I wanted to be that change and not just report it. Sometimes I’ve succeeded, sometimes I have not. Elizabeth Nickson, another renegade former journalist and Canadian (her career include stints as an editor at Time and Life magazine) describes acerbically the delusions of the contemporary press corps. For some reason, modern journalists consider themselves to be the peers of their subjects:

Average journalism-school graduates watched their fellow undergrads go on to wealth in finance, innovation in technology, or power in politics. Meanwhile, the high Masters of Journalism are struggling to avoid replacement by college interns and to out-write AI software. After years in expensive schools cozying up to the right people, they believe that an equal professional respect is due. The trouble is, they’ve done little to earn it.

The media follows a socialism of status, demanding cultural equity with the newsmakers they cover. The members of the media don’t realize that the elites consider them with as little regard as does their dwindling audience. Striving for acceptance into the right social circles makes them all the more desperate to parrot the conventional wisdom of the ruling class. See, I’m on your team, the reporter thinks, as the Vice Undersecretary for the Department of Agriculture (Tropical Fruit Division) glances across the room to find someone worthy of his notice….

Perhaps journalists could improve…by not catastrophizing every issue that has plagued humanity since ancient Sumer. But one crisis left unnoticed has doomed journalism to dwindling audiences, rising irrelevance, and public contempt. Newsrooms from Washington to San Francisco, New York to London, suffer from a humility crisis. What makes this odd is that journalists have so much to be humble about.

This is part of her essay contributed to Michael Walsh’s new book Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You (2024).

I’m far from certain I could bear to read 448 pages about the contemporary press but for those who care about fourth estate, it looks like obligatory reading.

On a serious note, what’s gone wrong with journalism is the tendency for publications to no longer pay their reporters properly and no profits from the press. Journalists need a side gig. Side gigs depend on being considered “easy to work with” and “cooperative. Almost all newspapers and magazines are money losers now, and their future existence depends not on their readers, but on their advertisers and their corporate sponsors.

Courage has left the building, and modern mainstream journalists have become PR hacks instead of investigative/critical journalists.

Substack and independent websites provide the vast majority of serious reporting these days. The decline started with the rise of the internet. Journalists slowly became toothless from as far back as the year 2000.

^* I wrote regularly for The Economist, The Moscow Times, Dance International; produced news spots for ABC Television and short documentaries for Radio-Canada.

Sometimes honest observers take a too idealistic view of the past.

I’ve recently read George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) set in 1829-1832. The financial sector in England was nearly as corrupt then as in today’s USA. Society and public opinion nearly as stupid and parochial as the US media. At this time, the Triangular Trade in human slaves was just coming to an end. In fairness to England, they were among the first to outlaw slavery in modern times (1834) and even allotted a fleet to the west coast of Africa to hinder the slave trade. Yet the expropriation of the natives continued apace, in both the Dominion of Canada and the United States of America. Simultaneously India was despoiled by the British, as they prepared for the Opium Wars to cripple China (1839-1842, 1856-1860).

Tonight I just happened to read a bit of Percy Shelley, “Song to the Men of England” (1839). Here’s the most moving stanzas:

Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed and clothe and save
From the cradle to the grave
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?...

The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.

The American militiaman and worker effectively lives today as Englishmen did 185 years ago. Not Percy Shelley, not Juan Cole, not Philip Weiss, not Richard Medhurst, not Bernhard Horstmann, not Ron Unz and certainly not Alec Kinnear have been able to put a stop to it. Those who would enslave, expropriate and war carry on making the human condition worse as quickly as technology will enable it and the laws allow them.

The ubiquity of evil in the past does not excuse us from fighting evil where we find it in the present. In recent times, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden did manage to put a small dent in evil doing by exposing it to light. Collateral damage will never as effective a euphemism (Assange), while conspiracy theory has become conspiracy reality (Snowden), thanks to their efforts.

Cancel culture, argues Hedges, has been embraced by corporate America as it is an extremely effective tool to both distract citizens from serious corporate transgressions and to silence real critics.

Corporations know these moral purity tests are, for us, self-defeating. They know that by making the cancel culture legitimate — and for this reason I opposed locking Donald Trump out of his Twitter and other social media accounts — they can employ it to silence those who attack and expose the structures of corporate power and imperial crimes. The campaigns of moral absolutism widen the divides between the liberal elites and the white working class, divisions that are crucial to maintaining the power of the corporate elites. The cancel culture is the fodder for the riveting and entertaining culture wars. It turns anti-politics into politics. Most importantly, the cancel culture deflects attention from the far more egregious institutionalized abuses of power. It is this smug, self-righteousness crusade that makes the liberal class so odious.

The ruling elites and the courtiers who trumpet their moral superiority by damning and silencing those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech are the new Jacobins. They wallow in a sanctimonious arrogance, one made possible by their privilege, which masks their subservience to corporate power and their amorality. They do not battle social and economic injustice. They silence, with the enthusiastic assistance of the digital platforms in Silicon Valley, those who are crushed and deformed by systems of oppression and those who lack their finely developed politesse and deference to linguistic fashion. They are the useful idiots of corporate power and the emerging police state. Cancel culture is not the road to reform. It is the road to tyranny.

