Watching Jake Tapper lecture his CNN audience about the dangers of state propaganda was like listening to Ronald McDonald pitch a sermon against childhood obesity. It was like watching a crab louse act all grossed out about venereal diseases. This is the same parasite who has been actively promotingthe Bana Alabed war propaganda psy-op, and there he was getting all high and mighty the other day about Trump conducting state propaganda.
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n a corporatist system of government, which is what America undeniably has, corporate media is state media, because corporate power isn’t separable from government in such a system. The handful of plutocrats who own America’s highly consolidated media networks only hire people to run them who will maintain the status quo which has made it possible for them to rule as oligarchs. This is why you see every single talking head on TV repeating the same exact establishment narratives about North Korea, Russia, Syria and Iran today regardless of that pundit’s purported ideology, for example; the US power establishment is held together at gunpoint by US military interventionism, so the corporate state media advances narratives which facilitate that. Despite the mountains upon mountains of evidence to the contrary, these propaganda outlets always report from the premise that the US government is a force of good in the world who would never lie to its people to manufacture support for military interventionism.
We see this propaganda being peddled with domestic affairs as well, because in a corporatist oligarchy where money equals power, the relative power of the ruling elites necessarily depends on keeping the public relatively poor. When the people decided to advance a candidate last year who ran on a populist platform of fighting income and wealth inequality, the Washington Post, whose sole owner (Jeff Bezos) is one of the wealthiest people on earth and is a CIA contractor, ran an incredible sixteen smear pieces against him in sixteen hours during the hottest point of the Democratic presidential primary. The media blacked him out whenever it wasn’t smearing him, in one cartoonish instance filming Trump’s empty podium rather than showing Sanders’ speech. [Editor's Note: And this is although Bernie Sanders was never a true anti-oligarch, anti-imperialist subversive, but a phony, and a member of the establishment himself.—PG]
CNN anchor Jake Tapper has now deleted a tweet where he advised his followers to seek expertise on Syria from a 7-year-old living in Turkey pic.twitter.com/koWk7YG0FK
Tapper promotes a blatant war psy-op. At CNN, he's just an abject "bootlicking warmonger."
It was very funny, then, to hear one of the leading pundits for the US oligarchy using the term “propaganda straight out of North Korea’s playbook” in reference to anyone other than himself. Yes, the President’s “Trump TV” whatever thing with Kayleigh McEnany is severely idiotic, barely watchable, vapid and certainly propagandistic in its own way, but no more so than the bootlicking warmongers at CNN like Tapper. At least Trump, unlike the plutocrats, was elected, and his promotion is openly stumping for him. You don’t see the names of Jake’s owners on the backdrop behind him.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here are some 320 million people in America, a large percentage of them with firearms, and they’d never knowingly consent to a system which actively depresses their wages and deprives them of the same basic social safety nets accorded to everyone else in every major country while pouring unfathomable amounts of money and resources into needless interventions overseas. So the mass media is used to manufacture their consent by America’s true rulers. They are assured, again and again and again, that this is all a perfectly normal way for things to be, and if you don’t like it you can blame Pablo or Ahmed or Vladimir. This is all normal, don’t you revolt, we’ll take care of everything, go back to sleep.
Last 11/3 I suggested "Trump TV" wasn't his fallback. It was a prototype for State Propaganda. It has now launched pic.twitter.com/AWuaI2yJfZ
(THREAD) Trump's "Real News" show—Trump TV—is state-sponsored propaganda like what Kim uses in North Korea. It's vile. RETWEET if you agree. pic.twitter.com/vpD9l41lhy
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]mericans are saturated in the real propaganda of their actual rulers day in and day out, and until we find a viable way to combat that we’re going to have a hard time changing anything. The people of mainstream America can always be corralled back into their stalls no matter what political or social upheavals occur as long as the mass media propaganda machine is functioning. I’ve come up with a few suggestions for how to combat this in this hyperlink here, and I’d like to invite you to add your own creativity to this endeavor as well. Let’s all come up with a bunch of new and innovative ways to kill the lie factory and put Jake Tapper out of a job.
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About the Author
Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.
Americans are saturated in the real propaganda of their actual rulers day in and day out, and until we find a viable way to combat that we’re going to have a hard time changing anything. The people of mainstream America can always be corralled back into their stalls no matter what political or social upheavals occur as long as the mass media propaganda machine is functioning. I’ve come up with a few suggestions for how to combat this in this hyperlink here, and I’d like to invite you to add your own creativity to this endeavor as well. Let’s all come up with a bunch of new and innovative ways to kill the lie factory and put Jake Tapper out of a job.