Catherynne M. Valente
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No One's Watching the Watchmen
🕑 Added 2025-09-09 15:56:31 +0000 UTCNote: This essay is not the regular monthly essay, but cross-posted from my Substack, where I keep all my uncozy rageful political thoughts. My policy has always been to cross-post any paywalled posts there, here if requested by a paying member. Thus...voila.
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While I was writing about the beautiful dream of Trump probably dying and how the media is handling it, which is to say barely touching it and enjoying a refreshing cool drink on the porch while still basking in the dopamine jacuzzi they filled to the brim by having hounded a sitting President out of his own re-election campaign for much less hyenashit insane behavior; I wrote a line, then kept moving it down the essay hoping to find a space to explore the idea…until I ran out of room entirely.
But that’s what the follow-up posts are for!
So here goes.
The line was this: legacy media no longer reports on threats to citizens or America itself, at least not with any real enthusiasm. It reports breathlessly on threats to the regime. We are no the presumed audience of the fourth estate.
I grew up in a world where journalists were almost axiomatically heroic. Somewhere between a detective, a superhero, a spy, a daredevil, a soldier, an an artist. Woodward and Bernstein, Hunter S. Thompson, Nellie Bly, David Simon, a barrel of fictional versions of the dogged reporter who would not rest until they spoke truth to power and exposed the story. Sure, they wanted the byline and the fame, but the way to get that was by unearthing power’s misdeeds.
Before the election, I thought the media’s continual fawning over and normalcy-laundering of Trump came from a kind of lazy ennui, even hero-burnout, a longing, in the face of journalism continuing to be almost unbelievably devalued, to go back to those fabulous four years where you could make your name by commenting on power’s tweets instead of the long, hard, unlovely work of actually investigating deep stories. Because oh, how we worshipped journalists from 2016-2020, calling them heroes of democracy and justice and truth for doing…pretty much what anyone with a Twitter account and Google News alerts was doing. If Trump came back, so would the mind-spirallingly profitable halcyon days of getting national headlines and a book deal for musing hey I think this guy is up to no good in even the most modest of publications and/or just the internet like the rest of us mud-splattered peasants.
But I was wrong.
I don’t know what the late-breaking fuck is going on with the media these days. Trump literally opens an alligator-forward concentration camp and it’s vanished from all discourse in a week. Rights are being trampled, the economy is broken and the President’s move was to fire the person whose job it was to analyze the economy for the government, and big yawns from the press. The President yells into a camera that the sex-trafficking files he ran on releasing don’t exist and never did, then openly tasks the FBI with redacting his name from them, despite his name appearing in the Epstein Files more often than Spider-Man in a Spider-Man comic, and it would seem the professional journalist corps isn’t remotely motivated to be the one to get ahold of any of it, even though that scoop would make them a bonafide fucking historical figure someone would make a musical about in 20 years. (Can you imagine this shit happening in the 70s and nobody tracking down leads?) The military is now constantly deployed against American cities for no real stated reason, we rarely even hear much beyond the initial banshee-screech of a press conference, at which not one reporter, Fox-affiliated or otherwise, will ask one single question that even plays footsie with what the fuck? a question, phrased nicely, that is the goddamned basis of all journalism and the point of having press conferences.
Oh, they’ll note these things happened, but they don’t stick with the story, they don’t explain the context, and they don’t ask any questions about these actions that threaten regular, everyday people. It’s not just what they report, it’s the enthusiasm with which a story is pursued. That enthusiasm and stubbornness is why entrenched power was once afraid enough of the media to spin up a decades-long plan to castrate it.
This is why Fox News exists. It’s got what parents’ brains crave!
So what do they report enthusiastically on?
Things that do or don’t threaten the administration. Dems in disarray or Gavin Newsom shitposting. SCOTUS decisions that might halt or further their psychotic little plans to make everybody always miserable forever except like three guys in Missouri and Stephen Miller. The reporting on the Epstein situation was oriented around the possibility that the base was turning on Trump, not the inherent horror of a sitting President clearly having been deeply involved with a child sex trafficking ring and using the US government to make it all go away. So was the reporting on Musk and DOGE—the media discussed how people felt about it and whether those feelings would amount to actual resistance far more often and far more loudly than they ever bothered to look into what was being done, and then, naturally, immediately forgot about the whole thing.
The whole TACO thing stayed in the headlines for longer than Trump declaring war on Chicago or plans to invade Greenland. Because TACO was a threat to Trump’s big feelings, so it was a Very Important Story.
Ha ha he’s so funny and cool he’s gonna save humanity!
They’re not talking to us anymore at all.
The audience is presumed to be the regime itself. The regime needs to know which of Trump’s actions are actually going to cause problems or not. Apparently, neither the people in the cities Trump is targeting nor the rest of us need a minute-by-minute breakdown of what’s actually going to happen to them on the streets of their own fucking neighborhoods.
And all this is manifestly helping the regime accomplish its goals. One of the biggest problems with resistance to the Rubbish Reich is that it’s almost impossible to tell which of the terrifying babblings of this Voltron of Shit is actually something they mean to do or just whatever popped into Trump’s koala-skull this morning. And that’s partly because the media obediently forgets about each Bad Choices Announcement as soon as it can, so no one knows what’s happening in reality and what was a grandpa complaint metastasized into deployable policy.
Leaving us all paralyzed, not knowing what to protest or unify around.
No wonder social media has turned into a crowdsourced newsroom. It’s absolutely pathetic that the biggest pressure on the administration to release the Epstein Files is randos posting about it online in response to every move they make to distract from it. But no one else is doing much of anything, and someone has to apply the comically minimal pressure it takes to make that sack of old chalky white dogshit back down.
Now, I keep saying “the media” like it’s one thing. I do it because it’s easy, which is why everyone does it. I mean what we still think of as the Actual Media and not the Online Hive Mind. Cable news, broadcast news, newspapers and magazines, and well-known professional reporters. All of which the techbro tyrants-in-waiting are SUPER eager to replace with AI, so you’d think in their own self-interest somebody would slap Curtis Yarvin’s dumb face on the cover of TIME.
But of course the media isn’t one thing, nothing is. It’s a bunch of individuals, most of which are staring down the train tunnel at the same Snowpiercer that’s been grinding their industry up into bug-bricks since the late 90s. And that’s why I don’t understand what’s up.
Because I don’t think it’s just the oh-so-easy, oh-so-comforting billionaires bought it all oh well better give up thought-bricking lefty cliche.
And oh yes it is comforting to us on the left. Billionaires own the media a. has been true for pretty much as long as there’s been an organized media and b. it wraps us up in a cozy blanket of cynicism and superiority while gently soothing away the very notion that anything can be done about it. Like blaming the concept of capitalism for every single thing, from things costing money to Kevin in Boston not being able to get a date to me spilling my coffee this morning, it makes us feel like we’ve identified the problem with our excellent brains, but since others have less excellent brains, there’s nothing to be done until the revolution, so we’re not at fault and can go about excellently braining.
The rich have always owned the media. Every single story about a heroic journalist I’ve ever read, watched or heard about involves that journalist being threatened by their bosses to drop the story because the powers that be demand it.
Sometimes those threats include actually possibly getting killed unless they go write about exotic rabbit breeders in the Poconos or whatever. And that’s not dramatic license, it’s just true.
What the fuck happened to that energy? Yeah, I know there’s a lot going on. But the Gish Gallop strategy despots love so much doesn’t work if the press doesn’t drop every story the minute a new one whack-a-moles up. And we all know that, because as though they were the single entity everyone accuses them of being, the media with one unified breath aimed a firehose of acid at Joe Biden for months until they successfully burned him out of his own campaign, and I haven’t seen one piece reflecting about that top-to-bottom shitshow.
Whether he actually was crumbling to dust or not isn’t even relevant. Turns out, the media can hold a single thought until action is taken. They managed to not memory hole Gaza for two years (until Trump was elected, then we heard 90% less of it overnight) and they managed to come together to defeat the greatest threat to the American way of life, nay, the world—Joseph Biden stuttering.
I don’t think the regime-facing attitude started with pushing Biden out, but in retrospect, that whole pantomime was never citizen-facing, we know scientifically most of America doesn’t even pay attention until the Monday before the election. It faced the Democratic power structure to try to convince them to eject their leader, and, secondarily, the GOP campaign so they could leverage a perceived weakness that got its shit perceived because the media decided NOW was the time to fuck up a President, then go back to fucking sleep again for fucking ever.
It’s flatline-brained to even try to point out that Trump makes no sense ever and appears to be slowly inflating like a misshapen Macy’s balloon and no one in legacy media is calling for any kind of resignation or investigation. We all see it, even conservatives, they just like it. And yeah, that’s probably partly because billionaires don’t like paying taxes so I guess whatever dystopia is fine as long as they don’t have to…literally not pay taxes ever because the current system freely allows that leave us the fuck alone you weirdos.
But they always owned the media, and it’s never been this bizarrely quiet about CURRENT EVENTS because individuals within the system did their jobs even when the system didn’t, and threatened those who tried.
And now, it seems that like everyone else, journalists have given up both their own self-interest (and profit-motive, so don’t blame capitalism, they’d ALL make more money exposing Trump and playing to an audience of the people) fallen under this spell of unreality, this daze of ennui and fatalism that’s more effective than any boots on the ground have ever been at keeping America cowed.
We can’t even begin to hear the truth when its champions aren’t even speaking to us.
Comments
Randall Brynsvold
The Media loves The Horse Race, especially since they have found they can choose which Narrative to magnify. More than that, it loooooves The Circus with the continuous access to the spectacle of crime, corruption, and cruelty that Trump allows them, reported as if it were another kind of exciting competition (in between directly publishing the statements of the Ringmaster and his Clowns).
Jonathan Kamens
I think the media are refusing to stick to stories and do the work to follow them to their logical conclusions because, quite frankly, they are scared. "It's a lot easier to find people willing to kill for a paycheck than it is to find people willing to die for one." That's a bit hyperbolic, but only a bit. We're living in fascism, and in fascism, journalists who make the powers that be too angry at best find themselves in prison and at worst find themselves having fallen out very high windows. Nobody was ever going to kill Woodward and Bernstein or deport them to CECOT for their reporting.
