This year has marked the first time ever that trust in news media dropped below fifty percent in the United States, continuing a trend of decline that’s been ongoing for years.
Mass media punditry is divided on where to assign the blame for the plummet in public opinion of their work, with some blaming it on Russia and others blaming it on Donald Trump. Others, like a recent Forbes article titled “Restoring Public Trust In Technology And Media Is Infrastructure Investment” blame it on the internet. Still others, like a Washington Post article earlier this month titled “Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values” blame it on the people themselves.
The one thing they all seem to agree on is that it’s definitely not because the billionaire-controlled media are propaganda outlets which manipulate us constantly in conjunction with sociopathic government agencies to protect the oligarchic, imperialist status quo upon which the members of the billionaire class have built their respective kingdoms. It cannot possibly be because people sense that they are being lied to and are fed up with it.
And actually it doesn’t ultimately matter what mainstream pundits and reporters believe is the cause of the public’s growing disgust with them, because there’s nothing they can do to fix it anyway. The mass media will never regain the public’s trust.
They’ll never regain the public’s trust for a couple of reasons, the first of which is because they’ll never be able to become trustworthy. At no point will the mass media ever begin wowing the public with its journalistic integrity and causing people to re-evaluate their opinion of mainstream news reporters. At no point will people’s disdain for these outlets ever cease to be reinforced and confirmed by the manipulative and deceitful behaviors which caused that disdain in the first place.
A propaganda outlet will never be anything other than a propaganda outlet. A lot of half-awake people with one eye open and one eye closed will notice how the news media don’t practice journalism and don’t report the facts, and they’ll assume that something went wrong at some point. “Just do your jobs and report the news!” they’ll shout in frustration.
But nothing has gone wrong, and they are doing their jobs. They are doing their jobs extremely well.
Telling the mass media to “just do their jobs” and report the news is like bursting into a shoe factory yelling “Just do your jobs and start manufacturing dentures!” Their job is not to report the news, their job is to manipulate public perception for the benefit of the media-owning class. And toward that end they’ve been immensely successful.
There’s no point admonishing the mainstream press for the public’s plummeting trust in it, because a thing that has only ever existed to administer propaganda can’t suddenly become journalism. It’s like yelling at a rock for not being a tree.
The mass media are completely and utterly irredeemable, and always have been. It’s a waste of energy to try and get plutocratic propaganda institutions to suddenly begin doing journalism; that’s not what they’re for. Instead, our energy is better spent teaching people to stop seeing them as journalistic outlets.
The other reason the mass media will never regain the public’s trust is that humanity’s relationship with narrative is evolving too far beyond the level that once saw Americans gathered around the television listening with Bambi-eyed faith to the words of Walter Cronkite. That level of widespread blind credulity in the official stories of the day will never again exist.
Our old relationship with narrative is crumbling, and people’s old ways of understanding what’s going on in the world just aren’t holding together anymore.
As cold war tensions with Russia and China continue to mount while the US-centralized empire fights with increasing desperation to retain its dominance, we’re seeing propaganda hit white noise saturation levels to such an extent that we’ll likely soon find out how aggressively the collective consciousness can be pummelled with mass-scale psyops before it snaps.
America just went through four years with a president whose words had no relationship with facts or reality, and who made no attempt to pretend otherwise.
The mainstream public is becoming increasingly aware of the widespread nature of disinformation and propaganda.
Deepfake technology means we soon won’t even be able to trust video anymore.
Ordinary people are hurting financially while Wall Street is booming, a glaring plot hole in the story of the economy that’s only getting more pronounced.
There are numerous different narratives about Covid-19 and the government responses to it running parallel to each other with everyone still to this day absolutely certain that their position is the only correct one.
The entire media class is acting stranger and stranger, now routinely reporting bogus stories en masse like the Russian collusion narrative or the “Bountygate” narrative and then simply acting like it’s no big deal when those stories they’d fed us with such urgency are completely discredited.
Now we’re even seeing headlines about UFOs in esteemed mainstream publications, not just once but regularly, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
You can’t twist and shove the collective consciousness around like that without something snapping. Without people beginning to look at the thoughts in their heads with suspicion and beginning to question their sense of reality. Without people wondering if everything they believe is a lie.
Narrative Is Crumbling
"We are now, as a species, collectively squeezing ourselves out of our old unhealthy relationship with narrative."https://t.co/iYK2oC7YXf
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) July 26, 2020
We’ve been seeing signs that humanity is moving into a new relationship with narrative for some time now as people learn across all sectors of society that so many of the seemingly solid rules we once took so seriously are just empty thought fluff that we are free to rewrite at any time.
Atheism and secularism, once fringe positions, are now mainstream as people have discovered that they don’t need to allow their lives to be controlled by words written by long-dead men in far off lands from cultural and historical contexts which have no relevance to our own circumstances.
People are beginning to recognize that money is made up and we can collectively change the rules of how it works whenever we want, with the rising popularity of both socialism and cryptocurrencies capturing the public imagination of what’s possible.
People are beginning to understand that what we call gender is a large network of conceptual constructs which we have overlaid upon human anatomy, and that we are free to disregard and re-author those conceptual constructs if that feels right to us.
People are beginning to understand that romantic relationships don’t need to look the way they’ve been modeled for us across the centuries, with unmarried, same-sex, polyamorous, or other relationship models also being perfectly acceptable options.
People are beginning to understand that “family” doesn’t need to refer to people to whom we are related by blood, with the concept of chosen family gaining in popularity.
People are beginning to understand that the failed drug war is an immoral abuse and that we should be allowed to experiment with our own consciousness using whatever substances we see fit.
These are all signs of a growing awareness that the “How It Is” narratives we’ve been fed by culture do not have the concrete reality to them that we once assumed they did. We’re beginning to see them as what they are: stories. Stories that we are free to ignore or re-write to whatever extent we find useful.
For propagandists whose manipulations depend on their targets imbuing their narratives with a great degree of significance, this recent development is very problematic. If a How It Is narrative isn’t taken seriously, it can’t be used to manipulate the way people think, behave, and vote. And this seriousness is exactly what we’re seeing deteriorate in humanity’s relationship with narrative.
This could end up being a very, very good thing. All human destructiveness is ultimately caused by our taking thought seriously instead of simply using it as the tool it’s meant to be and setting it down when we’re done with it; look at any manifestation of human self-destructiveness, no matter how large or how small, and you’ll find a belief being taken too seriously underlying it. This shift in our relationship with narrative could end up being what saves us from our self-destructive patterns as a species.
But it won’t lend itself to trust in the mainstream media. This too would be a very good thing.
______________________
I’m celebrating the hardback release of Woke: A Field Guide For Utopia Preppers by making a pay-as-you-feel PDF available.
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
68 responses to “The Mass Media Will Never Regain The Public’s Trust”
As someone with a background in Theoretical Physics, this is so astute:
.
“When we read scientific literature written in the 70s, liberal, left, and right, we’re immersed in a world of openly honest people. They can be mistaken, say untrue things, but they are all genuinely dedicated to the logos. And then there’s some kind of frontier, when they all started to lie, which in my opinion is connected to a shift of liberals to the left. Suddenly, Western society began to become very stupid; it became narrower and narrower.“
.
Alexander Dugin (31 August 2017):
.
Source:
• Fascinating interview with Russia’s conservative philosophy icon Alexander Dugin
• http://russiafeed.com/fascinating-interview-russias-conservative-philosophy-icon-alexander-dugin/
In a word, ‘managerialism’. At some point in the 80’s, scientific management as a whole decided that quantity was more important than quality. There’s still some good content in the scientific literature, it’s just enormously diluted.
Global warming. Quite obviously the most absurd hoax ever perpetrated. Decades now of empirical refutation and the same power mad anti-democratic entities never relent. It cannot be seen, it cannot be detected, it cannot be challenged by those who are not insider true believers. Its remedy is deliberately the same, disenfranchisement of individual rights and an end to the rule of law. This itself is a remedy to democracy and the resurgence of monarchy.
What have western imperialist technocrauts offered the world? Junk economics (neoliberalism), junk education (Common Core), junk energy tech (5G), junk agriculture (GMOs/glyphosate), junk weather engineering (chemtrails), junk foreign policy (war for war’s sake) and junk Rockefeller for-profit medicine, all promoted by junk media.
Pruning the dead tips off humanity’s tree is a good thing. New sprouts of life, not poisoned and disfigured by profit motive, will steer us toward long-neglected logic, empathy and purpose.
Agreed.
There has never been “good” journalism in general since such started being broadcast. Not a great deal of it before then. Even now, given this narrow window of opportunity for alternate sources to publish, before they are censored away, many of the alternative sources aren’t so good either. Constant skepticism is required.
