While American liberals should never allow ourselves to fall prey to Trumpian “the media is the enemy of the people,” style rhetoric, we do have every right to do as John Stewart used to do, and call American media outlets out for their laziness and sensationalism.
Many media outlets seem to have grown afraid of the conservative movement, and mindlessly repeat conservative tropes about inflation and the US Border, while completely ignoring key stories about US policy. This same pattern applies to concerns of the Ukraine, where Russian President Vladimir Putin is pushing to have NATO exclude several countries from their membership, creating a geographic “buffer zone” for Russian military interests.
US Media outlets have routinely failed to provide timely coverage of the Ukraine situation. On the website TheHill.com, a search for stories on Ukraine, conducted on the morning of January 8th showed a story from January 6th on UK threats to sanction Russia if they attacked the Ukraine, but the site had no coverage at all of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s comments on Ukraine, a story that was covered by Al Jazeera, Deutsche-Welle and The Guardian.
The story of Blinken’s comments could not be found on news websites for ABC, NBC or CBS either. The only major US media outlet that appears to be providing on-going and timely coverage of US interests in the Ukraine is CNN. American media outlets are failing the American people. American media consumers need to look at media outlets from outside the US to find coverage of what our own government is doing. This is not a minor story or an example of just being picky, this is a matter of coverage of comments form the United States Secretary of State regarding a part of the world where there are concerns of potential military involvement. Failing to address this issue in daily news coverage represents a catastrophic failure for these news organizations.
This represents a gross failure of the market to address the interests of US News consumers, and the only real solution to this problem is for American media consumers to turn away from US media outlets, and start paying more attention to those outlets that address the concerns of newshounds. We cannot allow large media outlets to get by on branding alone. Their failure to provide a high quality news product should be punished by a loss of viewers and revenue.