The mainstream press coverage of three NASA press releases in the past two days reveals quite starkly the fundamental corruption that permeates both the Washington establishment and the mainstream press.

First we have NASA’s announcement about its new Artemis spacesuits: Orion Suit Equipped to Expect the Unexpected on Artemis Missions.

I have spotted almost a dozen major news articles, from the New York Times to NPR to the Guardian, all buying into the spin put forth from NASA, that these spacesuits are another grand achievement by the space agency, and that with them NASA will take Americans to the Moon and Mars!

All balderdash. The suit might be real, but NASA’s planned lunar and Mars missions right now are nothing more than Powerpoint presentations. They do not exist, either with funding or with hardware. Any major news source that makes a big deal about this NASA press announcement while playing along with NASA’s Moon and Mars fantasies is not doing its job.

And sadly, not doing its job describes exactly what these mainstream news organizations are doing.

Next we have the quiet announcement by NASA that it has finally picked someone to run its manned bureaucracy: NASA Administrator Selects Douglas Loverro as Next Human Spaceflight Head.

This story has not gotten much coverage. Loverro takes over the program that runs SLS, Orion, and Gateway, previously run for years by Bill Gerstenmaier, who was removed finally in July. Loverro’s appointment won’t really change much. SLS, Orion, and Gateway will still remain bloated and inefficient, with guaranteed cost overruns and numerous schedule delays. These issues are a feature, not a bug, of these programs, and Loverro’s job will merely be to manage the problems as best as possible.

However, while this management change isn’t that important, the management failures at SLS, Orion, and Gateway are, and except for a handful of specialist news sites like myself and Eric Berger at Ars Technica, none of our glorious mainstream media sources seem interested in covering them. Instead, when the mainstream press does cover SLS, Orion, or Gateway it does what it did with the first story, laud NASA and its fantasies while ignoring the projects’ real problems.

NASA’s third press release (NASA Announces Changes to Spacewalk Schedule, First All-Female Spacewalk) has like the first gotten a lot of coverage by the mainstream press (NBC, Associated Press, Space News, to name a few), but for all the wrong reasons, focusing almost entirely on the spin put forth by NASA, that this spacewalk will be the first all-female spacewalk. All hail identity politics! Nothing else matters!

NASA’s press release intended the media to cover things this way in order to divert these media sources from reporting the real reason the schedule was changed: The failure of a controller that has resulted in a critical loss of power on ISS. Sadly, these incompetent and ignorant mainstream media outlets were glad to oblige. Bill Harwood at CBS fortunately focuses on the real story:

Astronauts Christina Koch, making her fourth spacewalk, or EVA, and Jessica Meir, making her first, will float outside the station to remove a malfunctioning 19-year-old battery charge-discharge unit, or BCDU, on the far left end of the station’s power truss and install a 232-pound replacement.

Trouble with the old unit, which controls how a newly installed solar array battery on the space station is charged and discharged, forced NASA to delay three upcoming battery installation spacewalks, including a planned outing Wednesday by Meir and astronaut Drew Morgan, until engineers can figure out what went wrong.

Adding urgency to the troubleshooting, another BCDU failed earlier this year after an identical lithium-ion battery was installed in a different circuit. The station’s power system includes 24 charge controllers and only three spares are available in orbit. Engineers want to make sure no generic problem exists before pressing ahead with additional battery installations.

If there is a generic problem with these units, the station could be facing a very serious power problem, with no good options for fixing it quickly. It appears NASA does not want these facts highlighted, and the mainstream press has been eager to oblige, in order to tout its preference for identity politics.

What these three NASA’s press releases plus their overall coverage by the mainstream media reveal is their corrupt partnership to hide important facts from the American people. NASA writes its press releases to garner it the most good press, while hiding bad news as much as possible. Sadly, most of today’s mainstream press appears quite eager to play along and help NASA in this crooked practice.

With this in mind, ask yourself whether you can trust the news coverage from these same sources on almost any other subject about the federal government, especially issues connected with partisan politics. The answer is obvious. You can’t. They are playing the same games there as well. The press and the Washington establishment work together to tout the government’s achievements, while hiding its enormous and pervasive failures.

Worse, because of this partnership of lies and distortion, nothing in Washington can get fixed, because no one there is working to fix anything.

And if this whole game isn’t shut down soon, it is going to blow up in the worst manner possible.