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The media-anticipated great blue Democratic election wave was not even a ripple. The much-vaunted Russian interference didn’t happen. The violent accusations against the postmaster general of voter suppression bandied all around the Trump-hating media never occurred either. America’s greatest contemporary failure is the media. Their debacle and that of their polling affiliates in the election is only the latest in a long sequence of profound American media failures and breaches of public trust. They were eager accomplices in the propagation of the monstrous falsehood that there had been criminal collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016. Some were willing collaborators but most were witless dupes in constantly circulating lurid calumnies about the president’s alleged treason. When that malignant canard floundered into oblivion there was scarcely a word of self-criticism in all the press of the United States. The New York Times passed off a virtual janitor in the Homeland Security Department as a senior White House official anonymously defaming the president in their pages. Joe Biden, on the night before the election, repeated the total falsehood confected by the editor of the Atlantic magazine that the president had described American war dead as “suckers and losers.”
The national American media almost never reported that 80 per cent of coronavirus sufferers are afflicted also by other life-threatening ailments, or that even as more and more people are infected, 99 per cent of them recover and are thereafter immune for at least some period, or that a great many who have contracted the coronavirus in the United States and other advanced Western countries have yet to be reported, which means that these countries are a good deal closer to a state of what is inelegantly called “herd immunity” than has been reported. Even in such an electoral Armageddon as this, with millions of ballots to be recounted, American newscasters of all persuasions are constantly, as if to reassure themselves, announcing that America’s electoral and justice systems are, wait for it and brace yourselves, ”the envy of the world.” The U.S. is a half-jungle; it is magnificent in its way, and operates on a scale the world has not seen since the height of the Roman Empire, but it repels much of the world. That doesn’t matter; the United States is a democracy and the Americans can run their country any way they want and it’s no one else’s business; but the imputation to the rest of us of being prostrated with envy of American life is a fantasy.
