Must Read of the Day – ‘Sorry, Not Sorry: Neither the Media Nor Their Owners are Going to Change’

Counterpunch published an excellent piece earlier today by Jason Hirthler titled: Sorry, Not Sorry: Neither the Media Nor Their Owners are Going to Change.

Here are my favorite excerpts:

The leftist heretic and popular scourge of religion Christopher Hitchens wrote in his superb Bill Clinton takedown, No One Left to Lie To, that the essence of American politics is “the manipulation of populism by elitism.” Unfortunately, this tactic didn’t work so well for the Clintons in November, as the reviled populists had the last irrational, racist, sexist, brutish and barbaric word on the matter (according to assembled liberal punditry). But the statement still rings true. This is, after all, the job description of corporate media. As The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald says, the “supreme religion of the U.S. press corps is reverence for power.” Their priesthood is a cabal of anonymous sources; their catechism is war everlasting. And so, the vulgar philistines on the plains, who foolishly prefer peaceful relations, steady work, and free healthcare to profiteering wars abroad, must be endlessly misled.

Don’t expect this to change in the wake of the navel-gazing mainstream’s historic whiff on the election–despite the occasional mea culpa and promise to overhaul its approach. Mostly because 90 percent of the MSM is owned and operated by six conglomerates that have little interest in changing the system that profits them, or in changing the editorial narratives that support the system. And most probably, like Barack Obama and Madame Secretary, because the media believes Trump voters are “a basket of deplorables” that are too unfixably ignorant to understand why Hillary was the right choice.

After all, these mainstream flacks have been happily disguising the neoliberal gutting of the American economy for decades. They are so distanced from the reality of the 99 percent, it probably does seem unreal to them. Yet now, pundits unironically tell us, we live in a post-factual era. Even though the MSM has been producing counterintuitive propaganda for a long time. Do you remember the early Nineties, when the MSM started the cult of personality around CEOs like Jack Welch, who was feted for sending thousands of GE jobs to factory ghettos in India? Captain Jack knew the score, didn’t he? Or who can forget–or fail to retchingly remember–countless Thomas Friedman columns telling American workers they’d better suck it up, get with the program, and learn how to compete in a global economy. You remember the typical free trade shtick: Wave goodbye, comrades, to your coddled lifestyle and that full-time manufacturing job replete with extravagant benefits and a superfluous living wage; now you must fight tooth and nail for peasant wages against several billion proletarian youth with zero wage expectations and no knowledge of OSHA; spare me your tired complaints and pop some Zoloft for the pain, comrade; get some job retraining at the nearest overcrowded unemployment center (double up on the meds before you go); and then get excited about your new job emptying bedpans at the nearby hospital for pennies on the inflating dollar; and don’t forget to celebrate globalization on Independence Day. One can see big Thom sitting back in his leather chair to re-read his 1100 words of scintillating prose while lustily fingering his Pulitzer.

Despite some interesting caterwauling about identity politics and the white poor, the MSM continued to miss the connection between the anger of the working class and the imperialism of the ruling class. The former is made poorer because of the latter. Spending on war usually means not spending on society. And the media has done yeoman’s work enabling both, principally by justifying nearly every imperial war as humanitarian necessity and erasing the working class from the American tableaux (except when stereotyping them as illiterate bigots, the vieux jeu herd that Friedman warmly chides, “Suck on this!”). Not understanding populist indigestion to the rancid policy platter it’s been serving up for years, what does the establishment media do? Continue shilling for imperialism, largely by spreading misinformation about Syria and ratcheting up the Russian threat with libelous claims.

This is important because, short of sustained media support, backing for imperial warfare would collapse; no imperial war can sustain itself in the presence of a free press. The Syrian war, or at least our role in it, could’ve ended a long time ago if the MSM had done their job and challenged the White House on any number of fronts. They might have, and might still do if they wanted, pointed out how the Assad government’s rejection of a Qatari oil pipeline immediately preceded the eruption of violent “protests” in eastern Syria. Mr. President, was this mere coincidence or was this pipeline the backbone of our plan to unhitch Europe from Russian energy and destroy the Russian economy? They might have asked President Obama why the CIA was arming, training, and funding intolerant jihadist terrorists in Jordan…

But you have to ask yourself, is the American establishment out of ideas? Is the empire running on fumes? The hysteria produced by the YouTube surge of beheading videos by black-garbed, sword-brandishing jihadists, deep in the desert, couldn’t last forever. In its place, Washington and its lackey media have been ransacking the archives for odious enemies to prop in front of the somnolent population. They must be kept awake and alarmed. As Martin Amis wrote of his protagonist in The Information, “He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.” Frenzy is not a durable state; hence the need for relentless stimulants. CNN is Adderall for the electorate.

Lacking new ideas, finding no new enemies, and unwilling to look at the twitching Cyclops in the mirror, Washington has resurrected the Cold War and is actively resuscitating the McCarthy Era. Most of us had hoped these two miserable epochs in our history had been interred forever. But given our decade-long obsession with zombies, it’s no surprise the establishment is anxiously reanimating these rotting cadavers.

But what does it say about our so-called leadership when they slip into nostalgia for the past when facing the rubble and ruin of their modern ideology? That neoliberalism has peaked and is accelerating toward its inglorious finale? After all, history’s encore is farce, to paraphrase Marx. The tragedy of neoliberalism culminated in 2008. Perhaps the question is whether the disorganized left can glue itself together long enough to offer a fresh vision that doesn’t alienate the penny capitalist or the diehard socialist, but which does cast aside the exhausted creed of market-led globalization and its ‘humanitarian’ corollaries, which all but a few have finally seen through. The duopoly and its media minions will doubtless continue to peddle such fictions, but they are wounded and stumbling and lashing out in all directions, a savage ideology cornered by an angry electorate. We should hasten their demise.

Read the entire article at Counterpunch.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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