When I was younger, I worked as a reporter for a couple of different newspapers. Interesting and very informative work. Informative in the sense that I learned a WHOLE LOT about people, most of which never found its way into my print stories.

But all of it found its way into my understanding of the intricate dances and machinations of local politics and culture. As Spock would say, it was “Fascinating.”

And while I probably had an intuitive understanding of the importance of story when I began my adventures in journalism, the central importance of narrative in our lives really hit home during that time. I realized I wasn’t writing news. I was writing story after story after story so that others could understand what had happened, and why it was important.

Human beings understand the world through stories. Without story, the digits on your page or screen would be just a big ole pile of witless words.

Like many folks, I have been baffled by the way that the current occupant of (the still-standing-half) of the White House has managed to slip through the keyboarding fingers of what Sarah Palin called “the lame stream media.” (I think her description was far more prescient than we realized at the time.)

And yep, it is true that way too many media outlets have flinched in the Orange Fubar’s glare, and what they are churning out now is propaganda. But I also think there is something much deeper going on here.

The inherent truth about the Fubar is that he does not fit our internal definition of story. He has no recognizable motivation. He flings spaghetti at walls, has public temper tantrums, utters contradictory nonsense, and crosses every line of morality, courtesy, and common sense.

He is nothing more than a mass of violence without motivation, a continually exploding bomb with no rhyme or reason. And the Legacy Media, who live by and through story, missed that. They kept looking for reasons for why he did what he did and does what he does.

Most of them are still missing that.

There are no reasons and no motivation in the Fubar’s world.

It’s why he lies so easily. When you have no internal story to guide your actions, it doesn’t matter what you say.

Recognition of the Fubar as a continually exploding bomb came much earlier in places such as Talking Points Memo founded by Josh Marshall and Letters from an American by historian Heather Cox Richardson. It accelerated in 2025 with the establishment of outlets such as the Contrarian with Jennifer Rubin and Norm Eisen. Then there’s Simon Rosenberg’s Hopium Chronicles, economist Paul Krugman’s column on Substack, and columns by Garrett Graff. That recognition is part and parcel of the work being done by Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, Jimmy Kimmel, and the crew of Saturday Night Live. (There’s really no one better than comedians at holding up mirrors so that we can see absurdity, is there?)

And in my opinion, there’s no better newspaper out there covering our government than the Guardian of London.

This essential failure to change on the media’s part is why so many of us have turned our backs on it in favor of other outlets. The Legacy Media’s dedication to reporting both sides of an issue as if they were two different versions of the truth—a trend that began with George H.W. Bush and our ill-fated war in Iraq— is a betrayal of journalism and of us.

It is one of the major contributing factors as to why we are where we are.

I’m going to leave you with these words from author Garrett Graff. He lives here in Vermont, and has reported on security measures for a wide variety of publications. He’s also the author of a book on Watergate that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. I thought I knew a lot about Watergate but Graff’s book was a real eye-opener. Highly recommend.

***From Garrett Graff: The hardest thing for the media to wrap its hands around over the last year is that Donald Trump has no plan — for anything, ever. Time and again, national pundits and the White House press corps invent a logical Donald Trump who sets, announces, and later “changes” real “policies” or “plans,” failing to convey what is clear to anyone who is actually following events closely: In each public appearance and social media post, the Mad King Donald Trump spouts a string of words, devoid of meaning or purpose, that may or may not represent anything at all.***

So your homework assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to check out news that’s outside the orbit of the Legacy Media. I promise you won’t be disappointed.