Alternative Media??

I’ll state it up front. I’m tired of Krystal Ball.

Two reasons. First, she criticizes the duopoly while realistically supporting the disgusting Dems in the last analysis. Second, she and Saagar Enjeti continually tell us how we should support them because they’re trying to defeat the stupidity and hypocrisy of the mainstream media (MSM).

Meanwhile, just about every segment on politics is framed within the D-R context, Saagar representing the R viewpoint as a counterweight to Krystal’s D.

Latest example. In a discussion of an Andrew Yang interview with Marianne Wlliamson around the issue of third parties vs. working within the existing two (ONE!), she casually uttered this statement about the ability to deeply influence the course of the current atherosclerotic system: “The only examples we have in modern times is by running in one of the two major parties,” leading Saagar to riff on the influence of William Jennings Bryan on the Democrats way back at the beginning of the 20th Century.

This represents a convenient anti-third-party burying of the fact that Ross Perot won almost 20% (18.9%) of the popular vote in 1992, by running on a populist economic platform that NAFTA would be a disaster for US jobs. One would think that this deserved mention, considering the prescience of Perot’s prediction. And the fact that the election of Bill Clinton in ’92 represented a key moment in the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working and middle classes. To omit a discussion of that key election and Perot’s triumph — his accurate prediction of neoliberalism’s goring of working Americans — is not particularly good journalism. To say the least.

Alternative Media? Nah. Too frequently just an alternate spin on the same old shit.