The State of the Onion Address, 2020 Edition

As the glow from the flaming dumpster fire that was 2020 appears in our rearview mirror, we can finally take a look back with hope, namely the hope that 2020 doesn’t come back for an encore. Unfortunately for us, the media’s malpractice will be coming back like the food and drink after a really intense bender.

The state of journalism last year was the gasoline thrown on top of the aforementioned dumpster fire. Big stories, like a little bug known as COVID-19, got covered intensely by people whose only experience with medicine is drinking a Dr. Pepper, while other stories, like Jeffrey Epstein’s “suicide” or Hunter Biden’s business details, were treated with a dismissive hand wave in spite of there being more red flags than a Chinese military parade. That is, of course, when they weren’t busy being the sycophantic propaganda arm of the Left.

But don’t you dare call the media out for acting like the lapdogs they were! They are real reporters working on real news, like…oh, I don’t know…continuing to follow the Russiagate narrative after being embarrassed by the lack of actual facts involved in it. That was certainly more important than reporting the actual news or following up on stories that might make the Left look bad. You know, like dragging a kid through the mud for shooting Leftist thugs who were attacking him first. The interwebs often did the work the “real news” people were reluctant to do, but the “real news” folks could be counted on to provide only half the story to advance their ideological ends.

Speaking of which, how’d that work out for you media types with Nick Sandmann?

The only other constant in modern media outside of the fact they’re all terrible is that they don’t learn from their mistakes. Oddly enough, that perpetuates the terribleness, which makes it all the more humorous to me. A lot of that comes down to ego. High profile journalists (which should never be a thing, in my opinion) are often notorious for having skin thinner than the plot of a Michael Bay movie. When they get caught screwing up, being general asshats, or looking down their noses at the rest of us, there’s a tiny bit of satisfaction that comes from watching them fail time and time again. It’s schadenfreudelicious!

Over the past year, the media decided to be fact checkers for anything and everything President Donald Trump said. And they failed. A lot. As of this writing, they still haven’t admitted the President was right when he said there would be a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2020. In fact, the media and their handpicked experts said it would be impossible. It makes you wonder why anyone pays attention to these self-professed defenders of truth when they can’t even find it.

This also applies to the self-professed fact checkers the media love to use to “debunk” the President and his supporters. In a move that can only be called peak 2020, the media did a handful of fact checks on…the Babylon Bee, a satirical website. And this is after popular fact checking website Snopes fact checked the Bee just the year before and were deservedly mocked for it.

Remember what I said earlier about the media not learning from their mistakes?

The funny thing (at least to me) in all of this is the people who profess to check and know the facts so we don’t have to are the ones who struggle the most with the facts and correcting the record when they get their facts wrong. This is why I take the media’s portrayal of themselves with a great lake of salt. At this point, you’re better getting your news from your local Super Shopper that has been left in a festering pile of garbage.

And speaking of festering piles of garbage, let’s talk about Twitter. Granted Twitter is to news what Jerry Springer is to quality TV programming, but more and more people (including journalists) are using it to report on events as they happen in as close to real time as we can get. The only problems with this type of on-the-spot reporting are 1) the information may not always be accurate, 2) information can be mixed with opinion easily, and 3) it’s fucking Twitter. And if you think journalists are slow to admit they were wrong, Twitter users rarely, if ever, correct their mistakes. They just prefer to ignore them or double down while insulting anyone who disagrees with them. Which, as we know, is the only way to win debates.

In closing, it will be fun to watch the media who spent so much time fact checking fall asleep on the job as Joe Biden starts his administration. If 2020 is any indication, 2021 in the media is going to be lit.

Just like a dumpster fire!

Author: Thomas

I'm a writer and a ranger and a young boy bearing arms. And two out of the three don't count.