592
Journalists float astonishing theory around silence surrounding Mitch McConnell’s health
(www.rawstory.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
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politics
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If we had a free independent press any more, all reputable news outlets would be writing about this every single day to apply pressure for proof of consciousness, so they can't drag this out until the deadline.
They would demand that his office, which released a statement saying "The Senator continues to improve, and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters while the Senate is out of session”, prove that they weren't outright LYING.
They would go around asking his spokespeople to answer questions on camera and hound them, "is McConnell conscious?", "Will you release a photo of him with his eyes open?", "Why did his wife go to Beijing?" etc etc.
But they won't. Because we don't have a free independent press any more. A few journalists will speculate. None will keep demanding answers until they get them. Just the talking heads speculating.
Good time to mention that Reagan gutted the FCC protections that kept companies from owning more than six radio stations across the country.
Read up on the Fairness Doctrine
Screw the national "independent press" let's all keep using people-owned independent press instead. Because the majority stock companies and owned by wealthy individuals aren't cutting it.
I'm not sure the last time that we had that. I'm Gen X, so it must have come before. The "liberal media" I was always told was so damned liberal always seemed to be hosted by people with suits and ties and working as part of some megacorp, and that mostly spouted corporate compliant things. In any case, pre-internet, things were pretty tightly gate-kept by a small set of corporations.
And Ronnie Raygun worked to make that even worse - the decades since has been a long march toward the right, at least on cable and the airwaves...
Maybe I'm too young, though if I watch something like Network, it seems the boomers didn't really have an independent press either. Chomsky is much older and seemed to make reference to a lively press in his youth.
These days, I like that Meidas Touch sends people in to ask questions. Mostly you get to see Maga Mike Johnson fleeing the scene while trying to avoid answering anything, LOL.
I'd say the downfall first started around the time 24-hour cable news came along (starting in 1980 but it didn't happen right away) along with things like the abolishing of the fairness doctrine (1987). That and the need to fill 24 hours with "news" led to the shift to more op-ed content than news. More and more of these opinion news cable channels followed.
Then the deterioration really began to snowball with the internet and proliferation of "news" outlets tailored for specific audiences, culminating with the rise of social media (I mean, what hasn't been negatively affected by the rise of social media/oligarch-owned web 2.0) and the purchasing of all media outlets, including newspapers, by corporations and later by the rising oligarchs.
All this meant the "news" became just another type of profit-driven enterprise, with a need to compete for ratings, that shifted it from hard news to entertainment and nothing more than parroting of press releases with no independent investigation. Ultimately leading to the demise of the last bastion of independence, print journalism.
That doesn't mean there aren't still some journalists doing good investigative work, just that they are pretty much on their own now. I don't know much about Meidas Touch, but if they're actually out there asking questions and reporting, instead of just sitting around spouting opinions and outrage like most political podcasts, that's a good thing.