Q So having ripped the umpire jersey off their backs to basically stop the Trump menace, it seems like journalism can't now go back to even a pretense of neutrality. Is that what basically has happened now?
A I think so. I think, and I think you see that in, in what happened, what's happening with the ratings at, at cable stations. Um, you know, I, I warned about this in 2016. I, I, I wrote a column in the, in that summer saying that a model where basically right-wing media wrote about the evils of the Democratic Party and blue media wrote about the evils of the Republican Party. Um, that, that just wouldn't work audience-wise because audiences would no longer trust either, uh, source to be objective and to report the facts, and I think that's where we are now. Like, we, we see the declining, um, the declining ratings of, of companies like CNN and MSNBC, uh, which were previously thought of as more kind of down the road, down the middle of the road news agencies, And now are thought of as politicized, and they're having a terrible trouble kind of going back, because once you cross that line into politics, um, you can't get your reputation back as a neutral fact finder anymore.
AI assessment note: “once you cross that line into politics, um, you can't get your reputation back”