Fallen Sentinels: The 4th Estate

The guardians of democracy have abandoned their posts

Couple days back, transfixed by the lackadaisical puff piece from the NYT on Sam Bankman-Fried’s fall from grace, I tweeted out a rather heated thread about the lack of rigor that went into that interview. Poking at such an august institution always gins people up a bit, and there was some energetic back and forth including stalwart defender of contemporary media Matthew Yglesias saying my ire was due to poor reading skills before thinking better of it and heading back to his writing studio full of entirely beige ideas that he uses as craft his masterpieces.

Today this surreal piece of astroturfing by the Washington Post drops, lamenting how Sam will no longer be able to give to all his wonderful charities. Y’all, the man stole that money what on earth are you talking about? This sort of deranged post-nihilism of perfectly balanced takes where we always have to “see the good in people too” is not doing us any favors on the front of, say, curing the sickness in our society.

We need more caricatures.

We need to be able to talk openly about unethical behavior without worrying about perfectly counterweighting with pillowy platitudes that tell the side ‘from Sam’s perspective.’ How about this instead: he’s a crook who gives a crap about his perspective. The compliment sandwich is a corporate management tactic, it’s no way to run a society.

The First Amendment was enshrined into our founding moments in part to protect the 4th Estate of free media, so that those guardians could tell even the government itself the harsh truths we need to hear, for sometimes those truths are what protects the Union. And yet now, in our hour of need, the media has failed us. They have grown soft and lazy — petulant creatures who have been trained to obey in return for the drug they are so painfully addicted to: access.

It’s also about the money, of course. Sponsor dollars exact their penance in dignity, a point some of us concerned netizens attempted to point out earlier this year when a popular podcast was voice-reading promotions the utterly depraved notion of adding crypto to IRAs. It didn’t go particularly well, as one of the hosts elected in response to lightly weaponize her platform to fire back. The two have yet to even acknowledge that tacitly endorsing an asset class that increasingly looks like it’s riddled with fraud to freakin’ retirees was a real lapse of judgement. A real media joint would issue a retraction. Errata is part of the business. The media business, that is; not the business of providing vapid commentary to kill the time between shilled products.

The 4th Estate turned itself into a catalog. Something with glossy pictures and thick stock paper and high production values for us to browse, lazily by the fire, when we want to completely shut our brains off and maybe purchase a thing or two.

The country has woven protections for these soldiers of democracy into the very fabric of our society, and they have in response used the armor we granted them to cut in line at the mess hall when it’s time for supper.

The watchtowers are abandoned as they fill their bellies.

Stealthily, predators slip into the courtyard.