The 2024 Campaign Was an Embarrassment for Elite Media

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Posted on 12/30/2024 12:14:45 PM PST by nickcarraway

Journalists increasingly see their job as protecting their preferred candidates, not asking tough questions.

On September 25, more than two months after entering the presidential race, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris finally sat down for her first one-on-one interview with a national television reporter.

It wasn't just any reporter. Stephanie Ruhle, host of a nightly show on the Democrat-cheerleading cable network MSNBC, had, just five days prior, ridiculed the very notion that journalists, let alone voters, needed to hear anything more from the vice president before Election Day. "Let's say you don't like her answer. Are you going to vote for Donald Trump?" an exasperated Ruhle demanded to know from co-panelist Bret Stephens on HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher, after the New York Times columnist suggested undecided voters—presciently, it would turn out after Trump's victory—could use more information from Harris. "We have two choices….There are some things you might not know her answer to, [but] in 2024, unlike 2016, for a lot of the American people, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is, and the kind of threat he is to democracy."

When Stephens protested that "I don't think it's too much to ask for her to sit down for a real interview," Ruhle shot back: "I would just say to that, when you move to nirvana, give me your real estate broker's number, and I'll be your next-door neighbor. We don't live there."

Ruhle, a former managing director at Deutsche Bank, will not likely be moving any time soon from her town house on Manhattan's Upper West Side or summer cottage on Long Beach Island. But the anchor's zinger, praised by the likes of The Atlantic's Tom Nichols and The Nation's Joan Walsh, did signal another kind of shift. Thirty-six years after CNN's Bernard Shaw gutted Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis with a single debate question ("Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?"), journalists increasingly view their vocation's role in the political arena as instrumental rather than adversarial: How does their work affect the electoral bottom line?

Ruhle's eventual sit-down with Harris illustrated the artistic limits of this functionalist approach. "To call the interview with MSNBC softball," snarked The New York Sun's Dean Karayanis afterward, "would be an injustice to the game." The 25-minute exchange better resembled T-ball, with such participation trophy set-ups as "Can we trust you?" and "[Trump] said he will be the protector of women if elected. Can you respond to that?" Left unmentioned was a question that, remarkably, did not get asked of Harris until Fox News anchor Bret Baier brought it up on the 87th day of her candidacy: When, exactly, did she notice her boss was experiencing age-related decline, and what did she do about it?

"As reporters," Bernard Shaw once reminisced, "we were not doing our jobs if we don't ask the toughest question possible." Well, that was then. But what is now?

A surface analysis of the modern media ecosystem might conclude the industry has transitioned into a more conscious partisanship, embracing rather than downplaying a political bias that has metastasized from majoritarian to dominant. Defenders of this mission creep call it "moral clarity"; detractors deride it as orthodoxical and "woke."

But that reductionist picture zooms in on the tusks while missing the rest of the elephant. The basic condition of the industrialized journalistic project is massive and long-term institutional decline—of audience, of reach, of employment, of influence. In a way that mainstream reporters and their antagonists struggle to accept, the media, comparatively, don't really matter anymore. There's not enough there there to sustain the role of either hero or villain. No one cares about editorial endorsements; candidates prefer talking to comedians and podcasters; October-surprise investigative heaves rarely move the needle.

Yet the business of politics, and discussion thereof, continues to grind on. That activity now takes place in an informational context unrecognizable from even a generation ago, with politicos adapting to new sets of power dynamics and market incentives that are far less anchored in the aspirational pursuit of truth. As the catastrophe of Hurricane Helene amply demonstrated, these contemporary conditions can materially degrade the visibility of facts during life-and-death crises, particularly amid the hatred-organization of a presidential campaign.

Examples: Elon Musk posted on October 4 that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was "seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own." North Carolina's lieutenant governor (and now-failed GOP gubernatorial nominee), Mark Robinson, asserted on October 1 that "Joe Biden told the people of North Carolina they had no more supplies for us." Donald Trump at an October 3 rally charged that "Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants, many of whom should not be in our country….They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season."

None of these claims was true. Begged libertarian Republican Mayor Glenn Jacobs of Helene-ravaged Knox County, Tennessee: "Please quit spreading those rumors as they are counterproductive to response efforts….If everyone could maybe please put aside the hate for a bit and pitch in to help, that would be great."

But putting aside hatred of the faraway political Other is damnably hard to do when the venues for neighborly engagement have collapsed.

The Death of Local While the center-right tends to blame the deterioration of media on the elites who run them, the center-left has an accusatory explanation of its own: that social media, with its algorithmic preference for consequence-free fearmongering enabled by Section 230 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, has incentivized bad actors, including populist conservatives and foreign ne'er-do-wells, to pollute the discourse commons, thereby eroding social trust.

"If we trust little or nothing because we can't tell the snake oil from the facts," warned Steven Brill in his 2024 book The Death of Truth, "everything breaks down. We cannot have a democracy. Ultimately, we cannot expect a civil society." Similar theses, presented with similar pessimism, were advanced this year in Renée DiResta's Invisible Rulers and Barbara McQuade's Attack From Within.

But the sheer magnitude and long-term relentlessness of the media implosion suggests exogenous factors far more potent, with implications far more interesting, than what theories lie on either side of the partisan divide. Sure, Vice News went bust after transitioning from billion-dollar Bad Boys to identity-politics scolds. But the reaper also came for the proudly Trump-supporting Santa Barbara News-Press. There are plenty of ways to go broke without going woke.

For most of our lives, the basic industrial unit of journalism has been the newspaper, with more editorial content, larger newsrooms, and fatter profits than the rest of the verification business (magazines, books, broadcasts, newsletters, websites) combined. In 1990, at the apex of the form, American newspapers employed nearly a half-million people, had a combined circulation north of 60 million, and enjoyed profit margins consistently above 20 percent. Even as those numbers began their initial descent after the end of the Cold War, newspaper advertising revenue continued its half-century climb until the dawn of the millennium to just under $50 billion per year.

All of that has since collapsed by around 75 percent. Combined newspaper circulation is down to 20 million, ad revenue is just over $10 billion, and employment is now well south of 100,000. Weekly newspapers are going extinct by a rate of two per week—and certain subspecies, like the alternative weekly, have all but disappeared. Dailies have declined from 1,600 to 1,200 since 1990, and those that remain are often emaciated facsimiles of their former selves.

The Los Angeles Times in 1990 was as thick as a phone book, with the largest print circulation in the country (1.2 million), an editorial staff of around 1,300, and bigger profits than any other daily in the world. By 2024 the paper was down to a few dozen frequently ad-free pages, with a print circulation of 118,000, a newsroom of 385, and a balance sheet bleeding $30 million to $40 million a year. An institution that once played kingmaker in the West—transplanting rivers, erecting downtowns, making the political careers of such figures as (believe it or not) Richard Nixon—is largely an afterthought in its own city.

And even that grim ledger undersells the shape of creative news-industry destruction, and what remains in its aftermath. Consumers abandoned their local news/advertising monopolies for more user-friendly digital alternatives as soon as they could—to Craigslist for classifieds, the Drudge Report for breaking news headlines, Usenet and descendants for community, Yahoo! and other search engines for accessing information. Even those few newspapers that responded nimbly to new technologies and changing preferences were never fully able to reassemble their old captive audiences online.

The upshot: When local newsrooms shrank, very little sprung up locally to take their place. The new internet office spaces were national, clustered disproportionately in a handful of big cities.

In 2017, right around the time when digital began eclipsing print across all measures, in trendlines that resembled the letter "X," Politico Magazine ran a fascinating study of the journalism work force. Comparing the Bureau of Labor Statistics' media employment numbers with Census data and voting patterns, authors Jack Shafer and Tucker Doherty unearthed results that to them "read like a revelation." Namely: "The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn't true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you're a working journalist, odds aren't just that you work in a pro-[Hillary] Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation's most pro-Clinton counties."

