Breaking News
Once in awhile I will watch the evening news with my parents just to see how corporate media is framing things. If you are someone who doesn’t ever watch mainstream news then maybe you are unaware of just how shocking and horrifying it is. At first you’re like Oh this must be some kind of parody news (like this brilliant piece in ‘The Onion’) or a scene from a new screen adaptation of the dystopian novel ‘Brave New World’. But then the hair on the back of your neck stands up, goosebumps form on your chilled skin, and your gut twists as you realize this shit is for real and millions of people are watching it, unquestioningly.
The majority of Americans still mostly get their news from mainstream T.V. newsources. People report in poles that they feel they can “trust” T.V. news more than online news. But research shows that more falsehoods are reported on corporate T.V. news than on internet news sources, because profitganda.
[Read more about this in this here excellent Jacobin article.]
Here is Aldous Huxley, author of ‘Brave New World’ talking about Hitler….
“All effective propaganda, Hitler wrote, “must be expressed in a few stereotyped formulas.” The stereotyped formulas must be constantly repeated for “only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea upon the memory of a crowd.” Philosophy teaches us to feel uncertain about the things that seems to us self-evident. Propaganda, on the other hand, teaches us to accept as self-evident matters about which it would be reasonable to suspend our judgement or to feel doubt.”
Last night’s CBS evening news program (Feb 16th) was true to the stereotyped formula.
The show starts off with host Nora O’Donnell saying….
“We have a lot of news for you and your family tonite.”
Right out of the gate the propaganda starts:
A) Saying there is “a lot” of news is misleading because just a handful of facts will be relayed in the 30 minute broadcast, fluffed out with sensationalism, nonsense, useless information, fear mongering of things we shouldn’t be all that afraid of and reassurance that everything will be fine in areas where we should be very very afraid, peppered with tons of ads to assure you that you can buy your way out of fear and discomfort.
B) “…for you and your FAMILY”. This is part of the “family values” propaganda pushed relentlessly by this godforsaken country. The message is: unless you have a family you are an irrelevant loser. But in reality, 51% of people age 18–35 are single. The majority of young people are single for the first time ever. This statistic is from before the pandemic, so it may be worse now. Young people report feeling hopeless and extremely lonely, they know they are inheriting a very broken world. They deserve an in depth analysis of what is really happening, not the shit that is passing for “news”.
The first stories are all about the “crazy” cold weather and record low temps in the south and southwest. No mention of how this is what climate chaos looks like. No mention of how the rapidly warming Arctic is affecting the jet streams, making them go all wonky and throw cold air into places it usually doesn’t go.
Then they talked about the mass power outages. No mention of how we are gravely unprepared for when these house of card energy systems collapse for real. No mention of how these systems actually NEED to collapse in order to even have a shot at salvaging a livable planet not just for future generations of all living things but for current generations.
Next up is a 2 minute interview with Bill Gates, portrayed as a great savior or some renowned expert, when he’s nothing but an insanely wealthy (he has made $20 Billion just since the pandemic began), ego driven, immature, insecure, shell of a human who needs to be flat out stopped.
He’s there to talk about his new book. It’s called ‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster’ because the original title — ‘How to Avoid Being Tarred and Feathered by the Angry Masses by Creating the Mother of All Philanthropic Eco-conscious Smokescreens so that You Can Keep Generating Unchecked Wealth; A Rich Dick’s Guide’ — wouldn’t sell as well.
Remember, The richest 1% of the global population is responsible for more than twice as much carbon dioxide emissions as the poorest half of the world. So if his book on how to avoid a climate disaster doesn’t start out with “STEP ONE: Seize all assets of the rich and lock these jokers up in a tower surrounded by a moat full of crocodiles and sharks and flesh eating bacteria” then it’s a shit book.
The climate disaster is HERE, you assface! It’s too late to “avoid” it. Now it’s time to prepare, time to brace for widespread impact. Time to get our ducks in a row. Wait, scratch that. Getting our ducks in a row is what caused this mess! There are now more domesticated birds (poultry) in the world than there are wild birds!
The first “question” Nora asks Bill isn’t a question at all but some of the most vile propaganda there is:
THE ECONOMY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER. IT’S MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE EARTH, THAN CORAL REEFS, THAN POLLINATING INSECTS, THAN ORANGUTANS, THAN FORESTS, THAN SOIL, THAN CLEAN WATER AND CLEAN AIR, THAN YOUR SANITY AND HUMANITY, MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVEN LOVE, BECAUSE JOBS JOBS JOBS.
