Legacy Media is an Antiquated, Obsolete Relic
And when their grip on power over narrative loosens, things get desperate.
The Fourth Estate
A very long time ago what is now called journalism played an important part in a society bereft of any long-distance communications. Long before the internet, or even telegraphs and telegrams, there was no real way for humans to learn about events in another province or state, much less another part of the world.
Not only were normal citizens removed from distant events, but even had they been in the vicinity, a slew of courtly concerns were simply out of reach for the commoner. The earliest ‘newspapers’ often reported such royal demarches by way of connections to the elite upper crust. The point being that, even the act of obtaining information considered newsworthy would often be a privileged action.
Over time, however, news services became incrementally less of an essential utility and more of a ‘convenience’. For instance, during World War 1, the average citizen of most developed countries could hypothetically apprise himself of a given piece of news or breaking update on the war across the ocean with a timely telegram sent to a friend or family in the place of interest. But lining up in front of a news service bulletin printing live updates on the situation, was certainly in many ways more convenient, and faster.
But the key thing was—already at this point, the gathering of ‘news’ was in its very earliest stages of being democratized; it simply hadn’t reached the critical point where the convenience of other sources outweighed that of legacy media’s methods of delivery.
But by the time the post-WW2 era came, telephones had begun to proliferate and, by the 50s and 60s, were soon ubiquitous in most middle-class American homes. But when the legacy news media corporations get a whiff of a threat, they reinvent themselves to stay relevant.
So, beginning with the ‘Golden ‘50s’, they transformed the presentation of news to the public. It indeed became a golden era of television personalities. ‘News’ had now become more of an ‘experience’ than simple fact gathering. Compare the emotional appeals of the suavely charismatic broadcast anchormen that had begun to crop up in that era to the previous photo of a flat, anodyne news ticker simply reeling off dispatch after dispatch without any added phatic flourishes.
The age of the ‘charismatic anchorman’ was born. During the ‘60s, ‘70s, and onward, legacy media hypnotized and entranced the masses with a series of smooth-talking, velvet-voiced lotharios slinging their NLP-laden diktats like lariats. The common drub was enamored with these sharply dressed and manicured puppeteers. Our natural attraction to certain ‘personality types’, intensified by the the comely fatherly tones of these anchormen served as a pre-ASMR manner of relaxation for people after a hard day’s work, rather than a source of legitimate news. Those in power quickly learned that people preferred their information masticated and digested for them, then spoon fed straight into their mouths like a mother bird bringing a worm.
It was all by design, of course; infused in the folds and selvages of these anchormen’s flowing speech were the internal programming chords and rhythms of the corporate ballad. Decade after decade, the recipe was the same: from Dan Rather, to Peter Jennings, to Ted Koppel—these suave and soigne parental figures lorded over the American public with their authoritative, richly crooning transmissions.
But what the presentable facade hid was the fact that they were in effect front-men for the hidden corporate interests of the world, the spokesmen for the endless web of powers bankrolling the media conglomerates.
Somewhere in that decades-long-running fantasm of ‘evening news’, we began to lose the essence of what ‘news’ and ‘journalism’ was really supposed to be about. Not the interjected opinions and coded language, and certainly not mere stenography for governmental and corporate interests.
The Disruption
Then came the internet—the behemoth that smashed down the door of the status quo, dragging in with it the final culminating point: that cross-convergence of convenience and instantaneity.
For the first time in history, humans could be apprised of events from all across the globe with the swiftness of the major news groups, but with the attendant convenience that came with not having to wade through the knee-deep sludge of corporate filler—be it commercials, fluff, or simply the over-saturation of extraneous guff not relevant to the particular viewer.
Now a person could subscribe to exactly the channels and venues that brought them just the news topics they wanted, not the blandly homogenized mishmash slopped on by the likes of CNN and co.
But the groundbreaking concept which was most pivotal of all was this: for the first time in history, people could get their news straight from the source.
First hand information is king in any journalistic endeavor. And the spread of social media services like Twitter suddenly democratized the field of reportage, giving voice to people that were actually on the ground of a given event.
Suddenly, we all found ourselves asking: why would we trust a CNN report about a given situation, delivered in monotone by a suited stiff in some news-capsule thousands of kilometers away, when we could get the info straight from the event, by a person at ground zero?
