2024: Year of the Coverup

The most ignored real stories of 2024, a year in which national media made the mass production of "pseudo-events" a stand-in for news

When photos of murder suspect Luigi Mangione’s arraignment hit the Internet this week, my first thought was, “Oh, come on.” The accused shooter of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson obviously possesses Kardashianoid media savvy, and after aping the Unabomber with a ham-fisted “manifesto” went to court Monday dressed in what looked like a Lee Harvey Oswald costume, though the color was wrong (Oswald was shot in black). Women’s Wear Daily covered his hearing like a runway event:

At first, videos on TikTok identified Mangione’s crewneck top as Maison Margiela’s burgundy washed lambswool sweater, which was available for sale at $1,000 on ssense.com — the piece is now sold out… Users [later] determined he was wearing the “washable Merino crewneck sweater” from Nordstrom. The style is available for $62.65 in six other colors. However, the burgundy color that matched Mangione’s outfit is now sold out… Levi’s, Peak Design, Tommy Hilfiger and Monopoly were previously referenced in news stories…

“What we see with Mangione is he has quickly become a folk hero and a fashion folk hero. It’s almost like the movie ‘The Joker,’ where people dressed like him,” Diana Rickard, a criminal justice professor at the City University of New York, previously told WWD…

That a sociopathic rich kid who’s too lazy to write a real manifesto (262 words is the insane diarist’s version of premature ejaculation) might skip the woods-and-privation part of the Unabomber story and jump straight to the American cheat code for fame isn’t surprising. That everyone from Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! to Michael Moore to writers at the New York Times and Washington Post would sign on to Mangione’s Bonnie-and-Clyde ploy and turn a murder into a referendum on health insurance and a forum for recognizing “public anger” (ten minutes ago denounced as both imaginary and a threat to democracy) is more surprising, but only slightly so.

2024 was the year of the pseudo-event. Journalists shouldn’t have to read Daniel Boorstin or Jean Baudrillard or bother with terms like “hyper-reality,” but in 2024 world events were driven by people more sunk in grad school gibberish than Alvy and Annie Hall in their infamous subtitle scene. Take the “politics of joy” episode, in which media figures tried to write a “cultural shift” into existence. The Kamala Harris slogan was sold as instant zeitgeist, a sign of “surging” popularity and an “out-of-body experience” allowing campaign pollster Tony Fabrizio to boast, “We have suspended reality.” We lately learned from Harris advisors that the campaign was never ahead in internal polls, making the mountains of stories about Harris jumping to big leads during the “joy” cycle (“Today, the winds have turned in Kamala Harris’ favor,” one Democratic pollster beamed) more absurd. This was Trump’s “people are saying” trick pulled to scale, trying to create “momentum” by mass-reporting its existence, the ultimate in what Boorstin might have called “intellectually planned” news.

I have a better word: bullshit. 2024 was the year in which people we used to call “elites,” i.e. party heads, intelligence chiefs, CEOs, media celebrities, university presidents, and so on, exhausted real-life strategies for maintaining institutional trust and were reduced to trying to bullshit their way through crises holding no cards at all. Stories like “the politics of joy” were patches used to cover up what in 2024 became big cracks in the illusion of elite competence. For every over-covered pseudo-story like “joy” or “the new masculinity,” 2024 saw ostentatious non-coverage of big, real questions, many still unanswered.

Unlike the traditionally undercovered stories involving foreign atrocities or corporate giveaways, which usually make up the bulk of, for instance, each year’s top 25 Project Censored list, 2024’s version of suppressed news involved classic cover-ups, loud public controversies smothered in lies and deflections before our eyes. One, the fitness of Joe Biden, proved an impossible illusion to sustain and collapsed into open scandal. Three others (plus an honorable mention) stand out as unacceptably unresolved: