When I was doing my PhD at MIT, Noam Chomsky, one of my professors (in fact, he was on my Generals Paper Committee for the pre-dissertation qualification) wrote a book called ‘Manufacturing Consent’. The basic thesis was this (quote):
“Especially where the issues involve substantial U.S. economic and political interests, the mass media usually function much in the manner of state propaganda agencies.”
They used a tsunami of detailed case evidence and documentation to establish this thesis beyond any shadow of doubt. They delivered an earth-scorching roast to all the “prestige” media: basically the New York Times, the Washington Post, the TV networks, etc. All the same scumbags and shills still operating today — what we’d now call the “legacy” media. In other words, the supposedly august and revered high-end news outlets were all without exception creating and relentlessly jamming the USA population with what we’d now call ‘fake news’. The book was an ironclad testimonial to the fact that there’s never been any such thing as “journalistic integrity”. It’s always been nothing but Pravda-level fakery all the way down.
Now bear with me here, this is where the road does a jack-knife hairpin turn, because Manufacturing Consent, authored as it was by two progressive icons (Chomsky and Edward Herman) was greeted as revelation and feted as Gospel Truth by all good lefties of the time. And the book totally opened my personal eyes to the fact that it’s always been fake/statist news all the time, from Day One. Who’d of thunk it? But hey fool me twice and all that, so I imbibed the message deeply and gratefully.
So just imagine how weird it feels right now, in a world where we have had a long series of MAJOR, OBVIOUS scams of monumental proportions, as big and as weighty as anything Chomsky ever analyzed, as big and as horrible as the Vietnam War — but everybody seems to now believe that selfsame legacy media, as though they couldn’t tell a lie to save their lives. As though they actually had a shred of investigative mojo left.
We’ve had how many OBVIOUSLY fake narratives in the modern era of false flag fakery that began with the incredibly blatant 9–11 scam in 2001, which any decent high school paper could have unraveled to its domestically orchestrated sources, then the outrageous drumbeat for the Iraq war killing a hundred thousand children, right up to the media’s function as chief cheerleader for the fake pandemic in the service of establishing medical dictatorship at present. And many others between those milestones.
One after another, too many to count. And that selfsame proven duplicitous legacy media, excoriated by every progressive follower of Chomsky since Manufacturing Consent appeared in 1988, is the main force and stage manager of all these false narratives — and yet swallowed wholesale by just about everybody without turning a hair or missing a beat. How can this be, when Chomsky fully documented their entire history essentially being nothing but statist propaganda and lies?
Here’s what the book’s Amazon blurb says:
“What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.”
Go get ’em Bro! That’s telling it! ¡Andale, Olé! But wait — how come suddenly now practically everybody, certainly everybody who considers him/herself intelligent, educated, sensible, respectable, logical, intellectual, a vegetable … oh wait that’s the song lyric — anyway, now all such people believe every syllable of this fake horseshit. What happened? It’s a real head scratcher.