This stark contrast became most vividly felt in warzones like the Syrian conflict. Mainstream media ran 24/7 blab-a-thons about events they understood in only the most tenuous sense. First they would patch in to a ‘correspondent’ in Beirut, the country next door. Then he would go on about things he “heard” from sources in eastern Lebanon on the border of Syria, whom themselves ‘happened to hear about an event’ from friends and family in Syria itself.
By the time the viewer at home received this information, it was already third, or fourth, or fifth hand knowledge—a distance from the subject matter that wouldn’t pass muster in a courtroom.
But at the same time, you could log onto Twitter or elsewhere, and receive direct first hand reports from a ‘citizen journalist’ who was right at the epicenter in Douma, or Ghouta, or Aleppo, or wherever it may be. At that point, why would anyone want to get their information from MSM ever again?
When this realization began to hit people, a great exodus from MSM unfolded. More and more, MSM’s ‘aesthetic’ began to look simply antiquated and old-fashioned, particularly to a younger generation already acclimatized to logging into their apps and getting reports from someone much younger, hipper, and more directly placed at the epicenter of events.
This caused a seachange in the mainstream media conglomerates. They panicked, looking for a way to win back not only the younger generation, but trust in the indisputability of their hallowed coverage.
Powerhouses like CNN hired a younger and more robust Jeff Zucker to usher in a hip new era populated by a cast of younger, more ‘attractive’ personalities. Gone were the days of cooing, fatherly Ted Koppel and Dan Rather, replaced by the shiningly young, fresh-faced corporate apparatchiks like Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, and Rachel Maddow.
Similarly, in was the new generation of vapidly attractive female newscasters to ‘cast’ their alluring spell in the form of continued NLP-churn over the masses. The new era of grinning, plastic-faced botox queens to replace the haggard stalwarts like the Barbara Walters of the world, was born.
Panic Sets In
But the crux point came when the Trump movement swept through America like a maelstrom. For all his failings, Trump generated a sort of attention which exposed the frailty and irrelevance of the legacy media systems. People tuned in to Trump directly—his very own statements, straight from his mouth. Not transmuted, attenuated, adulterated, or otherwise bastardized and bowdlerized by some media middling, meddling middle-men. And what was the result?
They began to panic.
Just as control began to slip from the oily hands of legacy media systems, they desperately scrambled to cling on to any last grasp or foothold of what was once solely their purview. Thus was born the mass, orchestrated offensive against ‘disinformation’ and ‘conspiracy theories’. The desperate corporate oligarchy posing as ‘media’ now, in concerted fashion, began to label any competition of theirs—i.e. the citizen journalists and direct sources which obsoleted them—with a slew of accusations.
The facade had been lifted. Once the people realized they could get their information directly from the source, without the compulsory adulteration mainstream media used to ‘process’ and ‘massage’ each news story to make it ‘fit for public consumption’, it unleashed a snowball effect.
Soon, self-starting ‘citizen journalists’ were regularly out-performing the classical MSM powerhouses. Guys like Dan Bongino and Joe Rogan retained more daily listeners/viewers than CNN or any of the large corporate medias.
Legacy media’s one chief cachet, which they used as cudgel and rod in demonstration of their ‘authority’, had now been etched away. When a regular schmo amasses more viewers than them on the selfsame topics they report on, it’s a sure sign that they’e lost the trust, the mandate of the masses on those subjects.
Like the Syrian conflict, the Ukrainian war is today being covered by an endless variety of citizen journalists on the ground, who are posting daily photos, videos, and interviews with the affected citizens and direct participants in the conflict. Why would anyone tune in to a glitzy, aseptic newsroom, thousands of kilometers away, where a cheese-grinning, prim-suited anchorman bloviates on about events wholly disconnected from him, occasionally satellite linking to some other third party who parrots second or even third hand info?
We can now log onto Twitter and Telegram and countless other services and plug directly to the source, getting information often in real time—as in, actual streaming-live footage of events the MSM won’t even cover until hours or days later, and many times not at all. One only has to look at the recent French riots, spreading like wildfire through social media, but a total blackout on legacy corporate MSM. In fact, a cursory search for ‘Paris’ on CNN’s front page un-ironically returned some propaganda piece about Macron’s condemnation of Putin/Russia—as if that was the biggest story surrounding France this week. Ha!