But she doesn’t say that outright, instead she asks “You want to eliminate fossil fuels, but what happens to the 2.8 million Americans who have jobs in the oil and gas industry?” As she asks this a big graphic goes up on the screen stating this statistic with a photo of hard hatted men installing an oil drill.
He says there are lots of CLEAN jobs to “create”.
First of all, we do not need to create any more jobs, we need to realize what the actual real essential work is (which is largely not being done, or being done mostly by the poorest most exploited people) and fucking do it TOGETHER! We are FAR from being “all in this together”. It’s high time for ALL of us to become essential workers and eliminate any work that isn’t absolutely necessary. This will require re-evaluating what is deemed necessary.
Secondly, dispelling the myth that “green” or “renewable” energy is CLEAN and “does no harm” needs to be at the forefront of all environmental work now (check out the forth coming book ‘Bright Green Lies’ for more about this). Trying to switch over to green energy from fossil fuels is avoiding the matter of overconsumption. The main thing that needs to happen is not transitioning to different energy sources but drastically reducing what is being consumed. DRASTICALLY.
Gates’ book is really pushing “green technology” as the answer. He just so happens to be invested in many of these green companies. As a person with such obscene amounts of wealth, there are actual things he could do that could help, but these things won’t make him more money or make him feel special or imporatant.
It’s been proven that rich people have different brains. Why would Jeff Bezos, the richest man who has ever lived, keep working when he wouldn’t even be able to spend all that money even if he lived to be 10,000 years old? Brain damage. Why would the richest man in the world not just pay his workers super well and not make them work under such horrible conditions? Brain Damage. Why would Bill Gates buy up insane amounts of farmland, 242,000 acres to be exact, more than any one person owns? He can’t eat all that food? Brain Damage.
In this ‘Nation’ article all about how much of a dickweed Bill Gates is, Christine Nobiss (founder of the Indigenous-led Great Plains Action Society) says this speaks to the Manifest Destiny mentality that has to be challenged in the political fight around climate change. “Bill Gates is smart enough to understand — he’s smart, he can do the math — that no one single person needs that amount of land,” notes Nobiss. “He’s basically participating in the never-ending cycle of colonization.”
Nobiss says that Gates’ landholdings are intrinsically linked to climate change because agriculture is a leading source of carbon emissions. She proposes that Gates give away his farmland — as an act of reparations and to ensure that the acres are put into sustainable food production.
Gates too is a big proponent and investor of GMOs. If you aren’t hip to Vandana Shiva, who has dedicated her life to fighting GMOs and the monopolizing of food, then get hip. She is the anti Bill Gates, a fierce guardian of the gates of biodiversity. Here she is holding her own on a French mainstream news program (As rude as this host is to her, at least they had her on. American mainstream news would NEVER EVER have the likes of her on). Shiva calls Gates the modern Christopher Columbus. He’s carving out new colonies on the molecular level of seeds.
But back to the CBS evening news…
At one point in the interview with Bill Gates, Nora O’Donnell quoted from his book…
“The loss of life and economic misery caused by this pandemic are on par with what will happen regularly if we do not eliminate the world’s carbon emissions.”
NO. It’s not what WILL happen, but what IS happening…and not just from “carbon emissions” — this is just more propaganda to keep us thinking in very reductionist/simplistic/ “identify one enemy” terms. The main thing driving the demise of Earth’s life support systems is habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, and air/water/soil pollution. We are trained to focus on just the burning of fossil fuels as the culprit which is dangerous because then we think we just have to eliminate what comes out of our cars when we drive, IGNORING everything that came BEFORE the moment we turn the key, all the destruction that happened before we even drove our car.
We can’t just fight fossil fuel extraction, we have to fight “green energy” as well, because it too involves extracting evermore shit from the Earth’s body all to fuel the machine called Industrial Civilization. Time to dismantle this machine and start figuring out how to generate our own energy with our bodies and by using the forces of nature, just like every other living thing does, and what we did until just very recently in our species’ history.
And so protests like the one happening now in Thacker Pass, NV — at the proposed site of a huge lithium mine (needed for electric car batteries) — need to happen anywhere the Earth is being destroyed for extractive purposes.
We MUST abandon the misleading “zero emissions” mentality that Gates is pushing and adopt the goal of “zero extraction”.
It’s not just physical extraction either. As Vandana Shiva reminds us, big tech companies are mining information from us, another form of extraction.