The digital jobs marching ever upward on those X-shaped graphs were, Shafer and Doherty found, overwhelmingly concentrated on the coasts—73 percent "in either the Boston-New York-Washington-Richmond corridor or the West Coast crescent that runs from Seattle to San Diego and on to Phoenix," plus another 5 percent in the greater Chicago area. "This isn't just a shift in medium," they wrote. "It's also a shift in sociopolitics, and a radical one."

The modal 25-year-old journalist was no longer a cub reporter covering and being accountable to the local community he or she lived among, but rather a graduate school grad lobbing insults at distant political figures from the relative safety of Brooklyn. As the nation itself was sorting geographically by politics, and retreating at measurable rates from community institutions such as church, Little League, and social clubs, journalism was refocusing on national and especially presidential politics, from the vantage point of the bluest neighborhoods in the bluest cities.

This reorientation has accelerated the industry's preexisting political trajectory. The American Journalist survey, conducted decennially, has tracked, among other things, the partisan self-identification of reporters since 1971. In 2002, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among those surveyed was 2:1 (36 percent to 18 percent, with the rest being independent or "other"); in 2013 it was 4:1 (28 percent to 7 percent), then by 2022 a whopping 11:1 (36.4 percent to 3.4 percent). Media are hurtling toward where academia has long been—a knowledge-creating sector of purportedly nonpartisan civil society where conservatives are nonetheless an endangered species.

The new generation of journalists entering the work force during the age of Trump has been at the vanguard of some of the profession's most head-snapping changes: an increase in unionization after decades of decline; the creation of departments dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion; out-loud opposition both to "platforming" people with unacceptable views and to "bothsidesism," which can mean the consideration of multiple perspectives on a contested issue that journalists consider settled or just critical coverage of a given Democrat when everyone knows the applicable Republican is worse. Most ominously of all, we now see unabashed journalistic support for the government to do something about alleged purveyors of "misinformation," First Amendment be damned.

These major shifts in how reporters are expected to comport themselves have generated episodes ranging from the startlingly illiberal to the unintentionally comic. In summer 2020, after Minneapolis police officers killed an arrest-resisting George Floyd, the knowledge economy erupted into dozens of managerial defenestrations over insufficiently demonstrative support for combating institutional racism. These purity spirals sent star talent packing to independent realms such as Substack and YouTube, bringing audience and money with them. As recently as this October we saw CBS descend into a series of internal struggle sessions and external managerial spats over a mildly combative morning-news interview about Israel with the celebrated writer Ta-Nehisi Coates.

"The good news," cracked National Review editor Charles C.W. Cooke at the time, "is that the CBS that moderated this year's presidential and vice-presidential debates and the CBS that melted down because someone asked a non-progressive question on TV are completely separate and couldn't possibly both be affected by the same pathologies."

But the political right has some major, giggle-worthy informational pathologies of its own.

Tucker's Journey

If the journalistic left reacted to the decline of the media by more doggedly policing its own orthodoxies, the journalistic right has doubled down on some unfortunate preexisting tendencies of its own, devolving from counterfactual skepticism to antifactual conspiracism. Nobody embodies this degradation more flagrantly, and successfully, than Tucker Carlson. Once among the most talented political-magazine journalists in the country, and then an intelligent if peripatetic cable news presence, Carlson has become a cautionary tale about how right-wing populism can warp media literacy.

In 2009, while ramping up toward the launch of his website The Daily Caller, Carlson was famously booed at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference for having favorable things to say about the The New York Times. "This is the hard truth, and conservatives need to deal with this," he said then. "If you create a news organization whose primary objective is not to deliver accurate news, you will fail….The New York Times is…to its core a liberal paper, [but] it's also a paper that cares about whether they spell people's names right, by and large. It's a paper that actually cares about accuracy. Conservatives need to build institutions that mirror those institutions."

The Daily Caller developed into more a mirror of The Huffington Post than of The Paper of Record, landing somewhere in the editorial-quality neighborhood of Breitbart and The Daily Wire. But falling well short of an ideal is one thing; becoming what you once explicitly warned against is next-level.

