympathies go to anyone who either has it or is close to someone who does. Honest and no lie. But King Charles, a relic who is not only wealthy far beyond either logic or reason but has free access to health care that most of us can only dream of, is going to have to get in the back of the line of people for whom I feel sympathy.

Cancer, unfortunately, is far from uncommon. That makes me wonder how many relatives of American service personnel who are currently dying in the Middle East while serving their country also have a cancer diagnosis to add to the burden of losing their loved ones.

I wonder how many of those who have lost family members to the fentanyl crisis, due in part to the federal government’s failure to secure our southern border, also have cancer to add to their grief. I wonder how many of these folks might still have their family members alive and the luxury of worrying only about cancer if Congress, the courts, and the White House were doing their jobs.

I wonder how many California residents, who are currently being battered by days of violent weather, have cancer to worry about in addition to losing their homes. I wonder how many Americans whose lives were upended by COVID might now have advanced cancer that went undetected due to lockdowns. That would sure make an interesting story.

I wonder how many Americans whose cities are being overrun with illegal immigrants are more interested in the text of the controversial Sinema, Murphy, and Lankford immigration bill, the full text of which was just released today, than King Charles III. I wonder how many are concerned that markets dropped today after an announcement by the Fed concerning interest rates, a concomitant effect of disastrous Bidenomics.

I wonder how many Americans are concerned that their tax dollars are going to support a U.N. agency, the UNRWA, that employed some of the terrorists who were responsible for the October 6th attacks on Israel.

I wonder how many Americans are more concerned by the daily revelations of attempts by our own government to usurp the First Amendment—a document crafted after our revolution—in order to suppress narratives in the name of “combatting disinformation” than they are by the illness of a descendent of the very King that we fought against for the right to craft our own laws.

I can go on, but you get the point. The world is chock full of things that merit serious attention in the press. The health of King Charles III is not, in my opinion, anywhere chief among them. At least not to the tune of hours of major coverage.

Therein lies my beef with the mainstream media: CNN, MSNBC, Fox, NPR, CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, et al. My complaint has never been as much that the MSM are biased one way or the other (though most indeed are); it’s that they just aren’t particularly good at their jobs. The media has always generally prioritized things that attracted eyeballs, decades before clickbait became a thing. It’s smarmy over substance every time. Every major newspaper in this country has, for a century, run daily horoscopes. Where was the journalistic value in that?

Worse, the media has long assumed that none of us are smart enough to figure things out without them not just putting the news out there but also telling us what to think about it. They choose inane, yet scintillating, topics upon which to focus and then belabor that erratum with useless, at best, and biased, at worst, analysis. They choose inane because a degree in journalism doesn’t help much in explaining a moon shot, and scintillating because it makes the most money.

Having said all of this, I’m not overjoyed that outlets like the Los Angeles Times are currently under duress. As much as I may take some temporary delight in watching woke 20-somethings who craft groundbreaking stories like How white drivers spew pollution breathed by people of color, fidget in unemployment lines, a shrinking press isn’t good for the country. Democracy depends on a vibrant 4th estate to push back against the power of the state.

But that’s not what we have. Instead, we have significant elements of the media cooperating with the government to suppress speech. We have newsrooms that think that the health of a pointless foreign monarch is more newsworthy than the health of Americans serving in war zones or living in disaster zones. We have an entire field crucial to democracy filled to the brim with people who can’t seem to find their way from their heads to their asses with their hands.

And that’s a problem. A newsworthy one at that.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.