How The Corporate Media Is Losing Its Influence

To regain its dominance over the cultural narrative, the corporate state is using every tactic it can think of: severe censorship of independent media through Facebook, Google, and Twitter; constant media hammerings of the message that dissidents are working for Russia; false flags and war campaigns, like the ones we’ve seen around Syria in the last month. The effect can be intimidating. “What this bipartisan stampede is about is to make the only horizontal threat of information exchange to come along since the printed flyer, obsolete,” writes the blogger Michael Wade Douglass. “Our media is crashing against us. That shit is nuts from here.”

But in spite of all these policies, the deep state’s propaganda system-the system it ultimately depends on to keep its power-is faltering. And it’s suffering a major blow right now with the widespread rejection of its demands for war and Syria, and with the collapsing of its charge of Russia being behind the Skripal poisoning. Here is an overview of the developments that have put it in this vulnerable state, and a look into how we can defeat it.

When they got caught telling one of history’s deadliest lies

Since the collapse of the Iraq WMD hoax, war propagandists’ major job has been to explain why we should still trust them. Their first damage control action was to shift the official reason for the Iraq War, saying it was instead about fighting terrorism, liberating the Iraqis, or in the more honest case of Hillary Clinton’s infamous 2011 statement on Iraq, about a “business opportunity.” But the lie had been exposed, and the war propaganda machine hasn’t had the same power since.

The factors behind this incomprehensibly disastrous failure in journalism-estimates of the Iraq War death count go up to around half a million-involved the media being dependent on sources within the centers of power. The New York Times’ Judith Miller sources her famous WMD article from the intelligence community. The media went along with the false stories so overwhelmingly because, largely, they allowed themselves to be intimidated by the Bush White House. Bush even admittedin 2005 that the White House produces its own news videos about world events, which are covertly sent to the major media outlets.

And even as trust in media has dissolved, the media has been becoming ever more corrupt and power-oriented since the Iraq War. As WikiLeaks has revealed, in 2007, Rachel Maddow, John Podesta, and other political and media insiders coordinated to form a self-described “echo chamber” which comprises most of the major news networks. Then in 2013, a 1948 ban on domestic CIA psyops was repealed under that year’s National Defense Authorization Act. This lets the CIA secretly recruit and train pundits to disseminate its narratives, merging the already highly consolidated American media with the state. The problems which produced the Iraq War have gotten much worse in the last fifteen years.

When they had to lie about the most corrupt election in U.S. history

Even before the 2016 election, the independent media journalist Abby Martin saidin 2014 that “we’re winning the information war.” As interest in newspapers and the old TV networks has gone down, alternative information outlets, like Martin’s former employer RT, have become more successful in recent years. To the establishment’s panic, this dynamic was defined much more by the end of 2016.

Throughout the primaries, and after the general election, the media had to try to pull off the monumental job of concealing the electoral fraud that was happening. The glaring voter suppression in Arizona, New York, California, and many other primary states had to be explained to make it look like Hillary Clinton was legitimately winning the nomination, with the same being true for the mathematically impossible exit poll discrepancies which plagued that primary contest.

This propaganda operation involved too much corruption and blatant lies for the establishment not to suffer some painful self-exposure: direct collusion between the Clinton campaign and the corporate media on many occasions, including a conspiracy that involved the infamous “pied piper” campaign to elevate Trump in the primaries; absurd distortions of the primary race, like TV networks’ wildly biased portrayals of the Clinton/Sanders delegate count; suspicious deflections towards Russia when anything uncomfortable for Clinton happened, like the post-DNC leak focus on “Russian hackers” and the Podesta-manufactured blitz of news stories which blamed “Russian interference” for Clinton’s loss.

These deceptions have worked on many people. But in a lot of ways, they’ve backfired.

When they had to lie ad nauseum

The last eighteen months have been a blur of wild, sometimes contradictory psyops from outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. It was these outlets, not Trump, that originally popularized the slogan “fake news,” as part of their rushed explanation for why Clinton had lost. This spookily ubiquitous phrase, along with the baseless propaganda about Russia having hacked the DNC to sway the election, ushered in a new era of disinformation and censorship.

The idea to paint Trump as “Putin’s puppet,” started by the CIA’s John Brennan as an apparent tactic for securing his position under a Clinton administration, was elevated to the defining media view of the Trump presidency. “Russiagate” has served as a weapon that the neoconservative establishment uses to make Trump comply with their agenda of unbridled aggression against Syria and Russia, and as a constant political noise which hides the real offenses of the Trump White House.

This new Red Scare has also been used to silence those who oppose war, corporatism, and the deep state. Since November 2016, when The Washington Postshared the infamous PropOrNot blacklist of top independent media sites, it’s been acceptable to demonize anything outside the CNN mainstream as “Russian propaganda.” And it’s always getting worse. Jill Stein was recently subjected to a senate inquiry on her supposed ties to Russia, just a step away from the McCarthy senate hearings.

The establishment has had to create this totalitarian paradigm, or else its deceptions would continue to be exposed through the online information revolution which broke out in 2016.

Despite all of this, the propaganda machine is still unable to keep things under control. Honest journalists and academics around the world are speaking out about the transparently false Syria war narrative about Assad being behind April’s “chemical attack.” The propaganda machine has reacted to these developments by intensely attacking the disfavored journalists, to the effect that the machine has exposed itself in the process. As I’ve shown, this is only part of a larger trend. We need to keep eroding the deep state’s propaganda control, until the structure of deception is completely toppled.