I feel like op established that this type of thing does not usually affect them. Are you suggesting the LA Times has cracked the code to finally reach the psyche of op? Or can we take them on their word that the USPS situation rankles them. Seems silly to suggest that they don’t really care, “but for the media”.

> Packages piled up, blocking the aisles and the heavy sorting machinery. Boxes of steaks, fruit and other perishables rotted. Rats dashed across the floor. At one point, Scantlebury said, the “whole building was filled with gnats.”

Keeping in mind this is the result of a conscious decision made at a high level, at one of the times the postal services has been most crucial to the functioning of a nation in modern history...

Can you rephrase this in a way that doesn't make it aggravating to hear?

Thank goodness there are still news agencies going out and getting stories at the ground level. Live animals dying slowly while packaged in boxes is a fact that they uncovered, not hyperbole.

Yes I have. Then I consider the hysteria news agencies would be doing if Obama did this. And I feel the current coverage is laughably sedate.

Politics and reporting are scummy, biased games, but none of what is happening now is business as usual.

If the stories about what is currently happening in the Post Office were reported in a completely factual, completely neutral way, they would still be enraging.

Have you considered the underlying actions were designed to solicit an emotional reaction via news channels, I.e. trump is trolling to own the libs, at the cost of watching the country burn (literally here in CA).

Not mutually exclusive. The news heavily optimizes for pageviews and one way of doing that is to optimize for anger. (Other than awe, which is hard to generate, anger has been shown in studies to be the most viral emotion.) However, they wouldn't have any raw materials for this if certain folks in government weren't routinely doing stuff worthy of anger.

Trump and the mainstream news media exist in this unhealthy symbiosis, where they create this toxic emotional environment for a whole country because both of them would fade away into nothingness if they didn't.

The thought behind your comment seems to be "Trump is no different than other recent Presidents, just he's treated differently" without saying it in so many words. Is that indeed what you think?

Republicans have long complained about the media being mean to right-wing presidents (or, sometimes, remembering Clinton and Carter, to white presidents, where Obama is considered a PC outlier), but this sort of non-defense is a convenient dodge in terms of having to actually defend Trump's specific actions...

The irony here, too, is that it also ignores right-leaning media's long history of fear-based politicking.