Paper of Record, Tissue of Lies

By Jason Hirthler

Legendary polemicist I.F. Stone once related a tale from the late 1960s about the Kennedy administration’s hysterical arms race with Moscow. In particular, the fabricated bomber gap. Stone wrote,

“…the Air Force does its best to hide from the Congress the true facts about the Soviet air force. Twice during the past year Senator Symington, who feels that the billions spent on this bomber are diverting funds which could be more sensibly be spent on new fighter planes, has asked Pentagon witnesses for the numbers of the various Soviet bombers. ‘Do you believe,’ he asked Dr. John S. Foster, Jr., Director of Defense Research and Development, ‘that the Soviet Union poses a serious bomber threat to the United States today?’ The answer was, ‘Yes, Senator Symington, I do.’ Symington replied incredulously, ‘The Soviets have not built a bomber for years, except the Blinder–and the latter’s performance is not as good as the B-58 which we abandoned. In spite of that we now have to spend billions of dollars defending against bombers also.’”

Stone showed how easily false historical narratives slip into the national dialogue, injected like a virus by foreign policy ideologues, media hacks, and sly leakers in the intel community. The arms race and the fear-mongering of the Cold War is not terribly different from the recent effort by the foreign policy “deep state” and its lemmings in the DNC to scandalize and disarm the Trump administration, prepping the slavering mogul for impeachment. The brush is whetted with the same Slavic tar. The techniques are the same. And though it’s been some time since their Russians have assumed center stage in the echo chambers of the beltway, plenty of other state-manufactured hobgoblins have entered the malleable public consciousness. Between the Cold War and its freshly disinterred skeleton, we’ve seen the fable of Iraqi WMDs, tales of runaway Viagra rapes in Libya, the lunacy of head-chopping “moderates” in Syria, and neo-Nazis polished up as freedom fighters in Kiev. All this from the same channels we continue to watch and read and absorb, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, FOX News, NPR, and other plasticized pilasters of our plutocracy.

Haven’t we seen enough? The people of this country have been swindled, hoodwinked, and gulled into ignorant complicity more times than they know, even though they know more than they used to. And now the mainstream press has come to the realization that it is in trouble and that the majority of the conned no longer trust them. Except neoliberals, of course (i.e., liberals who ferociously demand rights for LGBTQ+ communities and free speech in far-flung republics but nod off to sleep just as the imperial bombs begin to fall). Neoliberals made a mad rush to the digital newsstand in the bloody wake of Sir Donald’s gerrymandered triumph, desperate to reinforce their obvious misreading of the country with yet more uncompassed blather. So pleased was the neoliberal press with this surprising show of credulity, they have recently launched two acquisition campaigns brimming with gravitas, ads designed to remind us how fraught are the times we live in and how we must, as noble Americans, guard the truth with our dollars.

Time and Times Again

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n the wake of months of sophomoric hand-wringing over fake news and alternative facts and the imminent collapse of Western Civilization, the New York Times launched a campaign based on the concept of “truth.” If there were an Oscar for “Greatest Hypocritical Performance,” and the White Helmets hadn’t won it, the Times would have. In fact, the Times ran its first broadcast spot in more than a decade during the absurd pomp of the Oscars, while America swooned at the cheeky thespian fledglings that graced the stage. This was no coincidence. It was fitting that the paper aired its pompous drivel during the Oscars, which handed the Best Picture award to an LGBT film with an all-black cast. The Times knows its audience well: identity politics neoliberals anxious to signal their magnanimous values to a world teeming with rifle-gripping racists in the provinces. More fitting, though, was that the Times targeted a show dedicated to the celebration of artful fictions.
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The commercial is a text-driven ad, ebony over ivory, meant to somehow underline the worthy journalism of the old print dailies, a fiction from a bygone era when Walter Cronkite was America’s source for truth. The tiresome graphic trope of the half-finished sentence being relentlessly filled in is the paper’s visual of choice here. In this case, “The truth is ___”. For the Times, the truth is that:

• Our nation is more divided than ever.
• Alternative facts are lies.
• The media is dishonest.
• A woman should dress like a woman.
• Women’s rights are human rights.
• We have to protect our borders.
• His refugee policy is a backdoor Muslim ban.
• We need a full investigation of Russian ties.
• Leaking classified information is the real scandal.
  