Instead of holding as a primary objective the delivery of accurate news, Carlson in the past few years has, by his own admission, begun working backward from areas of perceived journalistic consensus, oftentimes asserting without anything like convincing evidence that the opposite of the consensus is true. "The media are part of the control apparatus," he explained to the Full Send podcast in March 2023, shortly before getting fired from Fox News. "And for too long, I participated in the culture where anyone who thinks outside these pre-prescribed lanes is crazy, is a 'conspiracy theorist.'…Their job is not to inform you. They're working for the small group of people who actually run the world. They're their servants, they're the Praetorian Guard."

Such strident contrarianism can be a useful starting point for journalistic inquiry—an impetus to ask questions conformists would never pursue. Alas, in a pattern familiar to every ideological subgroup (including libertarians), Carlson has too often used his antiestablishmentarianism as a shortcut to false conclusions backed by wildly unreliable narrators.

In June 2021, the Fox host asserted that "FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on January 6, according to government documents," even though zero government documents, then or since, have made any such claim. (In June 2023, a former FBI assistant director testified to Congress there were "a handful" of FBI informants on the scene who had infiltratedsome of the Stop the Steal groups, but the rumor of any organizational activity was "furthest from the truth." A Justice Department Inspector General report on the matter was being slow-walked to the finish line as of press time.) In February 2024, the man whose father was literally the director of Voice of America under Ronald Reagan notoriously toured a luxurious Moscow supermarket and declared himself "radicalized" and "legitimately angry" at U.S. leaders for talking about how "evil" Russia was even though the groceries were so dang cheap (for Americans, anyway).

In September, Carlson touted his guest Darryl Cooper as America's "best and most honest" historian. Cooper, a podcaster, has published zero histories but maintains some out-there views on what Carlson described as the "forbidden" topic of "trying to understand World War II"—namely, that Winston Churchill was the "chief villain" of the conflict. Some conservative journalists criticized this, but the Republicans who actually matter in national politics reacted with a brief shrug and then business as usual. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts appeared at a Carlson live event within days; Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance joined Carlson three weeks later, and Donald Trump campaigned with the broadcaster multiple times during the final two weeks of the race.

Trump has been a one-man wrecking ball against the illusion that gatekeepers, whether in mainstream or conservative media, can establish and patrol the boundaries of acceptable political and intellectual decorum. From his summer 2015 poll spike after decrying some Mexican immigrants as "rapists," all the way through a last-gasp, preelection bombshell from The Atlantic under the headline "Trump: 'I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had,'" the GOP nominee's survival of every allegedly career-killing depth charge has illustrated that it's the consumers of politics and related news/commentary, not the producers of editorial content, who hold the whip hand. But what his own supporters have been slow to realize is that pulverizing political mores makes it much harder to hoist Democrats on their own petard.

The Wolf Who Cried 'Plagiarist'

On October 14, conservative antiwoke activist Christopher Rufo published on his Substack an analysis showing that Kamala Harris' 2009 book Smart on Crime (co-authored with Joan O'C. Hamilton) plagiarized more than a dozen passages, including from Wikipedia. "This is a big story and should be treated as such," tweeted conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt. "Plagiarism is a big deal and if she gets away with it, what's the message to every high school student?tag=reasonmagazinea-20" The discovery, Hewitt averred, needed to be "on the landing page" of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

Well, the Times indeed weighed in, but in a way that played right down to its critics' worst stereotype. "Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book," went the headline—quite different from the paper's treatment of Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) back in 2013 ("Senator Rand Paul Is Accused of Plagiarizing His Lines From Wikipedia"). We are told in the subhed about Harris' book that "a plagiarism expert said the lapses were not serious" (that expert later complained that the Times had given him incomplete information). Further in the piece, readers are encouraged to view Rufo as being corrupted by bigotry: "part of a loose confederation of conservative writers and activists who, during the past year, have tried to expose plagiarism among academics, many of whom have been Black scholars who work in the field of diversity and inclusion….Some academics, however, have characterized the campaign as racist." OK then.

