Switch Your Straight News Diet from Political Media to Financial Media

But financial media is wedded to objective reality, even if that reality has been branded as partisan in the political realm. Financial media clearly understands that in this day and age, reality has a liberal bias. This is where I can direct this plea in a productive direction for liberals: change your homepage from the New York Times or Washington Post to the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal. You will see a marked difference in how stories get covered.

This is a sentiment I have been seeing more often, and there is a very clear explanation for why the financial media, animated by the highest tariff rate since 1934, are being more honest about this right-wing authoritarian moment than our political media telling everyone lies about things Charlie Kirk said and did. The death of journalism is right in front of our eyes, and it’s being authored not by Trump, but by a mainstream political media taking important context out to fabricate a version of the right-wing that doesn’t exist. The financial press largely doesn’t do this in their straight news writeups, and they present the right-wing as the right-wing presents themselves. Why?

Because they have different readers than the NYT or WP, who provide something of an entertainment product for liberals. The readers of the FT and WSJ rely on these newspapers to inform trillions of dollars of investments every day. Finance has a way of making everyone honest, as it’s the only realm in our capitalist world where you do in fact, have to put your cards on the table at some point. Politics is different, because it is naturally an exercise in peddling bullshit to varying degrees that has been taken to its logical extreme by the GOP. It’s easy to say someone isn’t a fascist in the political realm when you want to please both sides and keep getting scoops, but a lot harder in the financial realm when people hear the word fascism and think capital controls which lead to capital flight. If that’s on the table, and the WSJ isn’t afraid to say so, that’s very important context for their readers.

Jeff Bezos fired the last Black columnist at The Washington Post today, Karen Attiah, because she shared a quote Charlie Kirk said. “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously,” Kirk said on The Charlie Kirk Show on July 13th, 2023. “You have to go steal a white person’s slot.” This is a chilling moment for free speech, where simply because a man died in a tragic and senseless event, we cannot share the things he said without facing retribution. People around the Trump administration are literally making lists of people who exercised their free speech in the wake of Kirk’s assassination in order to get them fired, or worse. Cancel culture is here, and it’s the animating principle of the American right-wing.

And the mainstream political press is not equipped to handle this broad-based bad faith attack on the nature of reality itself. It has become far too reliant on sources leaking information to them. Their bothsides coverage has a way of continuing the flow of low-level scoops that has turned everyone into a Politico-style D.C. gossip rag, all while capital-J journalists at the WSJ get a copy of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday present with the president’s signature on it. Despite the hollowing out of mainstream media this year, especially at WaPo who seemingly lost every great journalist in every section they had, there are still plenty of very good journalists working to try to portray the world as it is in mainstream media. The problem is they operate in a culture driven by editors and management who simply do not believe in objective reality. I cannot count the number of times I have read straightforward “the president probably did crimes” copy in the NYT, only to see some braindead editor slap a headline on it like “Trump pursues bold new constitutional powers.” The people in power in mainstream media care more about feelings than facts, and the right-wing has done a brilliant job co-opting this cowardice for their own ends.

Take note that Trump is suing the Wall Street Journal, and not the New York Times. The world is changing, and the darlings of liberal media have so comprehensively failed at their core duty that they are having laps run around them by a Rupert Murdoch publication. It’s hard not to feel like NYT and WP are relics of a 20th century era that is dying in front of our eyes. FT and WSJ are not perfect, as the WSJ produced the worst moment of journalism this year that they had to functionally retract with an extensive editor’s note, attributing a false story about Kirk’s shooter being transgender to the inherently untrustworthy Pam Bondi Department of Justice. Despite proving they too are capable of braindead stenography, these financial papers are orders of magnitude more competent than Beltway political media because stenography is not baked into their business model, and they have a readership far more dedicated to needing to learn about objective reality than the folks on the left poisoned by infotainment. One of the best things I did for my news consumption the last couple of years was shift my straight news diet from political media to financial media, and I would encourage everyone to do the same.