“We’ve been seeing signs that humanity is moving into a new relationship with narrative for some time now as people learn across all sectors of society that so many of the seemingly solid rules we once took so seriously are just empty thought fluff that we are free to rewrite at any time.”
But many are also rules for survival of the species. Take the traditional nuclear family, for example. If the thin paint job we call “civilization” were washed away, there would be no better construct to insure the wellbeing of children and their mothers than a man willing and able to commit violence to protect them, who accepts that he is expendable, and so is willing to die in the process. A collection of such in a community would present the opportunity to create common defense composed of such men. The traditional nuclear family is the smallest viable political unit.
I’m not saying any and all should be compelled to participate in such, just that there is a reason for some traditions beyond any political motive, religious or secular. Please retain baby while throwing out bathwater.
A nice direct hit; gives one hope (e.g. everyone [semi-awake] now knows the NYT is a CIA-dominated joke)..
I just have one ~technical (if rhetorical) question – and that is: how do the world’s oligarchies (who create, share and promulgate the assorted psy-ops & memes) communicate securely among themselves?
The uniformity of the world’s governments in responding to this COVID farce (apparently synthetic non-plague with sub-percentage mortality) in full emergency mode does not seriously suggest that the WHO/UN (which has never had that much authority) is/was not the driving force. My tentative guess lies in the direction of a world banking cartel private communications net.
Fixing a sentence:
The uniformity of the world’s governments in responding to this COVID farce (apparently synthetic non-plague with sub-percentage mortality) in full emergency mode does not seriously suggest that the WHO/UN (which has never had that much authority) is/was (‘not’ removed) the driving force. My tentative guess lies in the direction of a world banking cartel private communications net.
Maybe it’s a case of Malice in Blunderland Caitlin.
Mass Media: “Wear a mask and get the vaccine and everything will be fine.” (doubtful)
Fact: “Pray the Rosary and go to confession and everything will be fine.” (even more true since the end of the world and the return of Jesus are near.)
Keeping my Rosary on hand!
Your last narrative about narratives is, I believe, over the top. Not everything is arbitrary. There is something like logic and science and observation and rational interpretation in what has been tøld in our education and life learning. Knowledge exists. There are those who an reflect deeply about evolutionary and historical events who are valuable in teaching and informing. Some of your examples violate this, even if otherwise there is truth, indeed, in your main thesis—that too much of what passes for news by MSM (and in or schools) is propaganda, and destructive for a robust and fair human civilization.
This is why a lying media is so important;
##
The question, is why do the esoterists need a front group spread among the cultures of the world to act as a catalyst and scapegoat, given that they actually recruit collaborators from all those same cultures into their orders? The answer is in the question: as a closed, highly inbred group that’s often well positioned in society they naturally attract resentment from the “base” culture thus intensifying the confusion and misdirection among them. And of course, the pushers of intense anti-oligarch rethoric are often esoterists themselves. As Stalin stated,, “When the people need heroes “we” provide them. Anti-oligarch ‘heroes of the people’. Hitler, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Bin Laden, Biden and Trump – a beautiful list. Funny that these heroes of the people never propose any structural change in the economic system. Capitalism is a religion of action, any Oligarch will tell you, and this “action” is towards the “international brotherhood of man” ( World Government ), while the other religions provide the base structure, the tax farm. In the end, any non-pollitically correct capitalist will be less welcome than any politician who collaborated in the for the formation of the “New World Order.”
While people trust the mass media less and less, they (we) still continue to watch / read it, sometimes regarding it simply as entertainment or worse still as addictive mind ‘food’.
The problem as I see it is one of belief not trust. Trust is too generalised, whereas belief can be applied to each and every story. Even though you may not trust a particular media outlet, you might still believe a particular story, view, value or some other part of the narrative.
For example, I might believe the basic facts of a story but not the numbers or statistics that go with it to distort the importance or significance of the facts. The trick is to filter out the verifiable facts and ignore the rest. Easier said than done, I know.
Speaking of the blame game Caitlin, check out this article;
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2021/04/25/exclusive-losing-the-war-for-press-freedom-banned-in-the-us-and-russia/?mc_cid=4d224311a2&mc_eid=7ffdc3ce6d
I had no idea that so many of my friends are on a U.S. terrorist list. LOL. Is it any surprise then that being black in America is like being the object of a turkey shoot?
It is quite extraordinary that we have been mesmerised by the biggest lie of all and continue to use it as a baseline. That picture of the book burning prompted these links, especially since this is about the evils of ‘mass media’ …
.
• Book-Burning and All-lied Book Destruction Compared
.
https://historicaltribune.wordpress.com/2018/10/24/book-burning-and-all-lied-book-destruction-compared/
.
The following paints a picture of Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s and the environment that the likes of Kurt Lewin (Tavistock), Albert Einstein and Marlene Dietrich were ‘compelled to flee’ at that time.
.
• Babylon Before Hitler (Part 27 of TGSNT)
.
https://www.bitc_hute.com/video/8WnEDy4JqczA/ (remove underscore)
Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell, letter dated 14 June 1807. (From Works 10:417—18)
~
To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.
Let’s do a free worldwide test about how far the media and the elite screw up the whole world in one year. It’s simple. Go walk around your city. You can use your car, of course. Pay attention to every person. Try to count how many business are now gone. But most important, listen to the sounds of your city. Feel the atmosphere of a graveyard. Grey is the new mood in social distance. You are unofficially trapped or jailed, you can name it, if you don’t have a covid passport. You cannot talk about sensitive topics related to politics and health in places like Twitch. You can be banned from all social medias in this new experiment faded to be our new routine forever and ever. The worst part is: They know it because it’s designed to be like this way. None of this would be possible some decades ago. But now, everyone is connected. One idea can be propagated quickly over and over till you quit into fighting against it and become one with the hive. In the past, religions and faith collapsed empires and shaped our reality. But now, something more powerful than faith can have the same nefarious impact. You know what I mean.
Most of the Public still trust The Mass Media and the public will soon have no alternative to The Mass Media. Then it will not be needed to regain public Trust.
Some people refer to “old school journalism” as some kind of Golden Age but I wonder in which period of time this “old school journalism” was alive and kicking…
Was it in the 60’s (over half a century ago) when Malcolm X declared: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the ones doing the oppressing”?
Was it between 1964 and 1973 when, according to Wikipedia, “the US dropped two million tons of bombs on Laos, nearly equal to the 2.1 million tons it had dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War II, making Laos the most heavily bombed country in history relative to the size of its population” and no newspaper reported it?
Was it during WWI when US Senator Hiram Johnson said (quoting Aeschylus): “The first casualty of war is truth” or during WWII when Winston Churchill said: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies”? A bodyguard of lies lavishly provided in both cases by warmongering media hellbent on making money on increased sales – just like today.
Was it in 1897 when William Randolph Hearst, for the same reason, cabled to the illustrator he’d sent to Cuba and who was not optimistic about the possibility of a war beaking there considering how quiet it was: “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”?
Was it earlier in the XIXth century when Mark Twain wrote: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, your’re mis-informed”?
When was this Golden Age of “old school journalism” exactly?
This is an important point. It’s only ever been a tool of the powerful used to advance the interests of power.
Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.
The world’s Greatest Liberator quoted the idiom of vultures attacking a corpse in the context of “one will be snatched and the other left” and in that context and situation he illustrated the way invading Roman soldiers would capture some of the people of Judea and Jerusalem for slaves. He predicted how inhabitants of Jerusalem would be dying from famine, disease, and internal conflict, surrounded by military regiments who held them under siege for 4 years, waiting to capture weak survivors.
The idiom also illustrates predator capitalism taking place today under oppressive contrived lockdowns.
The Road Not Taken
BY ROBERT FROST
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
It’s hard to imagine how the corporate oligarch propaganda media could break people’s minds faster if they tried. If they tried, it would probably look like Captain Kirk breaking the android Norman with the strangely revealing pants as shown here:
Harcourt Fenton Mudd.
https://sto.fandom.com/wiki/Harcourt_Mudd
Super funny. I liked the way steam was coming off his head. I remember this episode.
Stupid android, but you can’t deny he was packing it.
~
I guess they all planned this ahead of time to boggle its mind. Does that seem realistic? Maybe, maybe not.
~
I am all for having a “chosen family”, but at the same time, you only have one blood family and I consider myself blessed in that regard because we all still love each other. No family squabble amongst us peasants.
~
The story of Sally is taking some time to put in place and I won’t go into the details of the difficulties associated with making this happen, but I plan on telling the story in full and in detail. The tidbits of the story told here will be critical to cut and paste and that is what I will do. It will be at the link on my name, but I don’t know when.
