A Short Film

Minnows

The ocean brings them together, and soon the ocean will take them away.

Today's Beau

Republicans are unwilling to ease off their strangle hold on the Daddy State fantasy that all you have to do is say something to make it real.

So it's really not weird to hear them say, "the FBI is corrupt and nobody should put any stock in anything they say", and then turn around and tell us, "The FBI has a tape that can't possibly be anything but true" - because - you know - it's the FBI.

Daddy State Awareness

THE BASICS:

• The Daddy State lies as a means of demonstrating power.
• The lies have practically nothing to do with the subject of the lies.
• Lying about everything is a way to condition us - to make us accept the premise that they can do anything they want.

The goal is to dictate reality to us.

Stop wondering why the Republicans go on taking Rudy Giuliani's word for anything. It's not Rudy they're relying on - it's the simple concept that all you have to do is repeat the lie until it becomes a cultural constant.

"When legend becomes truth, print the legend."

Trump tried to pull that shit at least three times.

1. The Zelenskyy call: "I need you to do us a favor though." He wasn't looking for the Ukrainians to start an actual investigation. All he wanted was the headline. ie: "Ukraine To Investigate Biden"
2. The call to DOJ: "Just say you're investigating, and let my Republicans in congress do the rest."
3. The Georgia call: "...find me 11,780 votes." Again, he wasn't asking them to dig up the actual ballots. He just wanted to create the suspicion that the Georgia results were in question.

Every time, he just wants the appearance of impropriety. He pumps up the institutions' public image of rock-solid trustworthiness when he wants to cast shadows on his opponents &/or when he needs them to whitewash whatever shitty thing he's done. And when those institutions don't cooperate, suddenly they're corrupt and deep state and the worst thing ever. 

Daddy State Awareness Guide

7.   The law is my sword, but not your shield.

7a. The law is my shield, but not your sword.

Beau Of The Fifth Column

Mr Cop-Out Cops Out

There is disingenuous, and there is naiveté, and there is willful ignorance, and there is purposefully nefarious.

Put all that together, and then launch it into full-blown, Daddy-State-gaslighting, cynically-manipulative, who-me? fantasyland, and you're almost to where you can just barely start to make out the blurry outline of David Brooks, way off in the distance.

This jackass has played a significant role in dismissing, and apologizing for, and normalizing, and promoting exactly the kind of political atmosphere necessary to produce and then exalt a dick like Donald Trump.

Give it a fuckin' rest, Dave.

I Won’t Let Donald Trump Invade My Brain

And yet I’ve found that Donald Trump has confounded me at every turn. I’ve found that I’m not cynical enough to correctly anticipate what he is capable of.

I have consistently underestimated his depravity. I was shocked at how thuggishly Trump behaved in that first debate with Joe Biden in 2020. As the Jan. 6 committee hearings progressed, I was stunned to find out just how aggressively Trump had worked to overthrow the election. And then, just last week, in reading his federal indictment, I was once again taken aback to learn how flagrantly he had breached national security.

And yet I can’t quite feel ashamed of my perpetual naïveté toward Donald Trump. I don’t want to be the kind of person who can easily enter the head of an amoral narcissist.

I’d rather not let him infect my brain. I’d rather not let that guy alter my views of the world. If occasional naïveté is the price for mental independence from Trump, I’m willing to pay it.

I’ve been thinking about all this while bracing for the 17 months of campaigning that apparently lie ahead, with Trump probably once again the central focus of the nation’s consciousness. I’m thinking about how we will once again be forced to defend our inner sanctums as he seeks, on a minute-by-minute basis, to take up residence in our brains.

I cling to a worldview that is easy to ridicule. I hold the belief that most people, while flawed, seek to be good. I hold the belief that our institutions, while fraying, are basically legitimate and deserve our respect. I hold the belief that character matters, and that good people ultimately prosper and unethical people are ultimately undone.

