I am copying Steve’s post in its entirety for my readers, especially those who live in the Seattle area. Every word is true. I cancelled my subscription over 10 years ago, and the local fish wrap has only gotten worse in its communism.

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Way TLDR on legacy media. This is the next plank in the Democratic stranglehold on WA. Comments welcome: CANCEL YOUR SEATTLE TIMES SUBSCRIPTION, TODAY… Starve the legacy media, it’s our only hope.

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As a huge sports fan growing up, I absolutely loved reading the sports section, especially the ebb and flow of daily baseball coverage. Even with a terrible Seattle team in the early 80s, we were fortunate to have two really good writers: Bob Finegan at the Seattle Times and Tracy Ringolsby at the Post-Intelligencer. Then, in the summer of 1983, Ringolsby left for greener pastures, leaving me in mid-season panic as P-I reader: Fortunately, I convinced my parents to switch to a Seattle Times subscription (which wasn’t tough since I was the only one in the house with time and interest in reading the paper daily). And thus began my love/hate relationship (mostly hate the last 10 years) with the local Times.

Having a 40-year seat to watch the Seattle Times degrade parallels what we’ve seen nationally. The final stages of legacy media failure have encouraged the Democrats to eagerly grab hold of the 20% side of issue after issue. The famously effective Trump ad that did real damage down the stretch to Kamala Harris was the “she’s for they/them, he’s for you.” And yet they’ve learned nothing:

– Kamala Harris ran a “perfect” campaign, and only isn’t President because of racist and misogynistic voters – Confused boys have every right to compete in girls’ sports; there’s no proof that boys having a competitive advantage

– ICE/DHS is coming for sympathetic citizens and immigrants, just like the innocent “Maryland Man”

– We have every right to federal taxpayer dollars to support DEI state/local policy implementations

– Blue state budgets are broken because of Trump

– Stephen Colbert’s cancellation proves that we live under an authoritarian censorship regime

-Sydney Sweeny jeans ads are a Nazi eugenic dog whistle to white culture

-Farmers across the nation will be in danger without access to vital NPR weather alerts, and their completely balanced news coverage.

How in the world do they continue to cling to this make-believe world? Well, it’s right in line with the left-wing legacy media bubble. (And yes, I understand there’s a similar bubble that applies to Fox News…but they at least do have real “news” under Bret Baier, which is different than what you get on the opinion side). This bubble was finally pierced during the 2024 Presidential election with the rise of the independent media and “pod Bro” universe. However, on the state and local level, that same force has yet to break through in many places.

Washington state provides an instructive example. Yes, there is a growing independent media ecosystem, with everything from gritty street level coverage of drugs and decay in Seattle, to well respected commentators on talk radio and podcasts. However, in poll after poll, the independent and left-center voters on the West side who generally decide elections of the state, defer to legacy media as their trusted sources, such as local TV and the Seattle Times.

Many of their preferred narratives get established by taking root in that legacy media bubble and are softly corrosive over time. “We don’t spend enough on K-12 education.” “Climate change is existential, so we must remake the economy.” “America is the ultimate colonizing influence of the West.” and so on. And that narrative drives policy.

Some are more sinister, and more dangerous. In 2020, activists with the ample help and assistance of the legacy media, promoted a false narrative that police were killing unarmed black men across the country at an alarming rate after the death of George Floyd. According to the Washington Post crime tracking data, the number killed in 2019 was 13. In 2021, polling by http://Skeptic.com, 39% of liberal Democrats believed that number was in excess of 1,000 (8% of very liberal Democrats believed it was over 10,000!). That led to all sorts of crazy “Defund the Police” efforts which are still impacting us today. Here in Washington state, pursuits by law enforcement were effectively banned in 2021 with HB 1054, with the predictable impact: violent crime and stolen vehicle incidents went stratospheric until it was rolled back by Washington initiative 2113. You’ll find lots of references in the Seattle Times to studies supportive of rolling back pursuits, without concrete data on the huge increase in crime that resulted here. And no dogged pursuit of those legislators who championed this harmful policy.

The gender affirming care hoax was another. Organizations like WPATH, the AMA, and the APA were taken over by ideologues with a mission to normalize the surgical and chemical castration of confused, and often mentally unstable kids. They pushed out studies from friendly sources and discredited the opposition. Coupled with their media allies and unsupervised screen time by young kids, the incidence level went off the charts. Only now is that horrific practice being ended. Many of us have likened this to the lobotomy craze of the early part of the 20th century; however, this is much worse because it’s being carried out on children.