Where the dichotomy has become most evident, however, is in how utterly partial, biased, and partisan the legacy media has been exposed as being with the advent of real-time citizen cyber-journalism. For decades, most people had simply assumed the MSM was at least ‘relatively’ impartial, after all it’s an attribute pretty much stamped into their very founding principles, like a doctor’s Hippocratic oath (of course, just a tad bit of irony that in the recent Co-Vax years, those oaths, too, have proven their Charmin-esque two-ply worth).
The main reason this has become so evident is that in previous years, the MSM’s reporting of facts was not scientifically falsiable, due to the supreme monopoly they held on the acquisition and transmission of those very ‘facts.’
But with the age of the internet, for the first time common citizens like you or I could easily compare the MSM’s reporting to the variety of other sources even closer to the ground. And what we all found shocked us: the legacy media relicts seemingly had no discernible inclination toward conveying events truthfully, or even neutrally. They lied directly, indirectly, by omission, and in every other conceivable way to maintain the strict narratives of their corporate paymasters.
And for the first time, like scientists, we had the tools to ‘falsify’ their reportage.
In many other cases there was nothing to compare and falsify—things inconvenient to the ruling class or the many corporate sponsors, were simply omitted from coverage entirely.
Just take a look at last month’s still ongoing East Palestine, Ohio ‘Toxic Airborne Event’ crisis. The legacy corporate media tried their best in blackholing the event, sweeping it under the rug with the assistance of (“Don’t Be”) Evil Corp, Google, which censored and deranked search results around it.
Most of us had to dig up details about the toxic spill from intrepid citizen journalists, who went on the ground, reporting directly from the site and its outlying areas in ways MSM wouldn’t dare, snooping around and asking questions that were once the hallmark of real journalism.
Why would anyone possibly turn to MSM, with their stilted, detached coverage, when there are citizen journalists like the above going on site—in ways the corporate ‘journalists’ refuse to do—and transmitting directly from the epicenter? There is no more a ‘direct’ connection that we as viewers can possibly get; why settle for a middle man?
Now, as of this writing, a new school shooting in Tennessee has occurred, and the suspected shooter has been identified as a transgender radical leftist—by citizen journalists on Twitter doing the actual reporting. As of this writing, not a single mainstream media source has yet printed the word ‘trans’ or ‘transgender’ in any article covering the story. This is clear, deliberate omission of highly relevant facts, given that the suspect left political manifestos and was clearly politically motivated in their actions.
In fact, this shooting in many ways is more horrific than most previous ones as it specifically targeted young children; most victims were nine years old.
Let’s see how quickly legacy corporate media switches off and memory holes this tragic event. I suspect the many months of lugubrious coverage usually afforded every other school shooting will be this time promptly and unceremoniously foreshortened.
The Slow Erosion of Objectivity
History tells us the first precursors to today’s newspapers had begun in the 1400s and 1500s as circulations for the lettered elite, revolving around military and politics. Such things would have been beyond the grasp of any ‘citizen journalist’ for hundreds of years, as access to high-ranking members of court, or royal personages themselves, would be impossible to get.
But in today’s world, the very state leaders themselves have the ability to broadcast their own words—directly to the masses. No middle man necessary. Trump, of course, revolutionized this to an extent, bringing it to the fore with his blistering Twitter virtuosity to blast dispatch after dispatch straight to the common man he [claimed to have] represented.
In fact, what Trump did was revolutionary to the extent that he even eschewed the standard custom of using speech-writers (most of which are always appointed or forced in by members of the shadow government cabal which controls each president (this includes the cabinet amongst others)) and instead delivered his messages to the American people in the most direct way possible.
What use could a legacy media middle man possibly have in this context? What role? They’e been relegated to simply passive observers—nonentities.
And this is what enraged them. They could not understand, could not process past the cognitive dissonance of their own dawning irrelevancy. B-b-but, it’s WE who are supposed to filter this information to the masses! It’s WE that are supposed to control how the people perceive events! How could they just bypass us like this?
That explains videos like the MSNBC Freudian slip posted earlier, where aging, out of touch anchors impotently struggle to come to terms with their own utter redundant immateriality.
Additionally, just like modern corporations and institutions of every stripe have begun to betray their mandate to their constituency, stakeholders, shareholders, etc., by focusing on irrelevant ‘woke’ ideology and ESG nonsense tokenism that no one apart from a small vocal minority cares about, so too are the decrepit legacy media institutions now betraying their viewers/readers/subscribers by focusing—instead of on important events and actual news—on diversionary claptrap like this:
But what’s next for them? They’ve clearly been disrupted, usurped—their power waning like a setting sun.