I don’t think this worldview is born of childish innocence. It comes out of my direct experience with life, and after thousands of interviews, covering real-life politicians like Barack Obama, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Donald Trump, by his mere presence, is an assault on this worldview. Trump is a tyrant. As Aristotle observed all those many years ago, tyranny is all about arbitrariness. When a tyrant has power, there is no rule of law, there is no governing order. There is only the whim of the tyrant. There is only his inordinate desire to have more than his fair share of everything.

Under political tyranny external laws become arbitrary. Even when Trump doesn’t wield state power, when he is merely campaigning, Trump wields cultural power. Under cultural tyranny internal values become arbitrary too — based on his whims and lusts of the moment.

The categories we use to evaluate the world lose their meaning — cruelty and kindness, integrity and corruption, honesty and dishonesty, generosity and selfishness. High-minded values begin to seem credulous and absurd, irrelevant to the situation at hand. Trump’s mere presence spreads his counter-gospel: People are basically selfish; raw power runs the world. All that matters is winning and losing. Under his influence, subtly and insidiously, people develop more nihilistic mind-sets.

Trump has already corroded the Republican Party in just this way. Let me focus on one value that Trump has already dissolved: the idea that there should be some connection between the beliefs you have in your head and the words that come out of your mouth. If you say something you don’t believe, you should at least have a twinge of guilt about your hypocrisy.

I used to at least hear Republicans express guilt privately when they publicly supported a guy they held in contempt. That guilt seems to have gone away. Even the contempt has gone away. Many Republicans have switched off the moral faculty, having apparently concluded that personal morality doesn’t matter.

Trump’s corrosive influence spreads far beyond his party. Any stable social order depends on a sense of legitimacy. This is the belief and faith that the people who have been given authority have a right to govern. They wield power for the common good.

Trump assaults this value too. Prosecutors are not serving the rule of law, he insists, but are Joe Biden’s political pawns. Civil servants are nothing but “deep state” operatives to take Trump down. This cynical attitude has become pervasive in our society. Proper skepticism toward our institutions has turned into endemic distrust, a jaundiced cynicism that says: I’m onto the game; it’s corruption all the way down.

Over the coming months, we face not merely a political contest, but a battle between those of us who believe in ideals, even though it can make us seem naïve at times, and those who argue that life is a remorseless struggle for selfish gain. Their victory would be a step toward cultural barbarism.

who coulda knowed?

Prick Up Your Ears

When even the Press Poodles notice something - enough to actually say something about it - and to say straight out that the behavior sucks and needs to stop - maybe we're starting to get somewhere.

Of, course there's the usual Both Sides razor blade in this apple, and that pisses me off, but at least WaPo subtly points out the differences in the way each member is using the power to block.

Manchin is being Manchin - a self-dealing prick, and coin-operated shill for the Dirty Fuels Cartel.

And Bernie is holding certain nominees in order to get a commitment from Biden to put up a real plan to reduce medication prices.

So on one side we've got Senators holding things up for reasons other than partisan politics.

But the Republicans are doing it in order to impose minority rule - perfectly in keeping with their fucked up ideas about using government to exact political vengeance (ie: "weaponizing government") - so they can suck up to Trump and his MAGA rubes.

Opinion

Senators have become hostage-takers. It should stop.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) announced during former president Donald Trump’s arraignment in federal court on Tuesday that he will use what are known as “procedural holds” to stop the confirmation of Justice Department nominees. “We have to grind this department to a halt until Merrick Garland promises to … stop going after his political opponents,” he said in a video posted to Twitter. To decry what he wrongly claims is the politicization of law enforcement, Mr. Vance is, well, politicizing law enforcement.

Mr. Vance is not the only senator taking hostages. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) is blocking more than 200 military promotions, typically approved by unanimous consent, in a gambit to stop the Pentagon from reimbursing service members who need to travel out of state for abortions. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said Monday that he’ll block President Biden’s pick to lead the National Institutes of Health, as well as any other health nominee, until the White House releases a comprehensive plan to cut prescription drug prices. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, announced blanket opposition last month to every nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency until the Biden administration rescinds proposed power plant regulations.