~
The sooner we drop off the liars the better. Like many others here, I dropped them off a long time ago and since then it has been a mission to figure out what my mission is – which makes sense after you realize how many lies you have been told. After a awhile the lies just get more and more annoying and I plan on doing something about it, but my actions will be local cause that is where my family is. The lies are obvious and we KNOW.
~
Best to all,
BK
It has become obvious that news agencies are totally privatized and exist only to push our emotional buttons as they see fit. Old school journalism was essentially destroyed by the internet. The revenue to support what passed as a profession went away.
A monopoly of business controls America. Censorship (technical difficulties) are the way things are done in America now and coordinated attempts are made to suppress voters.
Why? Because power knows what is coming down the pike and ‘the people’ might be a problem. Wake up!!
And find out about the Methane Bomb on my website.
Did you see this recent piece of cheery news? I can’t say I’m too reassured by it, especially as they’re talking about slow-onset tipping points. But will our policy makers and corporations dispense with such subtleties anyway?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210421124640.htm
~
‘The disastrous consequences of climate “tipping points” could be averted if global warming was reversed quickly enough, new research suggests.
…
Until now, crossing these thresholds has been assumed to be a point of no return, but the new study — published in the journal Nature — concludes that thresholds could be “temporarily exceeded” without prompting permanent shifts.
…
“Ideally, we will not cross tipping point thresholds, but this gives hope we may be able to pull back from danger if needed,” said Dr Chris Huntingford of UKCEH.’
I read the article. I don’t like the tipping point concept as it does not describe the issue of feedback well enough. The fact is global heating causes changes which cause more heating. The effect is an AMPLIFICATION which happens all the time in a continuous process and not when a ‘point’ is reached. It also suggests a runaway situation as the only option which in feedback does not always have to happen. Possibilities are more complex.
What worries me is fossil fuel fans seizing on it with “Science proves we can quickly and easily reverse any climate change we cause, so full steam ahead!”
It allows the narrative to be manipulated.
Yes, just what I meant, though I exaggerated (I hope!) a bit.
Yeah, I read that article about tipping points as well; since when don’t scientists lie as well? Remember the Jupiter Effect? Word on the street is that everyone is condemned to die, just as it has always been ever since life began. It should be obvious u s by now that life isn’t a blessing, but rather a curse, but who doesn’t love poetic justice? Let the poor and ignorant be the last to die, and the others to be disposed of starting today; everyone on earth either doesn’t deserve to live, or doesn’t deserve to have to live this way, so as it says in some places, the the weak and meek butterflies and moths shall inherent the earth, while the humans will nourish the flowers with their rotting flesh.
‘Science Daily’ LOL !
A bastion of credibility !!
Who reads this tripe ???
I don’t think it’s where I first read about this paper, but what sources would you suggest for science news?
https://youtu.be/DTt31p3AWTc
I also posted a version on the Tube.
“They’ll never regain the public’s trust for a couple of reasons, the first of which is because they’ll never be able to become trustworthy. At no point will the mass media ever begin wowing the public with its journalistic integrity…”
There is a solid minority percentage of the World’s population that cares about… “The Truth”. The vast solid majority of the World’s people do not. Instead, they prefer their particular version of lies and falsehoods. Religions. Political parties. Worship of “The Science!” All of these and many others are blind alleys in which people become trapped and don’t even know they are stuck in a path with no way out that leads to nowhere. Then, they double-down on their chosen delusions and fight with each other over whose version of lies is the better one.
A young person – if they are lucky – learns to the value the lifelong search for ‘Truth’. What can’t be assumed by them is that others share in that same worthy pursuit. A few years out in the World quickly proves that others prefer anything but that.
‘The Truth’ is now seen as a silly pursuit from a naïve past age. But, The Truth itself is never compromised.
It does not seek ‘Likes’. It exists in the purity of its own integrity without need for human attention.