Ideas Beyond Borders co-founder Melissa Chen quipped: "I recall when plagiarism used to be something that ended presidential campaigns. That was 1988 though." Indeed it was, and the vanquished campaign in question belonged to, as Chen pointed out, Joe Biden. But the differences between then and now go far beyond changes in newsroom sympathies.

For one, 1987 (when Biden angrily bowed out of the race) was at or near peak media power. If a politician's behavior or words were deemed beyond the pale by most newsrooms, then the prophecy would almost become self-fulfilling. Not only did Biden get hounded out of the 1988 presidential race by the press, but so did Gary Hart for his extramarital shenanigans on the yacht Monkey Business. Plus there was that Bernard Shaw–on–Michael Dukakis violence. Nine years of Trump have proven on a near-daily basis that that spell has been broken.

It's also true Biden's plagiaristic transgressions make those of Harris (or, more likely, her co-author) look trivial. The then-senator didn't just lift passages from other sources, he flat-out misrepresented other politicians' biographical details as his own and serially inflated his own academic accomplishments far past the realm of mere braggadocio. Twenty years later, the scandal (which was mostly downplayed as ancient history by a press enraptured by the prospect of Barack Obama's historic candidacy) nonetheless was assumed to put a brake on Biden's presidential ambitions. He was a safe and somewhat goofy elder statesman, there to add Capitol Hill experience to an inexperienced candidate, not the heir apparent come 2016.

As in so many other things, Trump changed all that. Biden's fabulisms, which never did go away (during the 2020 campaign he repeatedly lied about being arrested while trying to see Nelson Mandela, to cite one of many examples), were largely treated by a weakened if increasingly side-taking press as insignificant at best compared to the daily onslaughts from the incumbent. There is more than enough myth making, academic exaggeration, and outright fabrication in Trump's co-written business book smash The Art of the Deal to give Biden and Harris a run for their money, yet whatever dishonesty is associated with that project ranks roughly 3,000th on any list of Trump transgressions, from "grab 'em by the pussy" to "stop the steal" to his 34-count felony conviction for fraud (regardless of that case's dubious propriety). The whole value proposition of Trump is to outrage the sensibilities of the Acela corridor elite; weaponizing one of their parochial professional obsessions against his chief 2024 opponent over a 14-year-old book no one's heard of was just never going to go very far.

Rufo's work will also be greeted with suspicion by most traditional newsrooms because his muckraking enthusiasms are, by gleeful admission, unidirectional. Not only did the activist disclaim any interest in scrutinizing Donald Trump or J.D. Vance for plagiarism, but he offered in September a $5,000 bounty for any evidence proving that one of the GOP ticket's wildest claims was true: "that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio." Like Tucker Carlson working backward from media consensus, Rufo working forward from an unsupported Trumpian claim is a recipe for producing tainted information. Yet by treating his work with such blatant unfairness, The New York Times reinforced the suspicion that its work, too, can amount to glorified opposition research.

Revolt of the Independents

Gallup has since 1972 been asking Americans the question, "In general, how much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media—such as newspapers, TV and radio—when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly—a great deal, a fair amount, not very much or none at all?" In mid-October, the latest results came back: Trust is at an all-time low of 32 percent, tying the nadir from the presidential campaign year of 2016.

As independent journalist Matt Taibbi acidly observed, the news for the news industry was even worse. At 68 percent, the media's combined distrust number is one point higher than even Congress; and in the trust level of "none at all", it's a rout—39 percent for the reporters, 24 percent for the pols. "It's impossible to overstate this embarrassment," Taibbi wrote. "Asked about trust in a politician, 'None at all' is what people say when they expect nothing to get done. With media, it's what you say if you don't even trust a reporter to tell the time. It's an extraordinary indictment."

Taibbi, a National Magazine Award winner who used to write for Rolling Stone, is one of the dozens of iconoclastic writing stars who felt pushed out of their perches in an increasingly conformist traditional media, and have since struck out successfully on their own. His December 2022 Twitter Files series of stories—uncovered after new owner Elon Musk gave Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and other independent journalists access to internal documents at the company—uncovered an elaborate, multidisciplinary system of government pressure on social media services to censor individuals deemed to be spreading "misinformation" about COVID-19, January 6, and other controversies.