In taking an unprincipled stand on behalf of a criminal defendant, Mr. Vance appears to be acknowledging that a political debt has come due. He owes his Senate election to Mr. Trump’s endorsement last year.

His goal, he claims, is to “limit the number of people that [Attorney General] Merrick Garland has access to.” In practice, Mr. Vance’s announcement means Rosie Hidalgo will not get confirmed anytime soon to be director of the DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women. The Senate Judiciary Committee already advanced her nomination, and she’s awaiting a floor vote. Mr. Vance says he will not put holds on nominees to the U.S. Marshals Service, but his procedural ploy also jeopardizes the confirmations of U.S. attorney nominees for Mississippi and the Southern District of California.

Most relevant for Mr. Vance’s constituents, his announcement means Cleveland is unlikely to get a U.S. attorney anytime soon. Last week, Mr. Biden nominated veteran prosecutor Becky Lutzko to oversee the Northern District of Ohio, which is responsible for combating federal crime in 40 Ohio counties that are home to nearly 6 million residents. The office has already suffered the longest stretch without a Senate-confirmed leader in its 166-year history. Ms. Lutzko has worked as a career prosecutor since 2005 and oversees the office’s appellate division. Depriving the staff of permanent leadership disadvantages the community and undermines public safety while having no impact on the probe into the former president.

Hey, WaPo - maybe you could connect a coupla more dots here by pointing up how Republicans love to bitch about "rampant crime" while blocking the appointment of federal crime fighters. Just a thought, fellas.

Mr. Garland has gone out of his way to stay above the political fray and to restore the independence of his department. He appointed Jack Smith as special counsel so he could keep the case at arm’s length. Mr. Smith charged Mr. Trump with 37 serious crimes, including violations of the Espionage Act and conspiracy to obstruct justice. William P. Barr, who served as Mr. Trump’s attorney general, called the indictment “very damning” and said Sunday on Fox News: “If even half of it is true, then he’s toast.”

Holds cannot ultimately stop confirmations, but breaking through them requires significant and valuable Senate floor time — typically two or three days per nomination — that is better used, for instance, to confirm judges to lifetime appointments. While we might like to see Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) keep the Senate in session seven days a week and cancel summer recess to force the hands of obstinate members and push through the president’s nominees, that’s not realistic.

Senators in both parties need to respect a president’s right to make appointments. It’s unconscionable to treat the people charged with keeping us safe, whether career prosecutors or generals, as pawns in partisan fights. These senators should drop their holds.

Karma's A Thing

I prefer "what goes around comes around" because it's more appropriately random - effects that are not cause-dependent.

But when it lines up so nicely, and boomerangs almost perfectly - well - these clowns got slapped in the face with their own dick, and that's just good old-fashioned poetic justice.

Angry Christians storm Utah Capitol after parent uses school district’s book policy to remove Bible over ‘vulgarity and violence’

Over one hundred Bible-toting parents and children joined Republican lawmakers at the Utah state Capitol this Wednesday to protest a school district’s decision to remove the bible from elementary and middle school libraries, the Associated Press reported.

Earlier this month, a Utah school district committee designed to flag books that contain sexual content determined that the Bible would be allowed in high school libraries but not in elementary and middle school libraries within the district after someone objected to the book’s contents. When asked by KSL.com if the anonymous challenge to the Bible, which was originally brought in December of 2022, was a serious attempt to have the Bible removed or just an activist taking advantage of the district’s policy to make a statement, Davis School District director of communication Christopher Williams said district officials treat all challenges the same.

Williams said the district decided to only make the book available to high schoolers “based on age appropriateness due to vulgarity or violence.”