And here in Washington, SB5599 passed two years ago allows the state to shelter kids seeking “gender-affirming care” from parents. And after passing the “Parents Bill of Rights” from an initiative two years ago, they came back this year with HB1296 watering down that bill and again favoring confused kids and their ideologically minded schools against the rights of parents.

I’ll just skip over Covid, because that could be an entire post itself. I will briefly mention this to my friends who lament the distrust of our institutions and “experts.” Deferring to expert “wisdom” the last 50 years with no real pushback, allowed them to develop a consequence-free mindset, which of course was then taken way too far. They’ve made this bed of mistrust and deserve every single ounce of scorn directed that way until they clean out their own trash.

This past week seemed to be a coronation of this fact-free narrative building, culminating with a document release on perhaps the greatest contrived brain-washing effort in US history; the Russiagate Hoax. Just this week, we had the following national and local media fails:

The New York Times publishes a dramatic photo on the front page as proof of starvation in Gaza, being imposed by an evil Israeli regime. Except it wasn’t. The horrific image was of a child with several other serious health maladies, and perfectly healthy brother cropped out. To add insult to injury, the “correction” didn’t run to anywhere near the same prominent location as the original misdirection but rather posted on a corrections site trafficked by far fewer people. And of course, our local Hamas-promoting outlet, The Seattle Times, ran it as well.

In Seattle, the new Democratic Socialist representative of Seattle’s 43rd legislative district was hit with $11,000 of Public Disclosure campaign funding violations, including charging haircuts to his campaign. The Seattle Times still hasn’t published anything on it, nearly two weeks after the fine was announced. Seems like something voters should know about…

In one of the most egregious and lazy journalism efforts you’ll ever see, a reporter for The Olympian (the paper of our state’s capital mind you) published a story decrying the plight of a local community member that was “disappeared” by ICE according to a local activist pushing a GoFundMe effort on his behalf. It was complete fabrication and the “community member” was apprehended by ICE as he’s wanted for MURDER in his home country of Mexico. The story ran in several other sympathetic publications and has yet to be retracted.

And finally, late this week came the capstone. Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel released documents found in a burn bag at FBI HQ from the Durham report detailing what many of us already knew but was actually far worse; the Russiagate hoax was cooked up by the Clinton campaign as a diversion from her own email troubles and enabled by President Obama and his corrupt loyalists throughout government. (Ed. note: I’m not sure I quite buy this entirely as being retold today, but I do think a lot is directionally correct.)

For the past 10 years, I’ve read story after story in the Seattle Times that had very liberal framing (just count the number of times they label someone in politics as “right-wing” vs. “left-wing”). But as I’ve gotten deeper into politics and media, I realize that’s just the tip of the iceberg. They hire ideologically left reporters that can’t help but write in their left coded voices. But far more troubling is the editors (not the ed board, who has their own issues btw). The ones chosen by top management and ownership as the gatekeepers of the values of The Seattle Times. Sure, they help frame the language. But most importantly, they decide what does and doesn’t get covered. Time after time, if a story originates from an independent source, they will refuse to cover that same issue, or with any level of resources and criticality. The Seattle Times actually does very little actual journalism today, mostly republishing stories directly from two of the other most corrosive and captured news sources in our country, the Washington Post and of course, The New York Times.

Every day you source news from there as opposed to an independent source or more balanced media operation (I happen to like The Center Square for Washington because they frame stories from the taxpayer’s impact), you’re sustaining the PR operation of the leftist politicians that have captured Washington state and held on tightly for forty years. And they get away with it because they can ignore both the other side of the aisle and the any media sources that don’t serve their followers and supporters. The only way to change that landscape is to inflict economic pain. Cancel. Today. Bye-bye Seattle Times (and if you’re getting news from NYT or WaPO do the same). Or maybe I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about… Make it a great week!

Thanks, Steve, for the fantastic exposition on why the Seattle Times deserves to go bankrupt. It is a corrupt, biased, far-left-wing rag, which has abandoned (along with ALL of the legacy media) its duty to INFORM the public, and not INFLUENCE it. The paper is now in the business of pushing whatever the latest communist propaganda is, including the destructive gender-ideology, dependence on Government for everything, promotion of Islam and denigration of Christianity and Judaism, and hatred of Republicans and especially President Donald Trump. The community would be much healthier and better-informed without the Seattle Fishwrap. Don’t waste your money on it.