institutional ability of the press to fully convey the abnormality of this presidency is in doubt

must differentiate.

Isn't profit the prime directive of corporate media, generally speaking?

We often say, "follow the money". Well, shouldn't we just ask what actually motivates mass media to even provide the news and who they are beholden to in order to assure profits to their shareholders, which our system has defined as a legal obligation that transcends all others in a corporate charter.

From that perspective, what does one really expect overall? Trump started the "fake news" meme, from what I remember and that just serves his dictatorial impetus to imply that he and his sources are a reliable venue for "the truth" which is typical of despots.

One problem with that is it just casts the media as a whole as fake, unreliable and completely suspect. That's missing the point and the nuances of the matter. Even Chomsky thinks that the major media are what we turn to in order to find out what is going on nationally and globally. They do have some accuracy and value. What's more subtle are several factors that reveal a demonstrable and obvious bias or deliberate misrepresentation of what is reported, depending on the story and context.

So, the devil is in the details here. The issues are, what is reported, how it is framed and what is not reported or emphasized. In order to ascertain that, the population would have to be more vigilant about how the media influences and manufactures consent, what colors they are tinting our view of the world with, etc. This takes some effort, fact checking and corroboration from reliable sources.

If we want a McNews view, we can just rely on skimming the surface of The Spectacle and we may then be more likely to be victims of our own lack of the ability or ambition to suspend judgment, analyses the information carefully and expand our knowledge.

Now, would you like fries with that and you can supersize your...

Hunter Biden will be subpoenaed. Don Jr claims executive privilege, as do Ivanka, Jerrod, Eric.