The Perils Of Trusting In The Mainstream Media

The formation of the CIA in 1947 was accompanied by a mood in the late 40’s that totalitarianism was the destiny of the human species. Naziism and Stalinism had shown the new extremes despotic states could reach with the modern technology at their disposal, and many realized it could get far worse. 1984’s vision of a rapid transition into global dictatorship after mid-century didn’t have to be a perfect prediction; the book has reflected the events following its 1949 publication well enough.

Even as Orwell wrote his novel, the CIA was closely emulating the Thought Police. Immediately the agency started recruiting figures from news organizations to covertly promote its agenda. By 1949, it was operating a propaganda radio station in Europe which spewed such false information that for a time, publishing transcripts of the station was illegal in the U.S. 

In the coming decades, as it helped the U.S. overthrow unprecedented amounts of disfavored governments and brutally tortured human experimental subjects with its Phoenix Program, the agency gained thorough acceptance in society by colludingwith major papers like The Washington Post. (The Post remains its favorite propaganda wing.) Even while spreading mass amounts of crack-cocaine during the 1980’s, the CIA was able to normalize itself by flooding the world in psy ops throughout that time.

With the fraudulent War on Terrorism and the recreation of McCarthyism, the erosion of our freedoms has become complete. The only reason the state still usually permits free speech is to give us the illusion of being free. The executive branch is now able to conduct military campaigns without any oversight from congress, because the Obama and Trump administrations have largely omitted the word “war” from their official language. Corporations control all branches of government, including the new fourth branch in the intelligence community. 

The Phoenix Program has been stopped as far as we know, but the state continues to torture in “black sites” and in American prisons. Government and corporate servers monitor all of our digital communications, and Wikileaks’ Vault 7 revelations in March showed the CIA can monitor any of us through the cameras and mics in our mobile devices. Our right to a trial, our right to being secure in our properties, and our rights to dissent and voting have also been destroyed by an exploded security state.

This despotic power structure doesn’t need the trust of most people to stay in place. It only needs to keep the knowledge needed for revolting out of the people’s minds. Most of the media is now controlled by large corporate conglomerates, whose executives directly collude with the intelligence community through the Domestic Security Alliance Council. The 1948 ban on the CIA’s assimilating members of the media has been repealed, letting that intelligence community control the press both indirectly and directly. 

Last year under the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, the state was authorized to create a new center that would “proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests,” as well as collect information on “foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts.” This fulfilled Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

This is what we expose ourselves to whenever we consume The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and the rest of the traditional media: a finely tuned, monolithic propaganda machine for the corporate state. With the restarting of the CIA’s covert psy op program, the bulletins have gotten both more subtle and more elaborate-last year a CNN segment briefly implied reading WikiLeaks was illegal, and the ongoing Bana Alabad psy op has involved manipulating an eight-year-old child into promoting Syria war propaganda. 

We must recognize and resist this machine, because it can drastically alter the worldviews of anybody. For most of this year I was unaware that North Korea has a no strike-first policy on its nuclear weapons, that the CIA itself has concluded Kim Jong Un to be in no way unstable, and that developing nuclear weapons has beenthe only way for North Korea to deter decades of threats from the U.S. Most have still only seen the government’s absurd narrative that North Korea could strike unprovoked, which is why so many accept the Trump administration’s preparing for a new Korean War. 

The same has happened with the media’s omitting the massive war crimes of the U.S. military empire, the militarist and corporatist actions of both major parties, and terms like “neoliberalism;” Americans are led toward supporting atrocity without knowing it.

“The aims of the corporate state are, given the looming collapse of the ecosystem, as deadly, maybe more so, as the acts of mass genocide carried out by the Nazis and Stalin’s Soviet Union,” Chris Hedges assessed in a column last year. “The reach and effectiveness of corporate propaganda dwarfs even the huge effort undertaken by Adolf Hitler and Stalin. The layers of deception are sophisticated and effective. News is state propaganda. Elaborate spectacles and forms of entertainment, all of which ignore reality or pretend the fiction of liberty and progress is real, distract the masses. Education is indoctrination. Ersatz intellectuals, along with technocrats and specialists, who are obedient to neoliberal and imperial state doctrine, use their academic credentials and erudition to deceive the public.”

That column was titled “We Must Understand How the Nazis Succeeded and Corporations Now Operate in Order to Fight Back.” This was a comparison between the tactics used by the Nazis to coerce Jewish communities into not resisting their impending deportation, and the tactics used now to stop us from seeing the ecological breakdown corporate capitalism is causing. We must refuse the propaganda we’re being presented with, or the consequences of these two campaigns will be similar.