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The Resistance and the Democratic Party say “Vote,” but the voter purges have already been done, the polling places restricted, the prohibitive I.D. laws put in place. The national press is writing about it after the fact and before the election, when they can seem to take it seriously without changing anything. For the press do anything more would mean moving beyond its crabbed sense of “politics,” to engage with the reality of the situation. The legacy media have been browbeaten into a perpetual terror of being seen as serving as partisans for the Democratic Party, until those are the only terms on which they understand the world and the work they’re doing.

“The thing I really want to impress on my students is that the commercial case for news only matters if the profits are used to subsidize reporting the public can see, and that civic virtue may be heart-warming, but it won’t keep the lights on, if the lights cost more than cash on hand. Both sides of the equation have to be solved.”