A Hopeful Light in the New Year

The post-Advent blues came earlier than usual this new year. We didn’t even make it to the traditional twelfth tattoo day of Christmas before disaster struck. Twin terror attacks in America’s most sybaritic cities: Nevada and New Orleans.

In the French Quarter, in 2025’s newborn stage, Shamsud-Din Jabbar manically piloted a Ford F-150 into a crowd of revelers, his ISIS flag waving riotously from the hitch pole in the deadly wake. After his murderous plow, he exchanged shots with police officers before a few well-aimed slugs ended his life. Law enforcement later discovered a cache of guns and explosives in the cab of his electric truck. (Think of the emissions cut while he mowed down helpless pedestrians!) Jabbar’s kill count is officially fourteen innocents.

Two time zones away in Las Vegas, Elon Musk proved his auto-company’s mettle when a crazed man—possibly suffering from a diagnosable case of TDS—committed slambang seppuku via kerosene-doused cinch sack of whisker biscuits. Matthew Livelsberger may have been making a flashy political statement when he tried detonating his rented Cybertruck in front of Trump’s hotel just off the Strip. Poor luck in underestimating the most oofy and autistic mad scientist on earth. Elon’s futuro hauler doesn’t just resemble a truck with PlayStation graphics—it’s steeled against conflagration better than any Twisted Metal battle ride. Whatever collateral damage Livelsberger hoped to inflict was mitigated, cabined to the vehicle’s interior. Livelsberger succeeded only in melting his own body, and that was after eating his own gun.

Dual domestic terror strikes on New Year’s Day—not an auspicious start to the calendar! And it’s certainly not fodder for an anthemic Bono blast. In both cases, the assailants appeared to have suffered from acute nut crackage—far more than your average case of Weihnachtscholer.

January is never an inspiring month, what with the packing away of Christmas lights, the resumption of salaried drudgery, all the circling back on email requests you begged of in December, the sun’s gloomy retreat, the moving in of blue-slate clouds, heighted heating bills, snow-dumped roads that keep schools closed and your kids hanging perilously from your antique chandelier in the background of the Zoom call with your boss.

But fear not! One must not have a mind of winter to regard our bitterly cold time. A heartwarming draft of good news blew as the year sunset: that news itself is losing cache. The Associated Press reported the day after Christmas that “two-thirds of American adults say they have recently felt the need to limit media consumption about politics and government because of overload.”

Better pop open another Moët! It sounds like after another shillyshally election season, the American people are waking from their media-binge hangover and are ready for a headline sabbatical. Plus, the NFL playoffs have kicked off, which will be a nice, if short, distraction from the click-mongering machines ready to turn every Trump grunt into a Führer foghorn.

Is the ebbed enthusiasm for news really that, to invoke contemporary press patois, all that “BREAKING OMG FLASH CLICK READ NOW”? It shouldn’t be a sudden scoop, even for the most partial observer. The brazen coverup of Joe Biden’s mental enervation, and stalking senility, for years should have been a fat, wooden stake through our vampiric media’s black heart. Why would any serious civic participant accept the sycophantic puffing system that has been White House press corps. and the Biden Administration?

It turns out even that fabled American independent, untethered from partisan loyalty, is losing faith in our fourth estate. A Gallup poll from October displayed a precipitous plunge in trust of prestige journalism. The pollster found “more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount” while another 33% have “not very much” confidence in the media as an impartial source.

Only 12% of Republicans reportedly take the pundit guild seriously. (On the right, we use a technical term for press sniffers: nitwits.) Contrast that meager percentage to Democrats, over half of whom proclaim great fidelity before the flack frat—which is, on further thought, a low number seeing as every national newspaper is functionally a blue-party pamphleteer.

But what about the almighty “middle,” those undecided rogues who buck both parties? Only about a quarter of self-identified independents give any credence to mainstream news offerings. In true skewed fashion, when liberal-journalist Kevin Drum reported the trend on Twitter, he brushed out the independent gauge, snarking: “Americans have not lost trust in the media. Republicans have.”

A real mystery growing media distrust is! Centuries from now, historians will have to parse through our digital detritus to discover why Americans by and large tuned out the dateline broadcasters and front-page printers. What they’ll find, of course, is a seedy track record of mendacity, a rusted-out narrative-massaging machine, and the trailings of a scurvy scrum of dissemblers slanting every single dispatched word to gloss their ideological priors.

Janet Malcom famously asserted that “every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” Fewer eyes on our penny-brained press is a nice sparkle-burst to begin the new year. Though, with a new Trump term jumping off, overly scandalized coverage may soon see a redux.