The press used to have an essential place in society from the invention of the printing press to the early 1900s, at which point it was immediately used, globally, as the main vehicle of totalitarianism. The "total" in totalitarianism comes almost entirely from the fact that the party in power controlled everything, including the newspapers. This was the first big test of the press since their invention, and they buckled, immediately. Since they were facing a two-prong attack from the people in government and the people supporting government, they couldn't maintain their editorial freedom and totalitarian government was able to run mass propaganda to reinforce their message.
In this way, the current fetishization of "editorial freedom" was a direct result of the press' fall to totalitarian government. One time, when the government held a lot of power but gave good faith allowances to the press to continue their job of disseminating information, the press could unironically be called a new democratic institution that could hold government accountable, but now they couldn't be trusted unless they built themselves away from the government, because it was proven at the beginning of the century by Hitler and Mussolini that the government and popular opinion was in reality above the press, and it was purely social convention that it was viewed as this independent body with more power than the people.
This is why objectivity became such an important thing in the press, so that governments wouldn't view them as opponents. Breaking this social contract between the press and the government is why we're in this situation right now. The press should not have endorsed candidates, they should not have paid into candidate donation pools, they should've maintained their journalistic values strongly, they should've stayed away from any and all political campaigns with a thousand foot pole.
People talk as if it's just "rags" like the daily beast when CNN literally stages protests, lies on national television about reading leaks being illegal unless curated by CNN, talks about how bad Doxxing is and how the Alt Right is responsible for a uniquely horrifying new age crime one day and "We reserve the right to publish this man's address at any time" the next. Because they're
big and important and essential to democracy.
It's a big lie. The press is outdated. Today's press is the internet, a near instant communications platform that can connect people from all across the world and is searchable by multiple webcrawlers for any information you want. The press fucking came into existence from the ease of communication provided by printing pamphlets. There was nothing but readers holding the press accountable then, there are nothing but readers holding the internet accountable now.
Their emphasis on their unique ability to locate sources is them trying to maintain relevance by stating that the quality of their news is better. Except it's not. Major news comes from literally three sources, Reuters, AP and Al Jazeera. After this there are press releases, which are printed verbatim if the company agrees politically, or misrepresented and attacked if the company doesn't. Everything else they do is suspect and ridiculously, obviously biased. Like the twenty billion articles using as a source "people familiar with X's thinking", a meaningless phrase that can mean anything from the person themselves to an industry analyst entirely unconnected to X.
They intentionally use the spotlight effect to great advantage to try and socially manipulate people to their political ends, and they do it shamelessly. For instance, they currently pervert the idea of responsibility I mentioned in the previous post to say they don't criticize "vulnerable groups" as a responsible way to keep harm from coming to them, while conservative events get priced out of attendance, interrupted by shouting children and physically threatened as well as rioted against and kept hostage, while never ever getting the "vulnerable group" treatment, despite gleeful editorials about how conservatives are becoming a minority and that's a good thing.
The idea that Trump is some unique danger to the press is part of that social manipulation, and it's blatant. When the motivations of his entire body of threats towards the press can be cut down by occam's razor to his thin-skinnedness (also seen in his endorsement of stronger libel and slander laws) and his tendency to exaggerate, it's irresponsible as fuck to talk about Mussolini and Hitler and how much of a uniquely Nazi-esque threat he is.
The first amendment might protect the press, but doing it for themselves ("""""technically""""". Consider how many commentators used to be government and get back to me on that technically) doesn't make even a slight bit of difference from doing it for a government. The press today is headless fascism. It never stopped being totalitarian social control, it just got its head chopped off.
As for "singing the praises of Milo", ha. He's a troll and a terrible journalist with an unforgivably provocative style. He didn't publish shit about shooting journalists, though, which is what he's accused of. Have I
stepped on the jesus tile enough yet or do you need anything more?