Axios CEO Beclowns Himself Defending Journalisming

Did you know that journalisming is “hard, really hard?”

That is the message that Jim Vanderhai, the CEO and founder of Axios, made to the National Press Club as he was honored for being a Serious Journalist™. 

The best part of this sanctimonious rant is when he uses Qatari-funded Al Jazeera as an exemplar of a media outlet that does real truth-seeking reporting without fear or favor. https://t.co/AIeOH5Ga9W

— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) November 25, 2024

In principle, I like the idea of there being professional journalists who spend most of their waking hours chasing down news and information. After all, the division of labor exists for a reason. Specialization increases productivity, and theoretically, people who specialize in a task increases productivity by orders of magnitude. 

Yes, but. Modern journalists, with few exceptions, suck eggs. They are ideological propagandists; most are lazy and self-satisfied, and their concept of the job is to schmooze with sources and repeat what they are told. They don’t report without fear or favor–they serve the same function as Pravda. 

🚨🚨 Trump has unabashedly surrounded himself with men who’ve said, done or been accused of things that would disqualify them under any other U.S. leader in our lifetimes. This reflects his view of power – and humanity, adviser tell us… https://t.co/IiRwBwOuW0

— Jim VandeHei (@JimVandeHei) November 25, 2024

There are countless examples that prove this, but the most recent is the 2024 election. The campaign itself was driven by left-wing hoaxes, ‘journalists’ calling everything Trump said a lie, false narratives about Biden being ‘sharp as a tack,’ transmitting the spin that the Harris campaign put out, and getting the likely results totally wrong. 

You are the media now https://t.co/3wkI9h0IuM

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 25, 2024

If you were on Twitter/X you had a MUCH better sense of the reality on the ground. The downside of X is that you have to wade through a lot more noise to detect the signal, but at least the signal you discovered was likely true. Reading the Pravda media led you to have a totally distorted view of reality. 

Millions of Democrats were surprised that Trump won. None of you were; our only question was whether he could win outside the margin of cheating. I was cautiously optimistic–cautious because I worried about confirmation bias on my part. 

There are still some journalists out there, of course. Catherine Herridge, for instance, is outstanding. But for the most part it’s clear that journalism is dead. Most good journalists have fled the corporate media altogether and struck out on their own. And you find them on…Twitter/X. 

“Citizen journalism is the future.”
– Elon Musk

We are the media now. pic.twitter.com/QS7cCeD0xe

— The Heart Speaks (@SGabardi1111) November 25, 2024

The funny thing is that Axios is a great example of access media. It isn’t completely worthless, but it’s not exactly the home of in-depth reporting from fearless independent journalists. 

The funnier thing is that I have known many journalists who do little but troll Twitter/X looking for things to write. They depend on Twitter/X as both a source of stories and to promote them. 

‘Who’s Crying Now?’
Not sure who did this; but it’s Beautiful! 🤩 pic.twitter.com/HAVXvzS4lG

— Still🏝️Roaming (@roaming_rn) November 25, 2024

What is really infuriating these ‘journalists’ is that they are being exposed as liars and, as a consequence, are losing their audience fast. Their business model has been upended, their prestige–one of the main compensations for journalists–is in the toilet, and their market value is asymptotically approaching zero in many cases. 

It’s their own fault, too. As with the public health and pharmaceutical establishments, they are the cause of their own decline in trust. People actually would prefer to have trustworthy experts in their fields do the work, be good filters for information, and relieve us of the need to spend hours trying to find out what is really happening. 

But we can’t. The establishment is captured, hates us, manipulates us, and does social experiments on us. We would be stupid to trust them, and now we don’t.