Despite the myth about a vaunted Forth Estate that holds power accountable, the press in the US operates with all of the conformity of a state run media, censoring alternative narratives and ensuring that the neoliberal/neoconservative party line is dominant.

But, of course, that’s not what the elite broadcasters and journalists believe. They believe that what they report is the “truth”. That nobody tells them what to write or say, yet will then report exactly what unnamed Western intelligence operatives tell them, and then turn around and tell you without a hint of embarrassment that Russia and China are evil because they have state media.

These trends of media conformity and propaganda have long been visible but since the election of Trump they’ve gone into overdrive. It’s been clear since Russia-gate that our feral elite had settled on a more aggressive form of social control via nonstop disinformation presented as headline news based on spurious accusations from anonymous sources, none of who were were ever identified, and none of whose claims could ever be verified. During the last 4 years the media has continued this propaganda campaign without pause and without ever acknowledging that its central claims have been exposed as lies.

The way mainstream news outlets consistently refuse to account for a fact so obvious and indisputable as intelligence agencies being known liars should by itself be enough to discredit the entire institution of mass news reporting. I mean, seriously, Mike Pompeo boasted that the CIA lies as a key part of its job, and crickets.

Going further, after the lies used to drive the invasion of Iraq any journalist who relies on the word of an off the record intelligence operative should be considered a propagandist.

Yet here we are with the latest New York Times bombshell about shadowy Russian intelligence outfits providing bounties to the Taliban to kill US soldiers being treated as established fact throughout the entire political/media class and down through the entire population of propagandized rank-and-file citizenry.

These flimsy, poorly-sourced allegations are being hammered into mainstream liberal consciousness on a daily basis now in the exact same way that Russia-gate was, and just like with Russia-gate the narrative they are being used to shape helps advance military expansionism and new cold war escalations which just so happen to fit perfectly into pre-existing geostrategic agendas of empire. The reason for this is because the propagandists who manufacture consent for imperialist agendas understand that truth and facts matter far less than does mindless repetition and emotion.

Even with the Covid-19 pandemic and unrest in American cities over police violence our reality remains forever war with a state media to make it so.