Protesters this Wednesday held signs reading, “The Bible is the original textbook” and “Remove porn, not the Bible,” with one parent saying that districts should definitely remove books with problematic material, but the Bible should be exempt.

“We love the Bible. We love God. And we need God in our nation,” Karlee Vincent said.

Last year, the Utah Legislature approved a bill that conservatives said would weed out pornographic material from K-12 libraries and classrooms. The Bible is known to contain graphic violence and sexual content, such as murder, incest, beheadings, sexual violence and genocide.

As the AP points out, the anonymous challenge to the Bible was likely a protest move by someone looking to expose the perceived hypocrisy of laws that police the content of school books.

“The Bible removal is the highest-profile effort to remove a book from a school in Utah since the Legislature passed a law requiring school districts to create new pathways for residents to challenge ‘sensitive materials’ and used a statute-based definition on pornography to define them,” the AP’s report stated.

Papa Got A Brand New Crush

TX-30

Jasmine Crockett is fire.

Scary Shit

I can applaud media for trying to provide a public service.

I get a badly ookie feeling when they tell me how to survive a road rage incident - like it's just another life hack tip - like how to get more for my grocery money.

You are nine kinds of fucked up, America.

What to Do in a Road-Rage Situation: Life-Saving Colorado State Patrol Tips

A road-rage incident on Interstate 25 in Denver shortly before 3 p.m. yesterday, June 13, left two people dead and 25-year-old Stephen Long in police custody.

According to the Denver Police Department, two men were riding in one vehicle and Long was driving another behind them when they got into some kind of altercation heading north on I-25 around Alameda Avenue. The vehicle in front stopped in the right lane of traffic by the Sixth Avenue viaduct, and the two men got out. Long stopped, too, though he did not get out of his car.

When the passenger of the other car approached, Long reportedly pulled out a gun and shot him. He then drove away, onto the Eighth Avenue ramp; the driver of the other car followed, and Long allegedly fired multiple shots. The driver fell out of his car, and was later found dead by the exit.

An off-duty Denver officer alerted the department about the incident, and Long was arrested soon after in northwest Denver. He's being held on two counts of first-degree murder. I-25 was closed for several hours while officers studied the scene; the investigation is ongoing.

In the wake of this latest road-rage incident, plenty of drivers in the metro area have been wondering how they'd react in a similar situation. And the Colorado State Patrol has some potentially life-saving advice.

A few years go, we caught up with Trooper Joshua Lewis, the award-wining public information officer for the CSP, to talk about what to do during a road-rage incident. "Unfortunately, there's no black-and-white rule that will work for every single scenario," he told us, before offering best practices that can be applied in a wide variety of circumstances.

"The biggest thing is to get yourself away from the danger," Lewis said. "That obviously doesn't mean speeding away at 100 miles per hour. It means slow down, separate yourself, take an exit, get yourself out of it, and then, whenever possible, contact the proper authorities."

That may include dialing 911.

"If it's an emergency situation, 911 is appropriate," he noted. "Hopefully, you'll have the location, a description of the vehicle, the license plate and maybe even a description of the party, if possible."

Lewis stressed, however, that "the first thing to do is get away from danger. Don't put yourself in more harm's way in order to get that information."

Aggressive behavior on the part of one driver can inspire otherwise calm folks to fly off the handle, too — and that's definitely the wrong thing to do, he said: "This is where we have to fight our own human nature. We have to realize that most people are not intentionally driving poorly or cutting you off or not using a turn signal as a deliberate, specific offense to another person. It may simply be a matter of distraction — that they weren't paying attention for a few seconds. Or maybe they are a bad driver. But ultimately, drivers should try not to take it as a personal offense. Take a few deep breaths and make sure you're being as safe as possible."

Of course, many drivers who've unintentionally made someone mad will want to make amends. But according to Lewis,attempting to do so can actually cause more trouble than it avoids.