One thing is obvious: as their fire is stolen in Promethean fashion, they’ve become more and more possessive of retaining any semblance of ‘control’ over the narrative. In recent decades, this has translated into what was once a field of plain, un-editorialized columns and straight reportage, to an era where everything has become an OpEd or editorialized opinion piece.
Mainstream legacy media has come to represent nothing more than the ‘Opinion Piece’. It’s a predictable compromise. When you no longer have the monopoly on the truth, the reportage of straight facts, which others have a far more direct beeline to, then all you’ve got left is to resort to saturating the public space with as much opinion disguised as objectivity as possible.
Recently, a wave of prominent media publications and personalities have even gone to air with the open admission that ‘neutrality’ is dangerous, and that journalists have some sort of obligation in not blindly adhering to it at the cost of ‘objectivity’. Of course, this is a clever way to couch their secret hyper-partisanship beneath a veneer of ‘concern’ for some founding journalistic principle or moral imperative, and ultimately reframe the definition of the word to something that suits them.
They define ‘objectivity’ as their own personal, actually-subjective truth about reality within the bounds of the typical leftist ideological tropes: identity politics, marginalization, etc. So when they say journalists should be ‘objective’ rather than neutral, what they mean is that journalists should state what are ‘objective truths’ regardless if those ‘truths’ appear neutral or not. And what are these ‘objective truths’? The usual things: America is under threat of white nationalism, alt-right and right wing terrorists, etc.
Washington Post states the thesis of the new normal plainly in this article:
Objectivity is just another word for false balance, false equivalence, neutrality, both-sidesism and “on the one hand, on the other hand” journalism. According to this argument, objectivity is nothing more than an effort to insulate ourselves from partisan criticism: When the evidence points overwhelmingly in one direction, we deceitfully suggest otherwise.
WaPo goes on to shamelessly snark about the origins of ‘objectivity’ in journalism in an effort to distance the obsolete concept from today’s precarious times, which clearly call for a much different type of journalism, in their express opinion.
“So, where did this idea of objectivity come from? And how did it become a journalistic standard in the first place? The origins are a bit murky, but they are typically traced to about a century ago.”
Just look at the condescendingly dismissive way they refer to it as ‘this idea of objectivity’, as if it’s some outre concept wholly alien to the profession, like some sort of ugly blemish or flea-bitten stray cat.
In reality, journalists are being pumped out through the ‘academic system’, the same one controlled by radical leftists who inculcate in them an innate belief in the correctness and infallibility of the leftist worldview. Teen Vogue has already started programming their young readers with the sentiment:
This article even introduces us to a groundbreaking new concept: movement journalism. Yes, that’s right—it’s journalism’s unabashed ‘coming out’ as open activism masquerading under the ‘journalism’ banner.
Yet she felt that her superiors didn’t share her priorities. Jones didn’t understand why she was running into resistance. That changed when she was introduced to a new concept — “movement journalism.”
Movement journalism aligns with goals of social change and liberation from oppression. Its proponents strive to work with underserved communities affected by injustice, particularly those of color.
Because it questions objectivity and other pillars of traditional reporting, movement journalism remains outside of the mainstream.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
This whistleblower driven article highlights how mainstream media structures have modeled themselves after fanatical-leftist academia. The CBS-affiliate whistleblower explains how ‘diversity officers’ in the media organizations act as hall monitors and CorrectThink™ enforcers as one. Journalists are forced to take mandatory ‘workshops’ which teach them that journalistic objectivity is obsolete and can no longer be adhered to.
“Much of what we’re gonna talk about today is going to center around the main code of ethics of journalism. And a couple things — during this workshop and throughout your day, I challenge you to stop thinking in terms of objective journalism. We’ll discuss why that’s not really feasible anymore. But [think] in terms of accuracy, fairness, and transparency — always striving for objectivity is not feasible.”
Here, again, they surreptitiously use the word ‘accuracy’ and ‘fairness’ (codeword for ‘equity’) to couch their dangerous lesson benignly.
In fact, equity is the opposite of fairness. Merriam Webster defines fairness as ‘lack of favoritism towards one side or the other’. But equity requires a certain favoritism towards what is arbitrarily chosen as the ‘marginalized/underprivileged/NewThing™’ class.
