Fox News State Department correspondent Benjamin Hall managed to survive being shot outside of Kyiv, but the network confirmed that two of his colleagues, Pierre Zakrzewski and Oleksandra Kuvshynova, lost their lives while reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Naturally, Susan Glasser of the New Yorker and CNN decided to fit in her hot take while the corpses were still warm.
What a tragedy. A cameraman died covering the war for a TV network that airs a pro-Putin propagandist as its top-rated primetime host. https://t.co/zKHXRciMYu
— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) March 15, 2022
Upon hearing about journalists who risked their lives to cover a democratic, sovereign nation’s resistance to war waged by a nuclear power, Glasser decided to capitalize on two deaths to dunk on a rival network, and considering her home studio from where she did a CNN hit later that day, it’s safe to assume that she did so from the comfort of some multimillion-dollar D.C. manor.
We expect many of the wealthiest and most credentialed cretins of the corporate media to be the most insufferable, but so rarely do we see one do so while giving the lie to the perpetual panic performed by the press. The same person who considers the killing of two journalists covering an actual dictator an opportunity to score a cheap point against Tucker Carlson wouldn’t shut the hell up for four years about Donald Trump throwing a rhetorical temper tantrum about talking heads on Twitter.
‘Bad people.’ ‘Enemies of the people’ I still can’t accept that the President of the United States is saying this. No matter how many times he does it. https://t.co/k0Of0FGSDo
— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) July 6, 2018
Thread on the history of ‘enemy of the people’ which has a long pedigree though Stalin’s Soviet Union in my view is indelibly associated with it, given that this label was a death sentence for millions sent to the Gulag>> https://t.co/qsPFiWmwMy
— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) August 3, 2018
Lived for four years in Russia, where “enemies of the people” was a Stalinist term used to condemn millions to the Gulag
Back in USA, where the President of the United States now refers to journalists over and over again as “enemies of the people”
Happy World Press Freedom Day
— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) May 3, 2019
More journalists have already been killed in Mexico than in the entirety of last year. Since the takeover of the Taliban, Afghanistan has become an open-air prison for active members of the press, as evidenced by the more than 6,000 journalists who lost their jobs, including some 80% of women, and now in Ukraine, the absolute best and bravest American reporters, especially those from CNN and Fox, are literally putting their lives on the line.
Just compare those journalists to the ones with the absolute cushiest jobs in the business who have not stopped complaining — and creating a career by complaining — about Donald Trump.
Trump may have had onion-thin skin when it came to critics, but a tyrant akin to Putin he clearly was not. Still, journalists didn’t just sensationalize Trump as some sort of Final Boss of the Beltway, but also themselves as active antagonists written into the story. Katy Tur cried about covering Trump’s campaign in her 2017 book Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History. April Ryan cried about covering his White House in her 2018 book Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House. In case you missed Jim Acosta crying for four years about how bad and mean the orange man was to him, personally, Acosta too wrote his own book about the trauma of traversing between the White House Rose Garden and the CNN green room, The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America.
Even worse than the journalists who act like tweeting through the halls of Congress is tantamount to standing up to the Castros or the Chinese Communist Party are those who claim their lives are in danger for tweeting from their mansions in McLean or TikTok-ing from their lofts in Los Angeles. Just consider Taylor Lorenz, who crapped on the New York Times for failing to insufficiently fluff her reputation as she abandoned the Grey Lady to write for the Washington Post. Sure, those Fox flacks may have been killed reporting on what could be the beginning of World War III, but Tucker Carlson’s mean monologue about Lorenz once scored her death threats! On the internet!
There are journalists refusing to let democracy die in darkness or let tyrants terrorize the people from voicing truth to power. They’re often just not the ones who refuse to shut up about what heroes they are.
