I’m begging corporate media to stop being so polite and accommodating

Business as usual doesn’t work under authoritarianism

Sep 22, 2025

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?

Who is Larry Ellison, who might soon become the world's richest person? | CNN Business — **Answer:** It’s this creepy fucker/Trump pal/natural blonde Larry Ellison. He’s worth nearly $400 billion and his nepo son is the one who just bought Paramount.

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.

I watched All the President's Men (1976) : r/iwatchedanoldmovie — Make hot people taking down presidents a thing again.

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: