The corporate media in America has been corrupted beyond redemption and any talk of political reform must acknowledge this reality. The Constitutional founders included the press, or 4th Estate, with its unique ability to hold the powerful to account, in their list of vital institutions purposely.

It’s suggestive that amongst all the wailing and rending of garments over disinformation, there is no discussion of revitalizing the 4th estate to its “unique ability to hold the powerful to account”, or any examination of the role the corporate media has had in its own repudiation. Thanks to the corporatization of the media, the press, as a unique institution, is on its way to decline if not ruin. The consolidation of corporate ownership, which has shut down scores of newspapers and hemorrhaged thousands of jobs, began in earnest around the time that the Reagan Administration eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, a development that led directly to the rise of Fox News and the Hate Inc., tribal discourse that has America on the precipice of a civil war.

Corporate control has been deleterious for the media for obvious reasons. Whoever controls the organs of opinion formation, the news and entertainment media, the schools, the universities, controls the mass mind, and therefore controls politics. The totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union did this blatantly, with direct state management of the press. The US does this clandestinely, with nominally independent, privately-owned media manipulated via back-channel communications, government grants, intelligence agency inserts (Project Mockingbird) and so on.

The New York Times is the key node in the US propaganda matrix because of its powerful impact on the professional/managerial/class. Lately they’ve been in over-drive, with the fake rape story, and the puff piece about secret CIA spy-bases, in a desperate attempt to preclude accountability for the Biden Administration’s disastrous proxy-war against Russia and complicity in Israels Gaza genocide. So far, the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza has killed over 31,000 people, mostly women and children. The US has supported the massacre by approving over 100 arms deals for Israel since October 7.

But something is wrong with the rest of American society, especially the young people–the Israeli stories aren’t working out (Anat Schwartz troubles, the mystery of killing people in a breadline, the murders of Palestinians on the West Bank, a new atrocity every day…). Israel is now toxic and the entire history of ethnic cleansing, massacre and long genocide on which the very existence of Israel is based, is now laid bare. 

And, questions about the wisdom of the proxy-war against Russia in Ukraine continue to mount, even as it’s the first war in which Americans have been instructed that the narrative must be preserved as a strategic imperative–that Ukraine will win no matter what pesky, contrary truths emerge.

The political class and corporate media are now in a panic and lashing out everywhere, with the bipartisan attempt to ban TikTok the latest example. The bill that could ban TikTok took one step closer to becoming a law on Wednesday. After being introduced just last week, the bill was fast-tracked through the House of Representatives and will now head to the Senate.

Independent journalist Michael Tracy writes–“Lead sponsor of the TikTok bill, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) admits the real reason they’re rushing to ban TikTok — because it’s “becoming the dominant news platform for Americans under 30″ and the US government doesn’t control it like other platforms”

Then there’s that elephant in the room that we’re not supposed to mention. In a leaked recording, ADL head Jonathan Greenblatt admitted that Israel had a “TikTok problem.” Suddenly, a so-called partisan congress agrees in unison: Let’s ban TikTok.

The problem appears to be that young people can recognize a genocide when they see it despite the best efforts of the corporate media to portray it as anti-semitism. What we’re seeing is an attempt at state censorship whose aim is to shut down Americans’ ability to dissent from currently unfolding US foreign policy, driven explicitly by elite fear at a rapidly growing antiwar protest movement that has largely succeeded in persuading the US public.

Indeed, the urge to censor TikTok demonstrates the way in which our elite feel towards an independent media that “holds the powerful to account”. You can see it with the censorship/industrial/complex, which is partly a reaction to the loss of influence of these legacy institutions, and a panicked attempt to assert control over the unruly many-to-many communications networks that have been displacing them. This is the latest iteration of the undercurrent of contempt toward ordinary voters that has become central to political elites’ worldview, especially since Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Suddenly in Washington the reaction was that if the American people held any views contrary to the elite: whether opposing fracking, being critical of Wall Street, protesting against war and police brutality, or voting for Trump, it had to be because they were propagandized by the evil Russians weaponizing social media. 

If you trust the media, you are a fool. That’s understandable. Most of us were brought up to think that authority figures were trustworthy. But at some point you have to look around and notice that the corporate media is your enemy, just like most other corporations, rich people and the US government. 

Personally–I don’t believe a word they say.

Update: Now we’re getting somewhere.

New York Post: “A swarm of anti-Israel protesters early Thursday targeted the New York Times’ printing facility in Queens and accused the center of manufacturing “consent for genocide.”‘