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During the first commercial break there were two drug commercials (which is why you will never hear any criticism of our healthcare system or talk of Medicare-for-all on corporate news — because big pharma is one of their main sponsors, or really their main sponsor is a culture that keeps us sick and in need of drugs instead of doing things to prevent sickness, but prevention isn’t a big money maker, so), then a “luxury” car commercial (I don’t really need to go into the schizophrenic nature of how this ad came on minutes after Bill Gates saying we have to get off fossil fuels or we’ll all perish), then there was a commercial for something called Ameritrade. It wasn’t clear what their services were exactly, much like the drug commercials aren’t always clear about what their drug is FOR. But the main takeaway Ameritrade wants to convey is that the stock market is TOTALLY on the level, and totally NOT a rigged dick fight, and it’s waaaaay too complicated for you to understand, that’s why you need Ameritrade to help you navigate where to invest your money so that you too can be Bill Gates someday.
The last advertisement was an actual ad for Google, as if there were people that haven’t heard of it.
The Google ad showed someone typing into the search bar “black owned businesses”, you know, because Google cares about this stuff and hey it’s black history month. I doubt very much this search would bring up this quote from FBI murdered Black Panther leader Fred Hampton….
“We don’t think you fight fire with fire best ; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism.”
Once back from the commercial break they had some lighter stories. First they let everyone know that “Central Park Karen”, the woman who called the police on a black man who had asked her to leash her dog, has had her criminal case thrown out Tuesday after completing a diversionary counseling program that prosecutors said was meant to educate her on the harm of her actions.
Racism solved.
Then there was a story of two guys that snuck into Fenway Park while it was closed to pretend to play baseball. But bad news bears for them because the Tik Tok video these dudes made to commemorate the occasion can be easily used by authorities to find out their identities. Of all the things going on in the world, of all the issues that desperately need our attention, why use precious expensive aire time to even mention this? Could it be to remind everyone that you cannot hide, that we are the most surveiled population in the world so don’t step out of line. Could it be to remind everyone that trespassing is a serious offense, and you better not even think about going where you are not allowed to go even if it’s not hurting anyone or anything.
This entire country was founded on trespassing!!!!
There’s never any reporting on the most heinous crimes. To even label a goofball stunt like this as a crime is ridiculous.
Maybe these dudes’ charges will be dropped if they take a mandated course on the importance of private property as one of the key backbones of Empire.
The next commercial break had another drug ad, then two different ads for “age defying” lotions and creams…for women of a certain age so that they can hang on to their physical value as a female human as long as possible. Even I was like “geez, maybe I should be moisturizing my skin more, I don’t want to die alone.” Then there was an ad for Amazon (like with Google, does Amazon need to advertise?) But it wasn’t an ad really (none of these are), it was just a public service announcement letting us know that Amazon has graciously donated over 12 million meals since the pandemic started. It showed said meals being loaded into a huge private cargo jet with the Amazon logo on the side of it. Where were they taking these meals? Is there not a better way to deliver them? Were they dropping them from the airplane? There’s at least 900 million meals eaten every DAY in this country, so 12 million over a year doesn’t even seem like that many really.
“The principles underlying propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. They are selling hope.” ~Aldous Huxley
And speaking of hope….Now it was time for the last segment, the feel good story they always end the broadcast with so you forget all the terrible end of days shit you just saw. It’s like if someone assaults you for 29 minutes and 30 seconds straight but then takes 30 seconds at the end to tell you that you really should smile because you are so much prettier when you smile.
So we have the story of a good guy in Chicago who saw this poor old Latina woman out on the corner in the cold selling her homemade tamales. The good guy decides to buy them all up so that she can go home and get out of the cold. Then he went and handed them out to homeless people. One of these homeless people was interviewed for the story and expressed mucho gratitude for the hot tamale. The good guy felt so good about what he did he decided to do it every day.
Because this is the story that the millions of people facing homelessness right now need, they need to know that good samaritans will give them hot street food, so the big fundamental structural societal changes that would prevent homelessness in the first place and eventually make it obsolete are totally unnecessary, silly!
Listen, its fine and good to do what that guy did, it’s even fine to report on it…but to do so without also addressing the root causes of homelessness along with it is shameful. It’s perpetuating the idea that people will help other people so the government or those like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, who have extracted and exploited so so much, are not responsible for alleviating the suffering they’ve caused.
Doing these small little good things, or hearing about these small little good things is distracting us from the big large good things we need to be doing, like overthrowing systems that are causing extreme poverty, destroying what is left of Nature, and manipulating us into remaining passive.
“This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country´s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of W. Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by few.” ~Aldous Huxley
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After the sign off, it was announced that the CBS Evening News was brought to you by Ancestry.com. Roll the commercial of a white woman in a starched white button up shirt popping out from underneath a pastel blue v-neck sweater, standing in front of a light house talking about the joy and pride of discovering her great great great great grandwhatever did some supposedly important nautical thing. But there are no important nautical things. Nothing good has come from large ships. The woman stressed how important it was that her children “know that they have ancestors who were brave and took risks”.
