I don’t know if there’s a fake Melania or not. Don’t care that much either way.

But USA Today’s “fact check” article, which summarily declared the fake Melania thing to be “false” without offering any such proof, is utterly ridiculous. That’s not fact checking. It’s clickbait.

You have to ask why USA Today even published such a baseless, pointless, and embarrassing article. Was it just to get easy page views from the kind of people who automatically believe and retweet any “fact check” article published by any major site?

Or did USA Today publish this nonsense as a favor to the Trump administration? On the off chance Trump wins, major news outlets will have to spend another four years begging Trump people for leaks and scoops. Favor trading is just the industry standard.

After this Trump thing is over, one of the things I’m going to focus heavily on is why and how the major media outlets end up publishing bullshit stories and phony “fact checks” like this. It’s almost never about trying to help one side win. It’s just about editorial access.

Major news outlets have been writing puff pieces about political figures in exchange for editorial access since long before Trump. It’s just that Trump and his people are so much more dishonest and horrid than any past political figures, the puff pieces are all the more jarring.

I didn’t get into political journalism to take Trump down. I got into it to force the mainstream media to discontinue the bad journalism practices that allowed Trump to take power to begin with. Even if Trump loses, that goal will be more important than ever.

If the media had been honest in 2015 and 2016, Trump never would have gotten into office. If the media had done its job in 2017, 2018, 2019, Trump wouldn’t have lasted this long. We can’t allow the media’s bad practices to ever stick us with another Donald Trump again.

After Biden wins, I’ll be talking a lot more about my specific plans to hold the media accountable for its antics. We’re going to reform political journalism for the better. But for now, let’s just go win this. VOTE.

Since some of you always find a way to misunderstand this, I’ll spell it out again: it’s NOT about the media favoring one side or trying to help one side win. It’s about the corrupt things the media does to get stories, kiss leakers’ asses, dishonestly chase page views, etc.

Media outlets exist for the sake of RATINGS. They don’t exist to inform you. They don’t exist to try to help one side win. They exist to generate ratings and page views, which is how they make revenue. They’re for-profit businesses.

If you think media outlets exist for any other reason, or have any other motivation at the end of the day, then you have a fictional understanding of what you’re consuming. In fact you’re not consuming anything. You’re the product. The media sells your eyeballs to advertisers.

This doesn’t mean the media is evil; in general they’re not. But the media does exist primarily to turn a profit, which is achieved through high TV ratings and/or high website page views. They’ll give you the news, but only in a way that lets them hit their ratings marks.

The best journalists do what they can to inform you, but even they have to operate within a ratings framework. If they don’t hit their ratings marks, their news outlet will replace them with someone who can hit those ratings marks, whether this new person is better or worse.