The Media’s Propaganda Machine Is Malfunctioning

It feels as if the march of history is accelerating now.  The number of meaningful current events around the globe continues to grow.

We don’t have time to process the Islamic riots across France before turning our attention to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s attempted judicial coup d’état.  While President Trump seeks peace between Russia and Ukraine, the United Kingdom prepares its citizens for WWIII and a Russian invasion.  The United States has elections, but Democrat seditionists and subversive members of the American Intelligence Community push for a “color revolution” to topple the Trump administration.

Big events happen every day, and we have scant opportunity to understand what they mean before another comes across our screens.  The issue of “screens” is important.  If you’re reading this, you are not likely a hermit living self-sufficiently in the woods.  Unless you limit your “screen time,” televisions, computers, tablets, and phones are pumping your brain full of information all day long.  Even when we’re not consciously reading or watching something on our screens, our brains are picking up signals about the events playing out in the world.

If you are a fan of science fiction, it is not difficult to understand that we are now living in a version of the dystopian worlds that writers such as Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick envisioned.  People who possess power in this world have a strong incentive to shape our minds, and they use every available tool to condition our way of thinking.

Information is no longer confined to a book, catalogued in a quiet library.  It is blaring at us from all directions.

Different cable news hosts on competing cable news networks repeat the same words and phrases all day long until we find ourselves reaching for those words while having polite conversations in real life.

Songs from pop artists representing different genres push the same messages, and when those pop artists collect awards, they use their acceptance speeches to drive those messages further into the brains of their most loyal fans.  Those fans magnify those messages on their social media platforms, and pretty soon, tens of millions of people are expressing the same thoughts.

Movies and television shows teach us to fear or detest “hate speech,” “global warming,” “white supremacy,” “Russian aggression,” “science deniers,” “right-wingers,” “fascists,” “European Union skeptics,” “fossil fuels,” “Islamophobia,” “transphobia,” Christianity, immigration enforcement, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump.  Any Hollywood character who doesn’t condemn these things is depicted as a villain; any Hollywood character who denounces these things is a brilliant, beautiful hero.

This is information warfare in a nutshell, and it is all around us.

If you look back in time, you will realize that some version of it has always existed.

Twentieth-century newspapers gave us descriptions of the facts filtered through the worldviews of their writers, editors, and publishers.  Three broadcast news anchors delivered almost identical accounts of each day’s news.  If you scrutinized those newsrooms, though, you realized that newspaper publishers came from the same prominent families that ran parts of the government and that federal licenses required television networks to abide by certain national security protocols.

The same “journalists” who gave each other awards for their “integrity” and “independence” married members of the government.  Twentieth-century “journalists” were never really part of a Fourth Estate; they acted as the public relations arm of the American government.

The most important aspect of “journalism” last century was its ability to seduce the reader or viewer into believing that “reporters” are impartial, just-the-facts clerics collecting important stories for the public’s benefit.  So long as “journalists” were seen as ink-stained priests who cared nothing for money or fame, they received a certain amount of public respect.

If people could be convinced that “journalists” would risk their lives to inform the public what is “true,” then some people might even consider those “journalists” heroes.  Priestly heroes cultivate public trust, and public trust is its own kind of power.

In this sense, the government had no interest in telling Americans not to trust the news.  All governments want the public to believe the news because it is through the news that governments disseminate their public messages.  In true symbiotic form, newsrooms and governments do not have competing interests.  They have a shared interest: to convince the public that what it reads or hears is the “truth.”

The entertainment industry has long played its role in this propaganda program.  A small number of publishing houses controlled which books would be printed and sold.  A small number of magazines controlled popular opinion.  A small number of movie studios controlled what stories were told.  When everybody worked in tandem, publishing houses printed books whose authors expressed ideas that the government wanted the public to read.

Magazines recommended those books until they became “best sellers” on newspaper lists.  Hollywood chose good-looking actors to play the characters in those best-selling books, and families sat in theaters to hear government-approved programming.  Sometimes, movie stars played hero journalists, so that the public remembered that The New York Times and The Washington Post could be trusted to report only the “truth.”

When a propaganda system works well, you don’t notice how all the various agents have clear conflicts of interest.  You don’t stop to ask why the deputy director at the FBI would be working with The Post to take down a sitting president (something that both Mark Felt and Andrew McCabe have in common).  You don’t wonder whether it’s appropriate for “reporters” to depend entirely upon anonymous sources.  You don’t ask whether the billionaire moneymen who own newspapers might have ulterior motives that undermine the pursuit of truth.

You don’t notice that the same families that own movie studios and publishing houses also own multinational chemical plants, pharmaceutical firms, shipping conglomerates, and banking empires.  You don’t realize that these wealthy families include members of Congress and the heads of agencies.  You don’t see how government officials receive awards from nonprofits and NGOs that are run by the same families handing out awards to authors, musicians, actors, and “journalists” for their professional achievements or contributions to “truth.”

See the problem?  Over the last thirty years, the public started to see through this sophisticated network of information warfare and recognize it as the propaganda that it has always been.  The expanding web of the Internet allowed people to learn information that had been hidden from them.  Email allowed people to communicate with groups much more quickly than traditional phone calls or written correspondence.  Social media platforms turned ordinary people into public broadcasters almost overnight.

Comedians lose their power over minds when ordinary people on YouTube are just as funny.  Hollywood actors lose their star power when teenagers can become famous just for filming their lives.  Publishing houses lose their gatekeeping power when writers publish online.  “Journalists” lose their monopoly on objective “truth” when citizen reporters describe current events in real time.

When all these parts of the propaganda machine malfunction together, people finally see the puppet strings moving the various actors.  And whether they work in Hollywood or for CNN, the narrative engineers are all actors — people paid to deliver messages that corporations and government officials wish to spread.

This is one of the reasons the march of history is speeding up!  The people who have long controlled public opinion realize that they have lost their greatest weapon: legitimacy.  Illegitimate systems are unsustainable.  So the narrative engineers have been forced to flood the zone with so much information that it becomes ever more difficult to ascertain the truth.  Global warming, Russian collusion, COVID, defending democracy, WWIII — the demand on your attention is huge and will get only worse!

As this happens, remember this: Your brain is the battlefield.  If you prevent others from using it for you, they will lose.