  ---

From there the ‘truths’ get faster until they are unintelligible. Then the ad slows and tells us that, “The truth is hard to find, to know,” and “is more important than ever.” Here the Times logo arises to soothe us, a Delphic oracle come to settle our fears and frame this confusing world for us. Notice how this ad presents a laundry list of neoliberal talking points designed to stir up outrage at the Trump administration but says nothing about the Democratic Party’s slandering of Bernie Sanders and perpetual mythologizing of the Kremlin. All the touchstones of identity politics are burnished: division versus unity, oppression of women, lesbians, and transgenders, the rights of immigrants, the freedom of religion, and so on.

See it for yourself:

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ut on the street, one can see companion ads end with the tagline, “The truth answers to no one.” Quite true, but it does beg the question of who the New York Times answers to. Or more to the point, who does the MSM community as a whole answer to? About six companies that see an obligation to shareholders as their foremost priority, regardless of whether they are news organizations. Adversarial journalism has been guillotined. The press also answers to its advertisers, and nobody wants to advertise in a paper or on a channel that rips the United States for austerity and imperialism.

As deregulation architect Larry Summers once advised Elizabeth Warren, there are insiders and outsiders, and “Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas….But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”

If you still haven’t subscribed to the paper of record, the Times may email you and ask you to, “Consider new opinions” and “Explore every angle.” After all, aren’t you an open-minded neoliberal ready to engage in the cut and thrust of debate (so long as your preconceptions aren’t shaken)? Unlike those bloated peasants from the heartland, firing their shotguns at jumbo jets that carry us between civilized coasts. No mention is made of the Overton Window, the important concept that there is an acceptable spectrum of debate in any society. Anti-imperial opinions don’t fall along that spectrum, and it is in the MSM job description to militantly police that spectrum. As deregulation architect Larry Summers once advised Elizabeth Warren, there are insiders and outsiders, and “Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas….But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”

From the paper itself, we are spoon-fed a steady diet of duplicitous gruel. Iraq wants war. Iran wants a bomb. Syria wants tyranny. Russia wants Europe. China wants the Pacific. Trump wants Russia. And, as ever, America wants peace. We are fed half-truth, shaded reportage, whole-cloth lies, and important distractions like Chelsea Clinton’s thoughts about Fahrenheit 451 and other such prefab piffle. Actually, we should care about what Chelsea thinks. Chances are good she’ll be president one day. That particular piece by Chelsea is something more than standard gibberish: it is part of a slow-moving campaign to build her name, character, and reputation into a viable political commodity. She’s already penned a book. We all know what that means. It is about global health. It examines public-private partnerships, which are an outstanding delivery system of public money into private hands. Bill and Hillary’s pampered spawn has shown her hand; we’re not quite clear of the Clinton clan. In an important literary aside, Chelsea piously tells us, “I avoid most fiction in which children are harmed or seriously threatened in any way.” Well, isn’t that just the kind of truth you can cast your vote for?

Ex Post Facto

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]ot to be outdone, The Washington Post, house organ of beltway myopia, has its own efforts to counter the rise of citizen journalism, citizen propaganda, and citizen confusion. In the masthead, the paper’s logo shines proudly above a new motto: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” This was probably chosen for its alliterative appeal, if not its relationship to anything the paper has done since Watergate. But the idea is obvious. We need trustworthy institutions like WaPo to frame the world for us. A companion fundraising campaign tells us, “Great journalism needs you,” which is presumably why you should give to CounterPunch, Truthdig, 21st Century Wire, Shadowproof, The Greanville Post, Moon of Alabama, The Intercept, and a host of other left media. But of course, this is not the message. The message is to give money to Jeff Bezos, who apparently doesn’t have enough to pay his piddling scribes to run their daily transcription service for the White House.