‘The Media’ is a dope peddler selling harmful concoctions to a public that craves more of it. And ‘The Truth’ looks on and shakes its head at the spectacle.
we know now they invent wars designed to make more wars because wars are profitable. oligopolies can act like this because they can place tons of ads in MSM hire ad agencies and bribe politicians.
so why not make viruses to sell more vaccines and under such ER duress infect the .GOV. enuff to get the so-called research and development under way and then presto sell it by keeping the patents… how does that work? korruption!
remember back when the ER docs and coroners were bribed to put covid as the cause of death? the CDC was slow but did eventually announce the death rate was 70% male and 85% over retirement age….
so vastly more older men. old folks homes and cruise ships. voila!
then the amazing accusations vs China, they set it loose in Wuhan as an attack on AMerica?! i kinda fell for DT on that one. what a clever fellow!
but then i got the message that CharlieChan was stealing our USA viruses to find out what WE were doing. Two Chinese nationals were arrested for conspiracy to steal vials from the north carolina university bio warfare lab….excuse me…WHAT?! did they give up basketball?
they were found w/ the vials…by the FBI, and….that IS stealing. not conspiring, perspiring!
2 pts: 1~they needed to catch up. 2 ~and the gratuitous usage of the catch word: conspiracy. also could we see what was in the vials? please? just before that misadventure, a Ms Qiu young expert…from Wuhan working in WINNIPEG! which it turns out… hold it i’m crying for Canada…is not caught stealing many vials of their secret new virus hired out for Special Ops. and she is going to marry another ‘Chinese biolab chinese citizen so they fly back to China 6 times to ask mom inform their bosses, Sino-teck, church, sisters brothers, i dunno…but missing vials were only found on the final trip. duh…why? everything…so they could let it out at home…and/or know what to do about it…but NOT let it our in Canada or NIAGARA FALLS on their honeymoon?
please conceive of the possibility that god bless America, with its 8 domestic BWLabs and like maybe 20 foreign labs is complicit in making AND vaccinating these attacking bats. Call it Project Batman.
did you know that Harvard University ran the Wuhan Lab for over 20 years.
this is an outline: from here do yer own homework. nothing is as it seems. and…
nothing is ever over.
I haven’t trusted the mainstream media going back to the 1970s. I got rid of my television finally in 2012. The mainstream media exists to prop up the status quo of the ruling elites through endless propaganda and outright lying to the public. And they do it knowingly and willingly. Proof of this is in the vicious vilification of genuine journalists like Julian Assange and other whistleblowers who expose the lies and back up that exposure with evidence.
The Mass Media Is An Actual WMD:
When you hear/read/see rare criticisms of “journalism” outlets in relation to virtually any narrative (say, Russiagate, for example,) one can know that, regardless of current evidence, the controlled campaign was a total success. And, what do they think of the successes? Just look and listen:
Incredible, or at least it should be. And the audience seem to find it so amusing. I wonder how many in the US still think Iraq had WMD, despite Bush himself ridiculing the very idea?
“Liberals like having Bush on their show because they are two birds of the same feather. They are all neocons and American exceptionalists and servants of corporate America. And I am pissed off at their crimes against humanity and the people that they have hurt. So no way I’m letting them rehabilitate George Bush or Tony Blair.” —Richard Medhurst
https://youtu.be/w4hgDIPMS_A
I don’t know that more people simply don’t believe the media as much as they disbelieve any media output that disagrees with their own preconceived opinions. Of course, much of this is the fault of the media itself, for refusing to stand up to government bullies – and because that media is owned by the wealthy oligarchs who pay to put the bullies in position of power that permit them to condemn any journalist who disagrees with them.
The problem, here, is that companies, like Raytheon, Northrup Gruman and many others create organizations that show support for what they do, thus making it look as though there is a consensus, when the truth is that all of those media presentations are the work of a single, central group.
I can’t speak for others, but when something seems off kilter (which is about 98% of what I see and read in the mainstream media), I accept none until I complete research extensive enough to prove or disprove it to my satisfaction. Money talks and (to not have this comment removed) you know what walks.
“I don’t know that more people simply don’t believe the media as much as they disbelieve any media output that disagrees with their own preconceived opinions. ”
I agree. Though those “opinions” are manufactured and weaponized. Most people are participating in some form of digital tribalism – with the enemy being anyone who is “not my tribe” (and with those tribes growing ever smaller).
I think that the ability to block and unfriend on social media has given rise to a mentality that allows people to simply ignore any information that causes them to even glance outside their little bubble.
This management of media presentation by huge corporations was facilitated by Bill Clinton when he signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, permitting corporations and the ruling elites to own as many media outlets as they could buy. That used to be illegal. There used to be a limit to how much media one person or company could own, to assure that differing points of view could be represented. This was the case going back to broadsides in the 18th century in England and including in the colonies before the American Revolution. There used to be socialist newspapers, many foreign language newspapers representing various immigrant communities, and all political spectrums from the likes of Hearst’s yellow journalism to the Daily Worker and Forwarts.
