I’m begging corporate media to stop being so polite and accommodating
Business as usual doesn’t work under authoritarianism
We open with some actually good breaking news: Jimmy Kimmel will be back on the air on Tuesday!!! It’s a testament to the power of boycotting and getting loud in the face of corporate compliance with fascism. But remember this is just the beginning of the fight, so grab your preferred form of caffeine and comfortable walking shoes (Hot Tip, as ever, is deeply open to Canyon Coffee and HOKA sponsorship!!!!) because as we move forward, we cannot become complacent. Attacks on free speech aren’t going away, and legacy media organizations need to be honest about how they cover a man taking regular, public dumps on the Constitution.
Normalizing the abnormal and going along with bullshit talking points is a problem. Like, for example, publishing that Jimmy Kimmel was pulled indefinitely over his “Charlie Kirk comments,” as nearly everyone did, when in fact it was because of pressure from FCC Chair Brendan Carr who went full mobster on a podcast. Or, I don’t know, cable news networks airing full press conferences where Trump can’t pronounce the word ‘acetaminophen,’ but then tells you not to take it.
Framing matters. Context matters. The order of events matters. How you use your airtime and your homepage and your words fucking matters!!!
The core of my frustration is this: just because someone has a job title does not mean they need to be taken seriously. If Trump decides tomorrow that 2+2 actually equals 5, journalists don’t need to talk about it as a “new approach to math.” You can just call it fucking dumb and wrong. That’s actually your entire job.
Yes, this person is technically the president. Those people are his cabinet. That does not make them a) smart b) credible or c) human. But I’ll save my RFK is an alien in a skin suit theories—things I’m allowed to say!!!—for another day.
And bringing on his cult followers like CNN does with Confederate Ken/Scott Jennings to hail the revolutionary way someone new is finally thinking about addition doesn’t provide ideological balance, it just shows the network’s interest in profit over information. Rage over fact. The math was never actually up for debate. So why are you giving them the platform to do so?
As many pointed out over the weekend, one of the first things Putin did to consolidate power was cancel a literal tv puppet show that made fun of him and then install a pro-Kremlin oligarch at the head of the network. And real quick, on that note, have you heard who has Trump’s blessing to buy TikTok in the US?
Last week we lost Robert Redford, an exceptionally hot and talented actor who was not a journalist—but did play one in a movie. That movie, of course, was All The President’s Men, the true story of two intrepid, young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward (Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) who brought down President Richard Nixon with their in-depth and brave Watergate reporting.
Then this week, Trump dumped a Watergate-level request on the internet for all of us to see—let’s be real, it’s not even the first, second, or even 12th one he’s publicly shared—and this was my New York Times push notification:
Listen, I understand that journalism comes with risks. But the risks of not using the real words to describe what is happening are far greater. So please, in the immortal words of MTV, STOP BEING POLITE AND START GETTING REAL.
With all that in mind, we here at Hot Tip (okay fine, it’s just me) are introducing our (my) brand new and hopefully infrequent section where we (I) offer journalists covering the Trump Administration some potential alts to consider to verbal diarrhea and/or dancing around the point:
More Accurate Headline: Scientifically discredited weirdo with brain worm who literally eats roadkill blames women for seeking pain and fever relief during pregnancy with unfounded and disproven claims linking autism to Tylenol
More Accurate Headline: Trump maybe accidentally publishes demand that attorney general do his bidding and go after his enemies Palpatine-style, and you put grandpa in a home for way less
More Accurate Headline: Random woman who met Trump at his golf club and has never prosecuted a single case made lead prosecutor by Trump in Virginia because apparently nothing matters anymore and, shit, where did I leave my xanax—
In closing: Someone doing a great job being real right now?
.Previously on Hot Tip:
"Make hot people taking down presidents a thing again."
If Rep. Crockett ever runs for president, I am going to be embarrassingly stannish for her campaign. Thank you for highlighting the leaders coming up to build a better future for us all!