As we absorb this truth, we are told on the front page, that the Justice Department will charge Russian spies for hacking Yahoo! This may or may not be true, but nothing is more predictable on the front-page of the Post than a) Russian fearmongering; and b) anti-Trump hysteria. (And remember last summer when they ran 16 negative articles about Bernie Sanders in 16 hours?) Another headlining home-page article shows us a beautifully captured photo of a white-bearded Arab man perched on the edge of a broad bed, looking out his shattered window frames into the streets of Aleppo. The human-interest story is fairly benign but twice notes Syrian government bombing in Aleppo, suggesting it is to blame for the blown infrastructure of the man’s family home. Perhaps it is. But no context is provided, as usual. No mention is made of the fact that the West launched an illegal proxy war in Syria in order to topple the Assad government, split the Shia Crescent in the Middle East, reduce Russian influence regionally, and control the flow of fossil fuels to Europe. “A minor oversight,” groans the Starbucks neoliberal, “We need to focus on Trump!!” Hyperlinks throughout the piece inform us that Obama is to blame for the fall of Aleppo. This means that Obama should have better armed our terrorist proxies that controlled the city; merely having NATO fly them in, the CIA train them, the GCC arm them, and the IDF heal their wounded, was simply not enough. Obama will never be forgiven for not unleashing American military power on Syria, Shock-and-Awe style. Nor will he be forgiven for making the rational decision not to bomb Syria in 2013 after the rebel-terrorists’ false flag attack on Ghouta.

Still more glowing links tell us that, “The bloodbath in Aleppo will haunt humanity.” More false news. Humanity will forget Aleppo as soon as the Trump impeachment hearings start, or Marine Le Pen wins the French elections. It is in the character of humanity to kick our sins into the dustbin of history; how else could we sustain our outsized arrogance? A final piece of prating rubbish tells us that a 7-year old girl from Aleppo has become our generation’s Anne Frank, though we’ve little avenue to discern what stories are real and which are staged or produced by the White Helmets, Oscar winners for their remarkable fictitious portrayals of rescues of children and adults from the rubble of their war on Syria.

That the Post is a transparent organ of state propaganda is not mentioned. This paper joined the rest of the MSM in marginalizing Bernie Sanders, lionizing Hillary Clinton, demonizing Russia, and misrepresenting the war on Syria as one of freedom fighters struggling against a hateful tyranny. It won’t do to tell the world the more mundane truth: that the “Syrian conflict” is a war of aggression conceived and activated by Washington and subordinate powers designed to crush an independent government unwilling to serve the interests of transnational capital. But that is old news, if not fake news. 

Burying the Lede

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he media is the front organization for globalized elite capital. Its job is to obscure the truth, not reveal it. In this capacity, it has done a tremendous job deceiving a poorly educated and now miseducated populace. It typically employs what mass society theorists might call ‘white propaganda,’ or propagandistic communications that, in the context of the messenger’s goal, suppress unhelpful truths and highlight helpful truths. Important context is stripped away and simple events are isolated in a media spotlight. Floodlight communications deliver context, while spotlight communications deliver singular emphases.

Take Crimea, for example. Eliminated from most MSM communication, either by straight elision, misleading insinuation, or outright falsehood, were the stories of the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev, the virulent anti-Russian neo-fascist character of the new government, the hugely decisive plebiscite of Crimea to re-join the Russian Federation, the U.N.-backed Kosovo precedent for this action, the existence of Russian troops in Sevastopol as part of Russia’s sole Black Sea naval base, NATO Eastward expansion and military buildup along the Russian border, and the long history of Western intervention in Russia, including the Siege of Sevastopol in 1941.

Hermann Goering, Hitler’s intended successor, said that it was easy to bring a population to support its leaders’ objectives, “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism…” Isn’t that precisely what we’ve been witnessing? Russia has attacked our democracy. We are in peril. Those who argue otherwise are either paid or unwitting Russian agents, and can be conveniently found in the Harvard Library’s list of Kremlin propagandists. Many of the tactical features of propaganda are readily apparent in this narrative: the construction of a dualistic, for-and-against storytelling construct; the simple and consistent repetition of the threat; the use of authority figures to establish credibility of the claims, with evidential analysis taking a back seat; the heightened visibility of the storyline via the flooding of the mainstream airwaves; and the propitious appearance of consensus in the MSM, supported by the vigorous slander of dissenters as complicit in the attack.

This is why the majority of the electorate are often misled about what the U.S. is doing on the world stage. The media has so comprehensively served the interests of the plutocratic elite, which is war and plunder, free-markets and profit, however one might phrase it. This slavish service to the one percent is the precise inversion of the media’s intended adversarial role in society. And it is why we will continue to fall prey to state lies. It was Thomas Jefferson who said that, “…the only security of all is in a free press.” But there’s nothing free about being wholly owned.

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