Twenty-Something Year Old Journalist

As the Washington Post crumbles in the wake of fascist leaders who feel a bit too on the nose, I have no choice other than to stand in where the Washington Post has fallen. 

Let me be clear—I don’t want to. We shouldn’t have to rely on twentysomething-year-old journalists with a WordPress blog to report on news, to offer some perspective on diplomatic issues, to hypothesize the broader effects of Trumpism on the world and what it means for our future. 

That’s a lot of work that I don’t want to do. Don’t get me wrong, I stay informed—I’m a devout New York Times reader and even venture out of the New Yorker’s “Shouts and Murmurs” on occasion. I’m always aware of the events that contribute to SNL’s cold open! But I will admit—it’s a lot. 

And that’s why I’m more than happy to leave the political reporting and journalism to those such as my Washington Post equals. 

It’s actually a strict agreement we have—they stick to political reporting to uphold their journalistic promise to keep people informed about what goes on and how it affects them, and I stick to writing about Tina Fey and the horrors of Tinder double dates. 

They get their national and international publications, I get a WordPress blog. I promise not to utter the words Israel-Palestine and they promise to stay clear of any Wuthering Heights thinkpieces. 

But then something changes—these legacy journalists start getting laid off. Journalistic perspectives and reporting become more at risk of being cut, and journalism starts getting policed. 

Suddenly I’m getting “breaking news” updates from stan accounts on Twitter (you heard me), journalists are exiled to personal Substack profiles, and videos of state violence are sandwiched between cat videos and GRWMs. 

Journalism is declining—and not to add any more to your plate, but we should all be scared. 

The state of journalism cannot be left up to me. It’s true that my independently operated blog will never be swayed by the executive power of Donald Trump nor the money of compliant, evil billionaires, but I am just a twentysomething-year-old journalist who wants to write about Saturday Night Live and corporate life and feelings and pop culture.

With the fall and decline of journalism, though, I can’t do what I want to do, and neither can you. 

There’s too much to keep up with. We are constantly inundated with news story after news story after news story. I don’t have enough time between commuting to work, watching The Pitt, and preventing nihilism to appropriately parse out the realities and consequences of every breaking news story. I’ve lost track of which news stories are meant to cover up the Epstein files and which release of the Epstein files are meant to cover up the release of Melania. 

It’s all purposeful, though. The firing of journalists, the propagandization of media outlets, the censoring of comedians, the breaking news that the U.S. has gone to war with Iran on a Friday night while we bloggers are distracted and intoxicated. 

They want the public ill-informed, overwhelmed, and desensitized so they create propaganda, chaos, and complacency. 

An informed and educated society threatens an authoritarian’s rule, so those who inform must be silenced and everyone else must be either intellectually dulled or too inundated with information to even begin to keep up. 

Good thing you all have me. I swear I never asked for the future of democracy to rest on my shoulders, but I suppose none of us really asked for any of this. I’m much better equipped to write about Timothée Chalamet than I am about Iran’s nuclear missile crisis, but, alas, the Washington Post has fallen. 

So for better or worse, democracy now hinges on my Google Doc titled “Blog.”