| Have you exhaled for the first time in four years yet? Just in case you were unafraid to watch a press conference again, or becoming pleasantly un-triggered every time you heard the word "President" and realized they were talking about Joe Biden, corporate media is here to un-level the playing field. In a time where our Senate is about to put our outgoing President on trial for inciting an insurrection, our government agencies are investigating which elected representatives may have had a hand in it, our current President is unveiling his plans for combatting a deadly pandemic - and Grim Reaper McConnell remains committed to obstructing all of it - The New York Times is hard at work investigating whether or not the President owns a Rolex. If you read this newsletter, you know that every week is not even a new example of this behavior, every week is several. We can't even shake our heads at Rolex-gate, before seeing an ABC News story framing the popularity of Biden's policies as "One-third opposes" instead of "Two-thirds supporting." This is combined with digital outlets like Axios rewriting the roles people like Kelly Anne Conway and Dr. Debra Birx played in this destruction, every single Sunday show laundering Republican lies and Politico giving a platform to noted bigot Ben Shapiro. What do we do with a corporate media that seems unable or unwilling to learn their lesson; that thinks being unbiased means having one standard for Republicans and one for Democrats? It's enraging that the media spent four years positioning a gold encrusted Trump as a populist, a man of the people, and now want to claim Joe "Scranton" Biden as some kind of elitist. And it makes you wonder why? What advantage is in it for them? (Now, that's a story I'd read.) This weekend we witnessed the firing of contract reporter Lauren Wolfe from the New York Times. Lauren has an incredible record of reporting on war and atrocities against women and children. But she had the temerity to tweet that she had "chills" at seeing Biden's plane landing. The New York Times has since released a brief statement implying that it wasn't just the one tweet. And sources say that Wolfe had been cautioned about social media posts in the past. Yes, large news organizations have policies on what their employees can say on personal social media and for good reason. Yes, it remains essential that we have an adversarial press, who report without fear or favor. But the hypocrisy is frustrating. Why is the New York Times so much more concerned with journalists looking biased in a tweet than they are with them looking biased in an actual piece of reporting? And let's be clear-eyed here. The truth is that there is no such thing as 100% objectivity. Reporters and journalists aren't robots, they're not AI. They are human beings with feelings. And that's a good thing, otherwise headlines would have read, "Patriots Almost Succeed in Defeating Socialists" on January 7th. Instead of mourning the millions dead from COVID, headlines would proclaim, "Over-population Curbed at Last!" Feelings should never change facts. But facts do change feelings. Trump and his administration cut a swath of destruction the last four years that culminated in 420,000 Americans dead, hundreds of families separated from their children, and a deadly insurrection that almost took the lives of elected officials. It's a fact that those things are unspeakable atrocities and you should feel relieved at an administration change. And is it not falling to fascism if we do not acknowledge the damage of these things? Aren't we then being complicity biased? Have we not seen the damage done when we don't acknowledge it? We barely survived this time. Will we be so lucky the next? And that's the biggest luxury about what we do at DAME. Absolutely no one is getting fired for being relieved.
Jennifer Reitman
Founder/Publisher
PS. You know I always love hearing from our readers. Tell me about how you felt inauguration day. How did you watch and mark the day? Have you exhaled yet? Are you already thinking about 2022? And as always, if there's something you think we should over let us know! Email me anytime at jennifer.reitman@damemagazine.com and share your thoughts!
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