In this Stanford Daily article, a professor of communications openly states:
“Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity,” said Ted Glasser, communications professor at Stanford, in an interview with The Daily.
More and more, the leading push in academia is to inculcate young journalists with the false urgency of today’s social upheaval in order to inure them into accepting completely illogical, irrational, contradictory, hypocritical, anti-democratic, and outright fascist ideas.
And I don’t mean ‘fascist’ as in the trendy contemporary throwaway term casually flung about to decry those we don’t like, but the actual textbook definition, which reads that fascism is not just a political movement, but also a philosophical one; and that it exalts “social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition”, which is exactly the purpose behind the indoctrination of a new generation of journalists into accepting the dissolution of journalism’s most classic and inviolable tenets. Pushing them into tendentiously believing only one side is right is the tacit implication that the other side is wrong, and thus needs to be militated against in both word and deed: i.e. suppressed. And since ‘regimentation’ means ‘uniformity’, the homogeneity of orthodox thought they’re striving towards fits exactly that definition:
The Power Creeping Spiral of Censorship
This is how one article justifies their descent into fascist ideology:
Facts alone cannot answer these questions. Discerning which facts to report requires judgment, and judgment requires morality. As the late Leo Strauss observed, “We cannot observe facts without selecting facts, and we must therefore have principles guiding our selection.” Put simply, the notion that facts are completely severable from values — an idea known as the “fact-value distinction” — is untenable, and no news outlet should pretend otherwise.
In short, they are training journalists to become patent activists.
The big question is: what next? Now that their power has been stripped from them by the democratization of citizen journalism described earlier, what choices are left for the legacy media relicts?
The final frontier for them are increased calls for censorship, for discrediting and de-legitimizing anyone they can to staunch the flow of truth bubbling to the top like a rising cream. One recent example is the controlled demolition of James O’Keefe and Project Veritas.
But I call it the power creep spiral because it becomes a sort of feedback loop. The harder they squeeze to strangle and suffocate the truth, the more they expose themselves on the world stage for what they are. This necessarily results in their having to use progressively more overtly heavy-handed tactics—but again, as they do this, they are forced into increasing levels of ‘unmasking’ their true intentions. It’s an escalation spiral—and we’re reaching singularity peaks of it.
Just look at videos like those posted earlier, the level of sheer bald-faced, breathtaking brashness in the admission of their own transgressions. And as some of the quoted articles here attest, they are at the point of the escalation spiral of outright brazenly confessing their crimes in a desperate plea to mobilize forces to their side.
And the reason for this answers the question of the next logical stage of their plans: to simply reorient public thought by way of another convenient term:
The more they attempt to steer and modulate thought, and enforce the orthodox narrative, the further it will continue exponentially accelerating until they’re forced to ‘power-creep’ their calls for tyranny as openly as possible, in abject desperation, to any who will listen. At some point one imagines it reaching a critical mass; perhaps it has already done so.
And then what? The only certainty is that they will continue their techno-corporate merger with government in order to maximalize censorship of all opposition and heterodox thought in order to retain their hair-thin grip on that coveted power of controlling narrative. But beneath these waves, the citizen journalism will continue to steadily rise towards natural ascendance—so long as platforms like Twitter remain in the hands of at least semi-freedom-conscious personalities like Elon Musk.
At this point, the powers that be would need a truly epochal black-swan event to stem the flow of tidal momentum. And they had one—at the onset of the Covid era. It gave them unprecedented and total control of the narrative, with a ‘justified’ mass-expansion of censorship.
But now that’s eroding—the endless seesaw of ebbs and flows has brought the initiative back to the side of the resistance. And by virtue of ‘the boy who cried wolf’ adage, the media elites won’t be able to easily repeat the trick again any time soon.
Now, we can only continue to mock them, and watch their self-inflicted slow-whirl down the proverbial cloaca, and hope that one day, from these embers, will arise new institutions driven by the actual, principled adherence to public trust, rather than the unctuous lucre of corporate sponsorship.
Good article to send to friends, most have no idea. 👍
👍Well written. I gave up on MSM in the mid 70s after hanging with reporters, editors, owners & other criminal types.
My Coles notes version: 🌎📰📽️📺🔊🖥️ = 🐂💩💩💩