I was almost feeling sorry for NPR and the CPB until this morning, en route to the grocery at 7:45 a.m. because that’s how I do things, and I heard some chirpy report from a Washington correspondent, who made reference to the presidunce’s talk of “annexing Canada.” Her words, not his.

And I thought, shit, just stick a fork in this outfit now. Let them go under. I’d rather listen to music.

This is what we’re talking about when we talk about “sanewashing.” Canada is not available for annexation. It isn’t an unincorporated suburban area adjacent to a growing city, it’s a sovereign nation. And it’s pretty clear it intends to stay a sovereign nation. Making Canada part of the U.S., or attempting to do so, would be an act of war. It would require military troops, gunfire and death. If Cheetolini won’t stop talking about it, you have to report it. But report it correctly. Use the English language, where words have actual meanings.

Remember when NPR was good? I do. Now it’s like you can identify the big funders by the news budget. Oh, a boring story about wind energy? They’re pleasing an environmental nonprofit, hoping for a grant renewal. An endless piece on diversity efforts of no great consequence, in a place or field you don’t care about? Someone’s checking a box for their year-end goal list. Which is to say, I miss the personal essays, offbeat stories and other weirdness you used to hear on All Things Considered and Morning Edition, or the stuff they used to call “driveway moments.” They don’t do those anymore. There are no driveway moments.

That said, I do not miss Susan Stamberg’s stupid cranberry relish recipe at Thanksgiving, and in fact I don’t miss Susan Stamberg at all. If smugness had a voice, it was hers.

I woke up with a cold this weekend. I never get colds during the warm weather, except when I do. Thought it was allergies at first, but three days of antihistamines haven’t made a dent, so I suppose it’s a cold. (It’s not Covid; I tested.) So it was with a particular grumpiness that I noted the juxtaposition of two stories in Sunday’s NYT. The first, a story about the breakdown of the news ecosystem in one California town, Oakdale:

First the nearby newspapers shrank, and hundreds of local reporters in the region became handfuls. Then came the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, and the pandemic; suddenly cable networks long deemed trustworthy were peddlers of fake news, on the right and the left.

…Now, in place of longtime TV pundits and radio hosts, residents turn to a new sphere of podcasters and online influencers to get their political news. Facebook groups for local events run by residents have replaced the role of local newspapers, elevating the county’s “keyboard warriors” to roles akin to editors in chief.

..As local news outlets shrank throughout the Central Valley in the 2010s, Facebook groups dedicated to local events started popping up in their place. And for years, they were harmless. But that changed in 2020.

What this story describes — misinformation, followed by attempts to correct/control it, followed by the flowering of even more Facebook groups, with names like UNCENSORED or UNFILTERED — is pretty much what’s happened in my own community. On the one hand, you could say it represents healthy pushback to narratives some find infuriating. On the other, it also represents the death of fact-based media. Here in Detroit, there are people who listen to police scanners all day and night, and report on what they hear on various social channels. Sometimes this is useful. Sometimes, when it’s slow, they throw in their own racist analysis. This is not useful.

The second story was pegged to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s latest real-estate purchase: A $23 million house in Washington D.C. This follows his Tahoe house, his Hawaii house, and god knows what other houses. He has become one of the richest people in the world off a technology that has ruined the news media and leads the people of Oakdale, California to fly at one another’s throats.

What a legacy.

I cannot wait for this cold to run its course. Have a good week, all.