Info Wars
Attacking reporters is a classic gambit of autocrats, and with today’s glut of global tyrants, lethal assaults on journalists are increasing all over the world.
Including here, in what is supposed to be a rock-star democracy. But like any tin-pot dictatorship, the USA has a president who calls reporters “enemies of the people.”
In fact, the press is the BFF of the people. It supports us, and we need to support it. In America, a group soul currently in mortal crisis — undergoing a Pluto Return — journalists who still have their critical thinking intact play a life-and-death role.
As for the others, those news outlets motivated less by critical thinking than by pandering and profiteering, they also play a fatally important role in this shit storm.
Sea of data
The mass media has become exponentially more powerful than it was only two generations ago, and more inescapable.
Politics has been gamified via the news, feedback-looping with minute-by-minute ratings… And news has become addictive…a kind of pseudo-discourse—a miasma of ephemera, that traps us in the daily drama, forces us to watch the news ping-pong back and forth across our screens…. We are left feeling some combination of overwhelmed, bloated, trapped, morally outraged, and, even still, mesmerized. – Michael Hirschorn
We’re so immersed in the media that we forget it’s there, like fish unaware they’re in the sea. But this sea conditions our emotional state as well as our political and philosophical assumptions. We can’t afford to be carried along by the current.
We can’t afford to assume that what’s trending must be what’s important.
Principles, not parties
And at our peril do we start to see ourselves as the corporate news sees us: solely in terms of the two raging polarities into which the USA has divided itself. (1)
In this new Civil War, the media is the mustering arm, cajoling us to join up. If we do, we’re committed to fight for our side, cheering or condemning every headline accordingly.
If you’re the type who’s turned on by war movies and violent sports, I guess this kind of hearty simplicity is invigorating. For the rest of us, it’s insulting.
I resent the presumption that because I haven’t drunk the MAGA Kool-Aid it follows that I have to root for everyone on Trump’s enemies list or be condemned as an apostate.
I resent the presumption that because I oppose Washington’s practice of fomenting coups abroad, it follows that I support the tyrants in Russia and Iran.
Big truths
The most important astrological transit of 2019, a square between Neptune and Jupiter (exact again this month), encourages us to question this narrow paradigm. It promotes the championship of genuine ideals.
This is an auspicious time to opt out of waving our flags for one or the other half of a duopoly. Instead, let’s wave them for principles.
Such as the First Amendment.
Flawed heroes
No matter how unsavory some of its proponents are.
Life is complex, and so are people. If it weren’t for the black-and-white thinking drummed into our heads by the media, we’d probably have no trouble acknowledging the problematic aspects of figures like Julian Assange or Martin Luther King, Jr, while at the same time acknowledging how history will probably see them 100 years from now.
Poisonous rash
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the Information Revolution so far, it’s that quantity is not the same as quality. The current mass obsession with Trump, a mediagenic black hole, is breaking all records as far as quantity is concerned.
Coverage of him is incessant and ubiquitous, like a hideous skin rash that itches everywhere. Superficially it is wildly inflammatory, but it doesn’t go deep. We don’t consider root causes because we’re too busy scratching.
Trump … tweets something outrageous which he knows the liberals will get upset by, the liberals read his tweets and …tell each other via social media how terrible it all is. It becomes a feedback loop in which they are locked together. .. together in a theatre watching a pantomime villain… — Andrew Curtis
Mimicking the mess
Its etymology tells us that the media is supposed to mediate between us and the cacophony of world events. Is the corporate news doing this? Or is it just mimicking the political mess we’re in, further sensationalizing a binary quagmire as futile as trench warfare?
Fox News continues to stir up the passions of the working-class poor (but only the white kind; the minority poor are 
cast as the enemy), while MSNBC promotes politicians struggling to win back the Fox demographic, whom their party has for decades dismissed and abandoned.
The blue states are the royal family & the red ones are Meghan Markle’s dad.—Bill Maher
Laughing darkly
Big Media’s stupefying approach to a complex world is systemic. It’s too simplistic for reality, and reality has gotten too weird for the news.
Anybody who’s ever watched an anchor sitting at their desk, struggling to keep a straight face while telling us about a Trump tantrum, can see that the conventional news format is unequipped to handle the degree of ludicrousness going on.
The monstrosities streaming out of Washington right now are too dead serious not to laugh darkly at. So it has fallen to the late-night comics, the heroes of this cultural moment, to give us the sanest take. Stephen Colbert et al dive as deep as their monologue running time allows.
But they critique the nonsense rather than offering an alternative to it. To cop some truth, and not just sit in appalled fascination at the vaudeville show, we need to pay attention to the reporters who work the back alleys outside the theatre.
Ignored by prime time
It isn’t as if they were in short supply. There’s more investigative reporting available to more people right now than at any other time in the history of the world.
True guardians of the Fourth Estate, like Naomi Klein, Amy Goodman, Robert Reich, Glenn Greenwald and Al-Jazeera (when its brave coverage of global censorship is not itself being censored), are available almost everywhere, at the click of a keyboard.
American reality
At the same time, we have to deal with the fact that it’s Big Media that generates mass thinking. Every day, round the clock, the mainstream news outlets churn out what most Americans think of as reality.
