Trent Telenko has already addressed the free-fall of credibility when it comes to elements of the federal government in the wake of the suspicious death in supposed tightly-supervised custody of Jeffrey Epstein, the Pedo-Prince of Perv Island. The resulting discussion thread provided plenty of food for thought, as well as clarifying the degree of contempt that elements of the so-called ruling classes and the federal justice bureaucracy apparently feel towards those ruled – in that they can’t even be bothered to tell a believable story regarding the last days of the Pimp to the Privileged.
Once upon a time, we had – or at least, thought we had – a national news media which might, with the wind blowing in the right direction, and assuming that the reporters at the top of the national news-food chain weren’t best buddies with the studly, hip, and dynamic president and his glamorous wife – that national news media would cover the important stories.

And not in the Iowahawk sense – with a pillow until they stopped moving. No, we could assure ourselves that what we read in most of our non-fringe-oriented newspapers and magazines was as close to verified facts as possible, not merely a hastily re-written Democrat Party press release. In cities with rival newspapers, those papers checked each other. The national television reporters could at least – most of the time – pretend convincingly a level of gravitas and public responsibility. They were serious people, then; they had credibility, although Ted Baxter, the hamster-brained anchorman and comic foil on the Mary Tyler Moore Show – he was played for laughs, as was Ron Burgundy a generation later.

Alas, now nearly all of them are Ted Baxter and Ron Burgundy, even the female anchors and reporters; venial, partisan, egotistical and apparently as dumb as boxes of hammers, richly deserving every scrap of ridicule aimed in their direction. A self-important jerk like Chris Cuomo will have the nickname of “Fredo” hung onto him from now on; April Ryan is a bully at second hand, Don Lemon is accused of sexually feeling up the help in the Hamptons, and Jim Acosta is a legend in his own mind. And that’s only this week’s toll of media mis-stepping; at the going rate, the major networks are turning into a kind of Riverdance clogging show.

These antics, and naked partisanship have serious repercussions – not least for those news consumers. We are left to patch together a narrative, drawn from pieces gathered here and there; from bloggers, social media posts and a handful of trusted voices, from knowledgeable commenters and from our own observation. That’s it. The major national media outlets have killed their own credibility wholesale. They went all out for Clinton (both of them) and all-out for Obama; now they are drowning, in Trump-hate, and by extension, choking on that hate for every one of those deplorables who supported him, even if we voted for him only because he wasn’t Her Inevitableness, the Dowager Duchess of Chappaqua.

Discuss, as you wish – the immolation of the national establishment media, and speculate on what will be left standing among the ruins.