"There's nothing that says you need to get out of your vehicle and engage somebody who's coming up to you," he pointed out. "And what may be a simple way to indicate that you didn't mean to cut somebody else off may be taken as a sign of aggression. So the best recommendation is don't engage, period."

Lewis said that he understands the motivation of drivers who do otherwise: "We all understand what can take place. Maybe you cut somebody off or you weaved out of a lane and somebody took great offense. You want to apologize, to let them know you had no intention of doing that. So you give a little wave as a mea culpa. But if they're upset, they may take it as an aggressive kind of gesture. As much as we might want to engage or even apologize, it's typically best to just separate."

The same goes for shrugs, smiles or other facial expressions, according to Lewis. If another driver is already so overwhelmed by indignation that he's giving chase, he may interpret something meant kindly as sarcasm or ridicule.

When a furious person is following another driver, other options are available — but they should generally be choices of absolute last resort.

"If need be, you can drive to a law-enforcement office," he said. "But if you have a phone and you're having to look up how to get to that place, it's better to call 911, indicate that you're afraid for your life for whatever reason, and then follow what the dispatcher tells you. Then we and dispatch and officers responding will know where you are and what's going on at that moment, rather than you taking an exit and going someplace else.

"It's harder to find you even if you're coming toward an office of a law enforcement agency, because chances are they didn't receive that call and they have no idea you're coming," he added. "Most 911 centers aren't typically located in a lot of actual police departments, especially if they're smaller satellite stations. Driving to one may not mean they know what's going on in your case, especially if you're in the Denver metro area, where you may change jurisdictions ten times over the course of ten miles. So sticking to 911 is still the best course of action in that case."

For the most part, Lewis concluded, "It mostly boils down to either separating yourself from that situation if it's being caused by someone else or just letting things go and making sure you're as safe as possible."

Today's Wingnut

People unwilling to die for their faith is not the problem.

People willing to kill for their faith is the fucking problem.

MAGA pastor: Christians need people who are ‘willing to strap bombs to their chest’ like the Muslims

Far-right Nashville pastor Kent Christmas told his congregation last Sunday that they should harness the dedication that drives Islamic terrorists to be willing to “die for their beliefs,” Right Wing Watch reported.

During his sermon, Christmas falsely claimed that the state of Vermont recently passed legislation declaring that “it is legal, up to 21 days after full-term birth, that you can kill a baby.”

As Right Wing Watch points out, Christmas is a Trump–loving pastor and conspiracy theorist who has repeatedly declared that God will soon start killing “wicked” elected officials

“I am at war with evil!” Christmas ranted. “This is one preacher that is not backing down. I can tell you this: I will give my life for the Gospel.”

“You want to know why the Muslim faith has had its advancements?” he continued. “It’s because the Muslims were willing to die for their beliefs. They were willing to strap bombs to their chest. They believed in the afterlife.”

“God, give us some men and women that will get a hold of some passion in their spirit and say, ‘I will lay down my life for the Gospel!’” he said. “This thing was born in blood.”

Usually, these guys are way more clever, taking some pains to couch their threats and their calls for violence in language that's more easily construed, and dismissed, as fluffy rhetorical excess (anybody who's trying to sell belief in the Great And Powerful Pixie In The Sky needs to pump up the bombast). This seems to cross a broad bright red line.

Press Poodles

Paranoid Mike says:

We are presented with a dilemma - the kind of dilemma SunTzu talks about in The Art Of War.

ie: Don't give your adversary a problem he can solve. Give him a dilemma that will work against him no matter what he chooses to do.

I can't help but think the plutocracy pushers are doing a lot of shit designed to give us that Damned-If-You-Do-And-Damned-If-You-Don't dilemma.

With a few exceptions, "The News" has left behind all sense of public service. It's a profit center, and the guys who own the Yacht-Buyers Club insist that their news division chiefs go on pretending there's a perfect balance between the extreme assholes (primarily on "the right") and the rest of us.