The gravest distortions of this kind of reporting has to do with what it fails to say. Intensely relevant truths are shorn of context, lost in a slurry of false emphases and sins of omission.
We looked at a flagrant example of this in my last blog. Americans are deluged with coverage of Russia’s election meddling but aren’t hearing a peep about America’s own cyber invasions, spying and disinformation campaigns.
It would be nice to see at least a sidebar. (2)
Lies at the border
Another example of the media failing to mediate is the race-baiting they let Trump get away with.
When this emoji-headed hate monkey(3) comes out with a tweet impugning an entire race of people via some random factoid he pulls out of his ass, the networks don’t miss a beat covering it. But instead of refuting it with facts, they usually just report the lie.
It is true that there has been heavy coverage of the situation at the Mexican border, particularly family separation, an abomination that harkens back to the days of slavery. But the crisis is mostly played for its sensationalism, rather than
presented with the kind of background that would give the public a sense of perspective.
It might seem logical, for instance, that when covering a Trump tirade against gun-toting Mexicans, a nod would be given to the reality of where these supposed criminals get their guns. In fact, 70% of Mexico’s guns come from here: the USA is where they’re made, sold and profited from. But this is rarely mentioned.
Moreover, it’s no secret that the reason Mexico’s drug economy is thriving is its massive and unflagging customer base in the US. Millions of Americans, probably a hefty proportion of those watching Fox News, are responsible for creating and maintaining the narco-state that Mexico has become.
Were this reality included in the coverage of Trump’s risible efforts to wall off the border, it might stimulate some real understanding in viewers, giving the lie to Trump’s bigoted theses.
We sometimes see the networks trying to counter Trump’s toxic malarky by featuring a talking head from “the other side.” But this just keeps us locked in the same dualistic trap. We end up with nothing more than a glorified stage fight.
There’d be no need for contrived rebuttals if the news would give the public a complete picture instead of an elided one.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world
The cluelessness among the American public about other countries, especially those that don’t serve
“American interests,” can be directly chalked up to the failure of our information suppliers to present the tiniest shred of history.
The epitomical example of this is the coverage of Israel and Palestine. Were context provided, it might be possible for more of us to understand
…why Palestinians have carried out violent attacks against the people who have occupied them for half a century…. under military rule, without recourse to elections or a fair legal system, much less citizenship, for roughly 600 times as long as we have been under Trump. – Adam Shatz
Debasement
In addition to failing to nurture our factual intelligence, conventional news reporting degrades our ethical intelligence. By framing all news in terms of where Trump stands on it, it debases us to his level.
It also degrades the institution of journalism. On his recent visit to the U.K., this ridiculous man — a picture of gaucheness in his ill-fitting formal wear — made gaffes that barely registered on the news radar, reflecting the extent to which his staggering ignorance has become normalized.
The New York Times described his news conference as “a restrained performance.” As Stephen Colbert pointed out, this is what you might say to a dog. Such a good boy! You didn’t hump the Queen’s leg.
When reporters have the chance to get in Trump’s face and actively ask him questions, it smacks of enabling: shoring up the charade that this pretend president is a real president.
Trump is governed by some algorithmic factor of ego, fear, impulse, greed, and the suasion of random celebrity petition; cogent analysis of social and historical dynamics fare nowhere in his thinking.– Jelani Cobb
For a reporter to ask this delusional ignoramus about, for example, any of the seven countries the USA is currently bombing, or, Goddess forbid, those that John Bolton is considering bombing (“Will there be war with Iran?” “I hope not”), is not about informing. It’s just playing along with the partisan war games.
The only way such journalistic gestures could rise above insulting the public’s intelligence is if the reporters were to follow up their questions with a substantive analysis. Or to ask their questions with the kind of subtle ironic genius that someone like Dick Cavett could bring to an interview.
Bubble tea
To the extent that we follow non-news like this, it is perhaps because we, too, prefer to avoid confronting the daunting issues of our day, genuinely, as mature adults.
We can forgive ourselves for this. It’s easy to feel crisis-saturated. Telling ourselves we’re self-informing, we dive into the bubble tea of the mass mind is to seek escape.
The trouble is, it doesn’t even work for that. It provides no real respite. To slosh around in Big Media’s neon-lit universe is to eventually become numb.
What our souls want is to become more alive.
Notes
1) All kudos to the NBC analyst who resigned over his network’s inability to approach the news in any other way than as a series of Democrat-vs.-GOP battles.
2) “[While what the United States government does shouldn’t be the model upon which we decide what’s right and wrong,] it’s highly relevant to the question of how we treat revelations about what other countries are doing—whether we treat it as a standard practice among countries, and respond accordingly, or we pretend that it’s some kind of 9/11 or Pearl Harbor, like an aberration and a violation of international norms.” – Glenn Greenwald
Washington is a hotbed of international lobbyists and meddlers we rarely read about. 
One of the most notorious is petrogarch Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates, a longtime ally of America’s energy, military and high-tech interests whose backdoor channels into Washington have elicited no public outrage and little press coverage.
3) Insult from the great Tracy Ullman.