Caitlin: I do not share your optimism. What I am witnessing is that as the main stream narratives become increasingly implausible and less tethered to reality, the majority accept the narratives almost as a matter of quasi-religious faith and thereby become themselves, increasingly deluded. Even when confronted with evidence that they’ve been lied to by their favored talking heads, they perform a series of mental gymnastics to abrogate the cognitive dissonance. Contradictions based on logic and fact no longer have any affect. In place of rationale is a sort of blind faith that, much like religious faith, is impervious to examination. Indeed, any attempt to question their precepts only makes their faith stronger.
So what I see emerging is a populace that is even more susceptible to manipulation. Those manipulations do not need to be backed by facts or logic. They don’t even need to be consistent with currently accepted or prior narratives.
The old narratives were long-lived and difficult to circumvent (like the ROM in your computer). The new narratives are modular and can overwrite prior narratives if that is what the spin-meisters wish. People are now increasingly programmable.
What’s so funny bout peace, love and understanding? The hippies had it right. Altruism as our only guiding principle. Caitlin, as always, is 100% correct, clearly articulating our massive problems. She is not alone. The difficulty is not pointing out the “why” but with implementing the “how”. Teaching Mindfulness, Social-Emotional Learning, Critical Thinking And Parenting Skills in schools from day one is a solution. This is currently being practiced with research-based, positive outcomes for our future. It’s too late trying to change ‘set in stone’ adult belief systems.
“God invented war to teach Americans geography” Mark Twain
“If you took all the words spoken by news outlets and laid them end to end. They would go nowhere.” – Me
Caitlin,
Thanks for the link to ‘Money Is Made Up …’
I’d read it before, and I think it’s a lot clearer and truer than ‘the economy is a delusion.’ It prompted me to compose a long account of how money, capitalism and capitalist ideas of time have taken hold here in the last twenty-five years. But a computer glitch swallowed it whole, so perhaps another day!
“The Mass Media Will Never Regain The Public’s Trust”
The response of the ‘sociopathetic’ oligarchic owners of everything, since time immemorial, has always been: “Who Cares”, unless of course a figure of conscious critical mind, such as a Julian Assange pops up and actually begins to directly upset their applecart of intents and interests.
Even when one of their own lowlife’s behaviors (Jeffrey Epstein) are brought to light – discovery of which may endanger their self-delusional rectitude, perhaps because of their own depth of involvement (Prince Andrew), are simply eradicated.
Merely the tip of the iceberg!
If they cycle up the PCR test – well – they are gonna find something – THAT’S why they use the PCR test !
Kary Mullis won the Nobel prize for medicine because he discovered something the could amplify your molecules up to a trillion times and target something in its infancy that MIGHT kill you in 30 or 40 years time !
He deserved the Nobel prize but said his discovery had NO application as a diagnostic tool !
Here he talks about Fauci !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sDeU9fj8N8
This is not Fauci’s first HOAX !
https://www.brasscheck.com/video/aids-faucis-first-fraud/
I SHOULD BLOODY WELL THINK SO.
This is an inspired column. I’m a freelance journalist who routinely pens “contrarian” pieces that of course don’t get published. One recent theme of mine has been this: Before the “swamp can be drained,” all the newsrooms (that produce all the bogus narratives) would have to be drained … but – as Caitlin points out – this definitely is not going to happen either.
My solution is that more people are going to have to “do it themselves.” That is create “news organizations” that do include stories that are “off limits” to mainstream journalists. There are a few examples of this. I’ve recently discovered “Lockdown Skeptics” website in the U.K. that regularly does publish opinion pieces, real journalism and research that the mainstream media either ignores, downplays or ridicules.
But Caitlin’s main point is crucially important. We KNOW the politicians and bureaucrats aren’t going to change, but we also SHOULD know that the “watchdog journalists” aren’t going to change either. As she points out, they are simply doing their job (protecting bogus narratives).
BTW, Caitlin is an example of what I write. She’s not hoping that some mainstream journalism sites will maybe publish her articles. She’s publishing them herself. It’s up to the rest of us to alert more of our friends and acquaintances that you can get important journalism and commentary at sites like this one. BUT the mainstream media (or even much of the “alternative” media) is not going to undergo some kind of metamorphosis.
