A swarm of liberal political pundits and journalists had spent the previous weeks denouncing any questions about Fetterman’s health as illegitimate, while attacking the few reporters who dared raise such questions as heartless bigots and right-wing shills. In the process, they unintentionally revealed something essential about how the elite media distorts the public’s understanding of key issues by bullying journalists into repeating obvious lies.

Case in point: NBC News’ Dasha Burns. On Oct. 7, Burns conducted an on-camera interview with Fetterman. Because Fetterman has “auditory processing issues” as a result of the stroke, according to his campaign, he had to use a closed-captioning system to understand Burns’ questions. After the interview aired, Burns told NBC’s Lester Holt on air that Fetterman didn’t appear to understand her pre-interview banter. Burns was just doing her job by reporting on the fitness of a public official, but her assessment also seemed to lend credibility to the line of attack coming from Fetterman’s Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, who has claimed that Fetterman is suffering from cognitive decline and covering it up. Simply for stating the facts as she had observed them, Burns was seen to be supporting the “wrong” candidate.

The media felt a great disturbance in the Force. On Twitter, blue-check journalists jumped in to defend Fetterman and throw shade at Burns. Soon, Burns’ tweets were inundated by thousands of haters calling her “disgraceful,” “trash,” and, again and again, “ableist.” The Associated Press published a syndicated story amplifying the criticism and suggesting that Burns’ remarks had given ammunition to the Republicans. The New York Times published an op-ed deploring her remarks. Savannah Guthrie confronted Burns about it on air. On The View, Sunny Hostin implied Burns had acted unethically. BuzzFeed published an article essentially accusing Burns of putting disabled people at risk of violence. Recaps of the criticisms surrounding Burns’ interview appeared in The Washington Post, LA Times and other publications where they served to legitimate the idea of a controversy that the media itself had created.

That’s how it remained for two weeks: with Burns scolded and swarmed, and other journalists left to internalize the message about what would happen to them if they too stepped out of line.

Then, Fetterman’s abysmal debate performance vindicated her. Most of us know better than to expect the media establishment to pause for even a fleeting moment of introspection but, still, it’s incredible to see how many pundits and blue-check experts chose to double down on the “ableist” defense. The few nonconservative commentators who had the gall to note the reality about the debate were promptly disciplined. “There is no amount of empathy for and understanding about Fetterman’s health and recovery that changes the fact that this is absolutely painful to watch,” tweeted New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi. In response, Nuzzi was instantly accused of “ableism,” racism, acting out of hatred, and lacking a conscience. The experts had spoken! But for the rest of us, it’s an excellent time to take stock of what Burns’ colossal ratio and the subsequent swarm on Nuzzi were meant to accomplish.

When I was in college, like any budding leftist, I read a lot of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s most famous book is Manufacturing Consent, in which he argues that the big corporations that pay for the advertising that keeps the media industry afloat exercise a soft power over journalists. It’s not that they tell publishers and broadcasters what they can and cannot print. They don’t need to. Their looming presence as the industry’s paymasters is enough for editors and reporters to figure out quickly where the lines are that they cannot cross. Simply by observing what kind of reporting is incentivized in the business and which kinds of stories will help them get ahead in their own careers, individual journalists self-censor. What emerges is a pliant, self-policing, corporate-friendly media.

Chomsky’s theory, if it was ever true, seemed to become obsolete with the invention of the internet. Before the internet, the mass media was the only way for advertisers to reach millions of people at a time. Today, not only has social media broken that monopoly, but digital ads can be targeted in a way they never could on TV or in newspapers and magazines. No longer do corporations have to pay a surcharge on their ad spending to cover the salaries of journalists and editors and typesetters. They get a much better service for way cheaper on Google and Facebook.

In his book Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers, Andrey Mir describes what happened next. Starved of ad revenues, print media outlets changed their business models. They had already been drifting toward partisanship, but now they saw there was money in it. Instead of seeing their readers as consumers of the ads they sold, they started looking at them as potential donors. They began appealing to their political consciences, asking readers to subsidize their noble journalistic missions, NPR pledge-drive style. “Support our brave truth-telling work,” went the pitch, “for Democracy Dies In Darkness!”