Competition is fierce, and the bean-counters refuse to believe they're doing a bad thing by pandering to the 10-20% of the audience who call themselves "independents" while actually being all but hardcore wingnuts who just don't want to admit publicly that they voted twice for Bush43 and then for Trump. "Fascists buy dick pills and panty liners too, y'know."

We know something's horribly wrong, but we have a hard time putting our finger on it.

ex: Count the number of times Katy Tur says, "Deeply divided" in any interview or political analysis she delivers on MSNBC.

While it's true - we are deeply divided - her phrasing strikes me as purposely ambiguous, and she never explains it so as not to invite the inference of Both Sides.

Yes we're deeply divided - like we're deeply divided on the Pros and Cons of Ass Cancer.

So, on that whole dilemma thing: 

I subscribe to WaPo and NYT, and I pay for MSNBC thru my Sling thing. Those three outlets comprise my main source of news. I pay for them, and I try to balance it all out with Reuters and AP and BBC - because I have the time, and I'm a bit of a politics geek.

A lot of people don't have the money or the time or the inclination to indulge the way I do, so they rely on picking up a few things from whatever source comes to hand, and after they get slapped down a few times for speaking up about something they thought they had a pretty handle on, only to be made to feel silly or stoopid or naive or whatever, they often retreat behind the Both-Sides shield: "They're all full of shit - you can't believe anything any of them says - etc etc etc"

Some will support a corporate model in the news because they support the basics of top-down authoritarian rule in business, even as they decry the same kind of tyranny in government, while they're advocating for "running government like a business". In fact, they'll parrot the Daddy State bullshit about how the government is "meddling" in the news companies' business by trying to hold them to account, "and that's the tyranny - corporate monopolies are the real victims here".

But the majority - people who are decent folks - people who make good friends and responsible citizens - they're the big squishy middle - the trend followers. Most of them won't get it, but will go along because they've been taught that popular = good.

(By 1974, the Ford Pinto was the best selling American-made care in the US)

Meanwhile, the minority of us who can afford the luxury of critical thinking are rendered politically impotent.

If we back away from the news, we're ceding the territory to the plutocrats.

If we back away from the politics - same thing.

If we raise our voices, then we're branded as the radical left and the Press Poodles can say we've shown their Both Sides crap to be accurate.

But the needle is moving a bit. I think if we keep at it, the needle will move some more, and then the dilemma is reduced to a solvable problem.

People who need a free press the most, are less and less able to afford it.

People who can afford it are using it to split the majority, keeping people siloed and isolated from each other.

This does not make for a healthy democracy.

It’s Not a Good Sign When People Who Don’t Pay for News Have So Little to Choose From

In a recently published profile of the former CNN executive Jeff Zucker, a tidbit of news caught my eye. Zucker, who has a venture fund with $1 billion to invest, is one of at least three suitors seeking to buy a controlling stake in Air Mail, a glossy media company catering to the jet set elite, founded by the former Vanity Fair editor in chief Graydon Carter. A recent weekly edition includes a profile of the caterer turned mercenary magnate who is a close ally (and possible competitor) of Vladimir Putin, an excoriation of new diversity rules for the Oscars and an article on Adele’s go-to rosé. It’s a frothy mix of European royals, luxurious fashion and salacious true crime, redolent of the Vanity Fair of yore. Air Mail has made quite a splash: It threw a star-studded bash with Warner Brothers in Cap d’Antibes that was the toast of the Cannes Film Festival last month. It is generally a fun read. I have been a subscriber for a while.

Still, it was jarring to see that this confection has so many suitors, checkbooks at the ready, at a time when the butcher’s bill in American journalism grows longer and longer. Last week, The Los Angeles Times announced it will reduce its newsroom staff by 13 percent, a month after the paper celebrated winning two Pulitzer Prizes. Last month, Vice, a company that once seemed like the invincible future of media, sought bankruptcy protection. BuzzFeed shuttered its Pulitzer Prize-winning news division. Insider slashed its staff by 10 percent earlier this year; its journalists are currently on strike. Hundreds of journalists from Gannett, the once mighty local news company, also staged a short strike last week after years of staffing and budget reductions. We’ve seen deep cuts at the major TV and cable news networks. MTV News closed its doors.

And last week, the pain hit close to home for me: Many of my former colleagues at Gimlet, the ambitious podcast studio where I worked from 2020 to 2022, lost their jobs. The pink slips landed shortly after the team won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigative podcast.

The loss of jobs in any industry, particularly one as central to protecting our democracy as journalism, is always worrying. But what makes these losses particularly troubling is what many of these news organizations have in common: They sought to make quality news for the masses that cost little to nothing to consume.

In an ever more unequal world, it is perhaps not surprising that we are splitting into news haves and have-nots. Those who can afford and are motivated to pay for subscriptions to access high-quality news have a wealth of choices: newspapers such as The Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times compete for their business, along with magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic. Niche subscription news products serving elite audiences are also thriving and attracting investment — publications like Punchbowl News, Puck and Air Mail. The people who subscribe to these publications tend to be affluent and educated.

It bodes ill for our democracy that those who cannot pay — or choose not to — are left with whatever our broken information ecosystem manages to serve up, a crazy quilt that includes television news of diminishing ambition, social media, aggregation sites, partisan news and talk radio. Yes, a few ambitious nonprofit journalism outlets and quality digital news organizations remain, but they are hanging on by their fingernails. Some news organizations are experimenting with A.I.-generated news, which could make articles reported and written by actual human beings another bauble for the Air Mail set, along with Loro Piana loafers and silk coats from the Row.

I’ve been thinking about the problem of news for people who don’t pay for news since the last months of the 2016 presidential campaign, when I was offered a job as editor in chief at The Huffington Post, succeeding its namesake, Arianna Huffington.

Before that, I really hadn’t seriously considered leaving The Times, where I had worked for almost 15 years, mostly as a foreign correspondent. I had experienced firsthand the lengths The Times would go to report in some of the most far-flung and dangerous places in the world. My editors had sent me from the Himalayan peaks of Kashmir to the dense jungle of eastern Congo, from the desert scrub of Darfur to the sodden deltas of Bangladesh. They literally sent me to Timbuktu. Twice!

Still, I took the meeting. I knew that something had gone wrong with American journalism. Local journalism was in free-fall. Trust in the news media was reaching new depths. And most worryingly, the news organizations that were thriving were the ones that people paid for directly.

Then Donald Trump won the presidential election, and I felt that maybe in that moment there was work to do elsewhere. Maybe HuffPost, with its huge home-page audience, could be a vessel for testing this question that had been nagging at me: How can you make a quality news product for people who were never going to pay for news? What would it mean to create a news organization that saw itself not as writing about people who feel left out of the political, economic and social power arrangements, but for them? I took the job.

With its clever, large-format headlines and populist sensibility, HuffPost had the feel of a left-of-center tabloid, like The New York Daily News in its heyday. We would make news for everyone on the internet, for free. Corporate America, via digital advertising, would foot the bill. If this all sounds overly optimistic, if not downright naïve, well, it was. But what else could one do in those desperate postelection days but fuse dreams and work and hope for the best?

In a way, this plan represented a very old model of paying for quality journalism, one that began in 1833, when a young businessman named Benjamin Day had an idea. As Tim Wu wrote in his book “The Attention Merchants,” most of New York City’s newspapers at that time were priced at 6 cents — the equivalent of more than $2 today — a luxury good aimed at a tiny, wealthy audience. Day realized that he could make more money if he charged readers just a penny for his newspaper, and then sold their eyeballs to businesses who wanted to sell them stuff. His newspaper, The New York Sun, set the template for the news business in the United States for most of the next two centuries, even as new technologies such as radio and television transformed how news was distributed.

