McConnell was rushed to the hospital in mid-June for an undisclosed medical reason, with his spokesperson David Popp issuing a vague statement regarding the reason for the hospitalization. It wasn’t until last week that media outlets learned McConnell had been discovered “unconscious” at his home and had to be administered CPR for potential “cardiac arrest.”
It remains unclear why McConnell’s staff refused to share details, but some, including independent journalist and crypto commentator Adam Cochran, have a theory.
“In Kentucky, a special election to replace a Senator will NOT be called if it’s closer than 3 months till the next election,” Cochran wrote Saturday in a social media post on X. “If McConnell’s condition is clearly unfit for office, they’d hide that to avoid being forced to submit a resignation letter until after that date.”
“So all they have to do is drag their feet until [the second Tuesday in August], then tell you that he didn’t make it,” Cochran continued. “And in turn block Massie from disrupting an otherwise safe Republican seat.”
David Morris, a journalist and author, also appeared to endorse the theory with a brutal jab at McConnell and his legacy.
“Mitch McConnell remaining technically alive for an extra three weeks because of a manipulative procedural maneuver is exactly how he would have wanted to go out,” Morris wrote in a social media post on X.
I’m not sure the last time that we had that. I’m Gen X, so it must have come before. The “liberal media” I was always told was so damned liberal always seemed to be hosted by people with suits and ties and working as part of some megacorp, and that mostly spouted corporate compliant things. In any case, pre-internet, things were pretty tightly gate-kept by a small set of corporations.
And Ronnie Raygun worked to make that even worse - the decades since has been a long march toward the right, at least on cable and the airwaves…
Maybe I’m too young, though if I watch something like Network, it seems the boomers didn’t really have an independent press either. Chomsky is much older and seemed to make reference to a lively press in his youth.
These days, I like that Meidas Touch sends people in to ask questions. Mostly you get to see Maga Mike Johnson fleeing the scene while trying to avoid answering anything, LOL.
I’d say the downfall first started around the time 24-hour cable news came along (starting in 1980 but it didn’t happen right away) along with things like the abolishing of the fairness doctrine (1987). That and the need to fill 24 hours with “news” led to the shift to more op-ed content than news. More and more of these opinion news cable channels followed.
Then the deterioration really began to snowball with the internet and proliferation of “news” outlets tailored for specific audiences, culminating with the rise of social media (I mean, what hasn’t been negatively affected by the rise of social media/oligarch-owned web 2.0) and the purchasing of all media outlets, including newspapers, by corporations and later by the rising oligarchs.
All this meant the “news” became just another type of profit-driven enterprise, with a need to compete for ratings, that shifted it from hard news to entertainment and nothing more than parroting of press releases with no independent investigation. Ultimately leading to the demise of the last bastion of independence, print journalism.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t still some journalists doing good investigative work, just that they are pretty much on their own now. I don’t know much about Meidas Touch, but if they’re actually out there asking questions and reporting, instead of just sitting around spouting opinions and outrage like most political podcasts, that’s a good thing.