by Matthew Boose
Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk kicked the hornet’s nest when he labeled National Public Radio “state affiliated media.” The howls of protest were amusing, and telling. While they like to pretend otherwise, the mass media in the United States operate much like the state-run media of autocratic regimes.
And it isn’t just NPR. The New York Times and CNN are preoccupied with the generation of propaganda, narrative making, the enforcement of dogmas (“woke” agendas on race, climate, sex, etc.), and the censorship of dissenters.
One knows where the state stands on every question just by assessing the volume and tone of discussion in the press. When something occurs contrary to the narrative, coverage is muted, perfunctory—assuming there is any coverage at all. But on pet issues like “white supremacy,” the breathless moralism of the media is no less crude and dogmatic than the propaganda of China or North Korea.
It was only weeks ago that an anti-Christian mass murderer killed six people, including three children. But shooter’s reported “manifesto” seems to have fallen into a black hole. The Biden Administration has the material, but it hasn’t been made public. If the Justice Department wanted this information out there, it would have been leaked to NBC or the Washington Post by now. If the media wanted it out there, they would seek it out.
Instead of information, we are flooded with propaganda. About the war in Ukraine we know virtually nothing, only that it is a battle for Our Democracy™ and that Ukraine inevitably will win. When a Pentagon leaker released authentic information exposing this narrative as a childish fantasy, the media helped hunt him down and called him a Nazi.
Recall that other Ukraine “whistleblower” behind the first Trump impeachment. The latter was lionized for leaking President Trump’s phone calls. This was a pretty serious violation under the Constitution, but the whistleblower was celebrated for “standing up” to the president the people elected.
During the Trump presidency, the state media LARPed as opposition media. In effect, they orchestrated a coup, working closely with intelligence sources and the Democratic Party to saturate the public discourse with leaks and innuendo that portrayed the president as a secret Russian asset. This was, essentially, a relentless “disinformation” campaign designed to discredit the 2016 presidential election.
Ever since 2020, “disinformation” has become an inescapable shibboleth of the Left, indeed, journalists spend more time frothing over it than they do reporting true information, most of which remains buried. The irony is that no institution spreads disinformation more capably or casually than our own media.
The leftist agenda cannot survive without massive conspiracies of concealment, and this is nowhere more apparent than in their coverage of the subject of race. The media constantly pumps out a narrative of white villainy, while ignoring rampant black crime. They portray “gun violence” as the fault of white ruralites armed with rifles, while ignoring where most “mass shootings” actually happen: in the ghetto.
In the media’s magic lens, blacks are always the victims, even when they are the perpetrators. Such is the case with the “Tennessee Three” (or rather, the Tennessee Two and one guilty white lady). With this tiresome, banal fabrication, complete with a Martin Luther King, Jr. wannabe, the mass media transported us once again to 1965 for another lecture about white guilt. With absolutely no evidence of racial motive presented, two black hecklers were painted as martyrs of “democracy” for disrupting a state legislature with a megaphone.
The wall-to-wall hysteria of the anti-Trump #Resistance now defines American political culture.
There was never any evidence of racial motive in the killing of George Floyd, but it did not matter. Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted by the media, along with white society at large, for his role in an imaginary conspiracy to murder blacks. The media and its patrons in the Democratic Party are at it again after the shooting of a black teenager, Ralph Yarl, by an elderly white man who said he was “scared to death” his home was being invaded. While the details are unclear, the usual demagogues have portrayed the incident as common. In fact, this is a “man bites dog” story.
Children were also shot in Chicago last weekend as a large mob of black teenagers raised hell in the Loop, but there has been a media blackout of the anarchy. With some justice, perhaps: black youths causing destruction is “dog bites man.”
In authoritarian countries, the people usually know when they’re being lied to, but they’re desensitized by the constant battering of nonsense. This is the truly pernicious effect of the U.S. media: by constantly flooding the zone with distractions, conspiracy theories and infantile noise about fake issues and non-events, the state media anesthetizes the citizenry. The people become so demoralized that they cease to even care what is true.
In a political order as dishonest and unnatural as our own, the generation of propaganda is a constant necessity, otherwise, the rickety foundation of lies on which the regime rests would collapse.
– – –
Matthew Boose is a Mt. Vernon fellow of the Center for American Greatness and a staff writer and weekly columnist at the Conservative Institute. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Caller. Follow him on Twitter @matt_boose.
Photo “Donald Trump Press Gaggle” by Trump White House Archived.