Capturing mass attention required access to expensive means of distribution: either a press and delivery trucks for print, or access to the public airwaves — which were licensed by the government — for broadcast. These costs allowed the news organizations that could afford them to corner the market on mass audiences, whose attention they then sold to advertisers. The handsome profits they reaped enabled investments in high-quality journalism, including high-risk and expensive endeavors such as investigative reporting and international coverage.

We all know what happened next. The internet, which initially promised to propel this old model even further by reducing distribution costs to near zero and creating the tools to sell ever more sophisticated kinds of advertising, instead created an economic crisis for journalism. Newspapers still had to produce their expensive print products even as the advertisements that paid for them gave way to much cheaper and more highly targeted digital ones. Paid classified advertising evaporated. Local news cratered, and even titans like The New York Times faced existential threats.

Meanwhile, the digital revolution brought a new crop of news organizations roaring to life, unburdened by physical production costs and powered by new forms of information distribution. HuffPost figured out how to reverse-engineer news articles that matched information people were searching for on the internet. Then social media arrived, and with it the opportunity to build huge audiences across people’s social networks, an art perfected by BuzzFeed. Sensing the opportunity for hypergrowth, venture capitalists piled into the media business, sending the valuations of these digital upstarts into the stratosphere. On paper, at least.

Powered by those dollars, some companies invested in quality journalism, just like the old-school newspaper publishers had when the market buoyed them. HuffPost won a Pulitzer in 2012. Vice News produced groundbreaking television coverage of the far right. BuzzFeed News invested deeply in investigative journalism and international reporting, and also won a Pulitzer. It seemed, for a time, that a new form of quality mass media was emerging on the back of new technology.

And then it all fell apart. Advertisers began cutting out the middlemen — publishers — and buying advertising directly from social media platforms, which offered what was sold as laser-sharp targeting of a company’s most desirable customers. And after Trump, who augured a new era of misinformation online and a ton of new headaches for social media companies, digital platforms largely fell out of love with news. The spigots that had gushed money-spinning traffic to new sites ran dry.

It turned out that I had arrived at the digital media party just as it started to wind down. It was almost impossible to sustain quality journalism with advertising alone. At HuffPost, we went through several rounds of layoffs in three years. Ultimately, I encouraged Verizon Media, which was then HuffPost’s owner, to sell the site to a company more focused on news. When it didn’t sell, I decided to leave. Less than a year later, Verizon all but paid BuzzFeed to take HuffPost off its hands.

HuffPost, with its big home-page audience, is less reliant on social media networks and has survived. It is smaller and less global than it once was, but it continues to employ talented and enterprising journalists who break news. But with all the layoffs, closures and bankruptcies it is hard not to feel that the old dream of digital news — lots of free, quality and diverse news from lots of different places — is mostly dead.

Instead, there are a few very successful media companies that charge people money for high-quality journalism. The best news organizations take their public service mission seriously, and do create news products that are free to all, like podcasts and email newsletters. Some have relatively porous paywalls, and even drop their paywalls entirely for coverage of major events involving public safety. But many surviving free consumer sites are cutting staff and focusing on aggregation — which is an important service, but not the same as investing in original journalism. Television news is dominated by talking heads as budgets for real news-gathering shrink. Cable news is in terminal decline in the age of cord cutting.

The current landscape means the mass audience that never paid for news and never will pay remains underserved, and that has big implications for the future of our country. Creating a shared reality was always the work of mass media. But our present and future look much more like the 1830s, with one class of people getting tips on summering in the South of France from Air Mail and everyone else reading whatever A.I.-generated aggregation the internet spits up.

For the better part of two centuries, news that was free — or at least felt free, owing to its reliance on advertising — was good business. But the advertising dollars that once underwrote ambitious mass journalism are now stuffing the pockets of technology billionaires. We’re all — even those of us willing and able to pay for quality journalism — the poorer for it.

Today's Brian

" ... but this is still secret."

How is that mango-faced prick not in prison?