The White House, largely cheered on by the new breed of anti-"platforming" journalist, went on a censorial bender in 2021, with Biden accusing Facebook of "killing people," Surgeon General Vivek Murthy announcing a "whole-of-society" effort to combat the "urgent threat to public health" posed by "health misinformation," and then–press secretary Jen Psaki singling out a "disinformation dozen" ripe to be booted off platforms. As late as 2022, Psaki was urging Spotify to do "more" and "be vigilant" about removing the COVID-related content of the world's most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan.

Spotify, the leading audio streamer, mostly refused to blink in the face of White House pressure, Boomer-rock boycotts (led by Neil Young and Joni Mitchell), and the obligatory internal staff revolt. Through the Twitter Files and other investigative efforts (such as the Facebook Files, exposed by Reason's Robby Soave), a legal fight was launched by some of the censored COVID voices, though the eventual June 2024 Supreme Court decision in Murthy v. Missouri was dissatisfying to free speech groups. Substack, which has taken in so many refugees from mainstream media, has survived sporadic journalistic attempts to smear the outfit as having a "Nazi problem." The establishment revolt against the independents, when squinted at in a certain way, seems to be in retreat.

The final weeks of the presidential campaign produced supporting evidence aplenty for that thesis. Trump and Vance traveled happily to Austin for the full Joe Rogan experience; Harris, after failing to convince Rogan to come to her for a shorter interview, declined. 60 Minutes bizarrely published two wholly different Harris responses to a question about Israel (one on TV, the other online), then refused to share the unedited exchange. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today all decided last minute to not make presidential endorsements, triggering journalistic outrage about "anticipatory obedience" to the incoming authoritarian. And when Trump won decisively, a New York Times subheading warned that "America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history."

But though the establishment may be greatly weakened, there is still some power left in the host—not in attracting audience, but in colluding with the government.

"I was invited to talk about risks to the First Amendment," Taibbi said at the September 29 Rally to Rescue the Republic in Washington, D.C., "but to spare the suspense: That battle is lost. State censorship is a fact in most of the West. In February our European allies began observing the Digital Services Act, which requires Internet platforms to enforce judgments of state-appointed content reviewers called 'trusted flaggers.' Everything we found in the Twitter Files fits in a sentence: An alphabet soup of enforcement agencies informally is already doing pretty much the same thing as Europe's draconian new law." The excesses of 2021 may have been rolled back, but as long as people in power agree with people in the withering rump of the journalism industry about the dangers of the rabble outside, speech squelching is inevitable.

Yet it will take more than just sturdy opposition to the censorship-industrial complex to grow a better informational ecosystem. The same Rally to Rescue the Republic that featured Taibbi also included Jack Posobiec, a popularizer of the "Pizzagate" theory that a D.C. restaurant was the secret hub of a power-elite pedophile ring, as well as fellow Pizzagater Lara Logan, who was banned from interviews on Newsmax in 2022 after saying during one that "the open border is Satan's way of taking control of the world through all of these people who are his stooges and his servants….You know, the ones who want us eating insects, cockroaches and that while they dine on the blood of children." People can rightly fight for the rights of lunatics without succumbing to lunacy themselves.

The unbundling of the newspaper has allowed consumers of political information to zero in on the people, material, communities, and delivery systems they find most valuable. The news outlets that survive and thrive—including, thankfully, the one you are reading—have adapted to this rapidly changing environment by enhancing unfettered access to audience favorites, jumping headlong into new technology and products, and above all not losing their ever-lovin' minds (or morals) in the face of political or peer pressure. If legacy media continue abandoning the field of trustworthy verification, there will be more room for new green shoots to spring up.

But only if consumers demand it. There have been markets for political information for as long as there has been politics, so it stands to reason those best at providing it—whether individual, niche group, or large corporate—will be rewarded with attention. The postjournalism era thus far has not been that great either for journalism or for politics, but the solution to both may just come from inside the house. Want a better media and government? Start demanding it.

1 posted on 12/30/2024 12:14:45 PM PST by nickcarraway

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