You can only be lied to by those you trust. We no longer trust the UNIPARTY political pupputs or the medical mafia monopoly. Armageddon is the end of the world, as you KNOW IT
We now know the ugly reality, we are creating a better, honest world
Try this on for unbelievable narrative;
https://www.veteranstoday.com/2021/04/25/vital-the-air-force-academy-and-nuclear-treason-americas-nuclear-command-meltdown/?mc_cid=4d224311a2&mc_eid=7ffdc3ce6d
But, for anyone who has been paying attention, maybe not so unbelievable.
Well, some of the details seem a bit far-fetched, but Israel’s got a nuclear arsenal, and both Pence and Pompeo (I wonder who in Biden’s gang) are keen on this Rapture idea. You could summarise that article by saying loonies have control of nuclear weapons, which certainly isn’t news.
PERKINS is either naive OR a HASBARA shill !
There’s a tale, possibly apocryphal, of a group of Soviet journalists visiting the USA to see how media was done there.
“You know,” said one, “in the USSR we’re bombarded with propaganda non-stop, just like you are here. The difference is, back home everyone knows it’s propaganda, and nobody believes a word of it for one moment. Here, everyone swallows it whole and believes it’s the truth.”
Westerners are waking up to the lies we’re fed by ‘our’ mass media, but what’s the result? Many seem to turn instead to believing every crackpot cranky idea under the sun. Donald Trump is on a secret mission to free the world from an elite paedophile ring harvesting adrenochrome from millions of kidnapped children. Climate change is a hoax. COVID vaccines are full of nanobots programmed to kill. Russsia, China, the USA and others aren’t in conflict at all, they’re secretly working together to establish a one world government. Etc etc etc.
This shift in how we see the world may turn out for the good in the long run. For the time being, I see chaos and paralysis, with no shared framework of understanding.
IAN PERKINS, one of the problems of Americans is that they hate science as a personal choice, so much so that they aren’t capable of distinguishing between science and science fiction, and quite frankly that’s all part of the plan, so it’s really not anybody’s fault that they don’t know what to believe, your government now knows how to build so-called UFOs and is about to pull a psyop job on the human race and that’s why you’re being setup, I know this to be true because I know the inventor, but believe what you want to believe because even nuclear science is little more than a replay of ancient religious beliefs.
HA HA HA – you need to read fewer Tom Clancy novel’s about how brilliant the nefarious deep state is poised to ruin the world and only an American hero can stop it.
I agree with the gist of your post, but I would say that “climate change IS a hoax” – or at least the notion that mankind can stop the climate from “changing.” Climate has and always will “change.” In my state, we’re having a bad case of climate change right now. It’s been unseasonably cold for two weeks now. For decades, the climate change believers told me the planet was warming irrevocably. In short, these unseasonable cold spells were supposed to become exceedingly rare. Well, they haven’t. So the question really becomes what “science” can we question and what science do we have to accept?
I guess even Caitlin would agree that it’s okay for skeptics like me to question the “consensus” science. What type of “science” do we really have, when one can’t do this?
“these unseasonable cold spells were supposed to become exceedingly rare”
Who said that? We were warned thirty years ago to expect more extreme weather events, which is what we’re seeing. Nobody ruled out cold snaps. Remember, when the jet stream wobbles around, pulling cold air from the Arctic down to north America, Europe or Asia, it often pulls unusually warm air back to the Arctic in its place. On average, the trend is clearly warmer, even if some areas get colder than usual weather for a couple of weeks.
Not to worry. While you caterwaul about climate change we are headed for nuclear war, after which the planet will indeed cool down because of the ash and dust cloud encircling the planet.
The world is a lie, there is no truth in anything, if any politician tells the truth (as they see it,they spew garbage for the interest of generations of idiots) they will become sick and never recover. RC Christian’s monument is becoming reality. Even ants have a common goal. We are lost in our own existence, The world may be a better place with some chance of survival,with 7 billion less humans on it.
Very hopeful and good-to-read column. What I take away from what Ms. Johnstone says about Americans are becoming less willing to believe lies is that they are more interested in looking for the truth. As one great thinker said America learns.
i am old enough to remember when journalism was an honorable profession – now i can only hope that our author is correct and that the slumbering sheeple are finally realizing that the plutocracy and its minions are lying to them. keep up the good work Caitlin….
I stopped believing it once I started working in this field 4 years ago. Now I changed my career completely just out of spite to acknowledge that I’ve wasted some tuition on that shit. But I’ll combine this and my new field to bring a whole new light.