The New Pravda:

No, you’re not imagining the media’s Pravda-ization

Andrea Widburg

Matt Taibbi is that rare breed – an honest leftist journalist. And make no mistake about his leftism, for this is a man who thinks Noam Chomsky is a great thinker. Despite that serious ideological confusion on his part, Taibbi understands something profoundly important in American politics; namely, that our media has become completely corrupt, and more closely represents the media in Soviet Russia than the media in a free country with a First Amendment. If you haven’t yet, you must read his article, “The Sovietization of the American Press.”

Taibbi, who has collected examples of Soviet newspapers over the years so he knows whereof he speaks, says that, in 2021, there is nothing to distinguish the American media from the Soviet press. The important point he makes about the Soviet media is that its world was divided into heroes and enemies. The governing Communist Party was heroic and anything or anybody that challenged it was part of a vast, evil conspiracy aimed at destroying this heroic party.

After giving examples of the fatuous superlatives that the Soviet media heaped on communist politicians and their actions, Taibbi points out that there is little difference between those words and what we see in today’s reporting now that Biden is in office:

Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:

For Taibbi, the apex of the hagiography that is every major newspaper article today is the Washington Post’s recent claim that comedians are finding it impossible to joke about Biden. You may recall, from the Obama era that the media claimed that it was impossible to parity Obama because he was simply too cool. According to Richard Zoglin, Biden cannot be parodied, not because he is too cool, but because he is too normal. His voice, insists Zoglin, is “devoid of obvious quirks,” and his manner too “muted and self-effacing” to give comics anything to work with. Taibbi’s response to these risible statements is the following video:

As another example of the media's voluntary decision to act as a Soviet-era apparatchik, Taibbi shows the different coverage accorded Trump and Biden when it comes to continuing to deal with Saudi Arabia despite its involvement in Jamal Khashoggi’s death. Trump and Biden opted for the same policy, which is continuing to deal with Saudi Arabia for geopolitical reasons. But while Trump was cast as a monster, Biden is praised as a pragmatic realist.

Taibbi explains the technique that the American media use to create the illusion that they are reporting something rather than reciting the party line and pushing a credulous public in a certain political direction:

More...