Hedges is right. Sooner or later every individual falls foul of one or another cancel tripling. If the critic is irritating enough, digging up ten year old Tweets or a high school newspaper is not too much to muzzle or harm him or her. I’m listening to writer Ivan Bunin’s journal written during and after the 1917 Revolution, Окаянные дни (Cursed Days). One of the most powerful Bolshevik tools was the ability to overnight declare individuals or groups of people enemies of the state or saboteurs – and then unleash a bloodthirsty mob to ravage those individuals home, personal property and even person without consequences.

Cancel culture offers the same kind of centralised mob rule. The necessary amplification to power cancel culture comes from CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. How could university educated North Americans (including Canadians) be silly enough to expect these establishment instruments would ever fight for real justice or real information?

***

Photo: Still from Dangerous Hours, Bolsheviks robbing apartment.

A study done a few years ago showed that over 2/3rds of international affairs stories in major European newspapers were basically reprints of NYT articles, tweaked lightly for localization purposes. The major media outlets all sing from the same hymn sheet and the CIA and other western intel operations knows that any story they feed into the system will be reproduced around the globe and taken as ‘fact’ by most of the newspapers’ readers.

The media’s incestuous nature and its infiltration by the intelligence services really became apparent during the Syrian Civil War and the Trump presidency. It is now clear that the western mainstream media works with the spooks to shape and mold opinion, and manufacture consent, rather than innocently informing its readers about world events.

The rise of the now often used insult “conspiracy theorist”, which is really code for “dissenting opinion”, is closely related to this. The western liberal democracies are going totalitarian in real time as the window of “acceptable” opinion continues to shrink and the establishment finds new ways to censor, ban and stifle heretical thinking.

Almost all print media has been run at a loss for the last fifteen years, as publishers “adapt” to a digital publishing model. It astonished me too that money losing businesses would continue operating at almost full speed. Tom explains the current media business model:

News publishers are all loss leaders. Their goal is to provide the daily bread of propaganda to feed the masses. As Craig Murray recent tweet puts it “the Press is not a genuine commercial enterprise. It is a loss maker on which billionaires are happy to splash money to produce propaganda for tax, regulatory and governmental regimes that aid billionaires’ wider interests.”.

The Epoch Times has recently been spending a lot of money on adds on you tube and I received in my mail box a copy of their rag just before Christmas. Propaganda works and you can see the results with “half of the US population chanting Russia did it and the other half China did it”. This sort of stupidity could get us all killed.

For mainstreamers winding up their conspiracy theory rattles, Antiwar7 reminds us that people who used to work in the CIA and the NSA (Edward Snowden) confirm the above.

Former senior CIA official John Stockwell discusses how the CIA would place false reports in newspapers around the world, including in the Washington Post. Stories that were complete fabrications, that were attacking their enemies, like Cuba.

What a courageous man Stockwell is, to give up his career, his support network, and invite attacks from one of the most dangerous organizations around.

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Contributor Red Ryder met Stockwell personally:

He’s a terrific guy. Working for the NSC in the White House, he created the false stories about the Cuban soldiers raping nuns in Angola. That was his job. He’s been around in public since the ’80s but never got any Media attention.

He also was CIA officer in the Vietnam Highlands working with the Hmong against the government. He married a Vietnamese. When the US pullout was ordered he was also ordered to sacrifice 150 agents in the Highlands who worked for him. The US wouldn’t take them out.

His book “In Search of Enemies” is vital to read. He testified to Congress about the machinations of Henry Kissinger that were illegal, antithetical to US best interests, but no one gave a damn. Left him out on the limb. John Stockwell is a great voice of the Truth. A good man.

Ironic that a man who committed these crimes could be considered a voice of the truth and a good man. On the other hand, think of all those who commit war crimes and never give it a second thought.

As a former international journalist, I can confirm from first hand experience in Moscow that the news day for all the major television networks starts from the New York Times. The NYT in turn was in close communication with the State Department when I was working. It appears the NYT works more directly with DoD and CIA sources.

I know it’s hard to accept that you are lied to every day when you pick up the paper or turn on the television. It’s all part of a huge fabric of lies. Even back then journalists who told too much truth would quickly find themselves unemployed. I don’t much like The Matrix films (my partner Lucia loves them) but what the Wachowskis did get right was the red-blue pill model. So few people choose the red pill. Most people sleepwalk through life believing lies from the day they are born until the day they die. Quite sad really to spend one’s life taking sleeping pills.

Edward Snowden in some ways is a modern day Christ. He gave up his happy life at the center of NSA contracting and American prosperity to try to bring the truth to people. And almost no one wants to believe him, or even really cares, particularly in the United States. Now he must spend his life trapped in Russia, a country for which he has little affinity. Why? For telling us the truth behind the CIA and NSA lies about the extent to which our privacy and our lives have been violated.

Frankly, Edward should loosen up a little and enjoy life in Russia more. If you learned to code competently, you can learn Russian too. We only live once: enjoy it.

Everyone else – please wake up. Think of the improved dinner conversation – table talk with zombies is crushingly dull.