Hey lady, you know what would be even better? Showing your kids directly now, in the PRESENT FUCKING DAY, what real bravery and risk taking looks like by using your social standing to fight like hell for your kids’ chance at inheriting any kind of remotely functional planet. We can’t afford to have bravery skip a generation.
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I wonder how soon our culture would change if the nightly news was AT LEAST 2 hours long and reported on the all things we all desperately need to know and understand? And allowed space to take it in, that acknowledged our emotions instead of trying to manipulate us with fear laced with hope.
Mainstream media is one of the major arteries of this industrial beast we are all serving in some way. We don’t need anymore breaking news. We need to be breaking the news.
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Carl S. Mumm writes in a recent article in ‘Counterpunch’…
“We are led by the nose (and other parts) to do what the rich want us to do, and we will purchase the garbage they tell us to buy, believe what their media tell us is important, and vote for the corporate candidates they instruct us to vote for.
Engaging our critical thought is the first step to understanding the machinations of the enemy. Are we going to be able to rediscover that kind of thinking, to lift our heads from comfortable distractions and addictions and corporate media spin long enough to notice that our flanks are being attacked right now, that there is no reason we have to struggle and suffer and die in order to allow a few one-percenters to dance upon our heads?
Everyone wants solutions at the end of articles, it seems, mostly because people tend to resist solutions that are implied. Fair enough: Disengage from the corporate pleasures that make us sleep. Resist being pushed to the margins by valuing ourselves over our rich adversaries. Resist charismatic (or bloviating) leaders. (Occupy Wall Street should have taught us this before it was shut down and shunned under Obama.) Realize that “representative” elections do not equal democracy when no real choice is offered. Don’t accept the frames you are given by “leaders,” “influencers,” or the corporate media. (That corporate lens is not something you need before you believe in something, but is, rather, a reason to question it.) In short, think critically rather than regurgitate talking points from those that oppose you. Then figure out how to act, or how not to act, to force back the Army of the Filthy Rich.
Oh, and for the love of whatever god you believe in, put down your goddamn phone.”
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And, I would add, turn off your T.V.
OR…
Learn how to watch the news and spot the propaganda.
Learn how to properly criticize.
Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote….
“The perfect dictatorship is not communism, not the Soviet Union, not Cuba, but Mexico, because it is a camouflaged dictatorship,” he argued. “It may not seem to be a dictatorship, but it has all of the characteristics of a dictatorship; the perpetuation, not of one person, but of an irremovable party, a party that allows sufficient space for criticism, provided such criticism serves to maintain the appearance of a democratic party, but which suppresses by all means, including the worst, whatever criticism may threaten its perpetuation in power.”
We are trained to look for one evil guy, the next Hitler. Trump was no Hitler. Corporate news puts Hitler to shame in the mass propaganda game. Mainstream media IS the dictator.
And I’m not saying there are no facts in mainstream news. It’s how they are presenting the facts, and it’s all about what facts are being glossed over or omitted.
Bill Gates was given 2 minutes to talk about the end of the world as we know it, which is truly happening. FACT.
BUT he then proposed solutions that are falsehoods, solutions that will only exacerbate the problem. And there was no one there on the show with him to challenge his stupid solutions, so they are just accepted as fact.
2 minutes is not enough time to unpack such existential, emotional, devastatingly horrific topics. During the broadcast, Google and Amazon were given that same amount of time to brag how woke and charitable they are. We are losing the information battle.
We need to somehow carve out as much time as possible to talk about these things. And especially to talk about how we FEEL about these things.
We have to send our souls on a rescue mission to save our attention spans, to annihilate these endless distractions.
“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” ~Aldous Huxley
For more information on this subject, I recommend watching the 1988 Horror film ‘They Live’. As this excellent synopsis says “They Live is a scathing indictment of capitalism and the culture of greed masquerading as a B movie about invading aliens.” Nothing has changed since this was made, if anything it’s perhaps worse. Here is a clip from the film that sums it up….
In the film, there is a 6 minute long scene of the leading character trying to get his friend to put on the magical sunglasses that allows a person to see the modern industrial alien-made world, with all it’s hidden propaganda, for what it really is. I think that fight scene is one of the most important pieces of cinema ever made. It’s highlighting how incredibly resistant we are to looking at the truth, and what lengths we will go to avoid it, how we will both endure AND cause pain to ourselves and others in our avoidance of it. Because we know the truth can hurt. But avoiding the truth hurts even more.
We must look. We must help others look.
I will leave you with the words of my friend Daniel Suelo, who is one of the best lookers I know…
“Humans are social creatures.
A social creature is socialistic.
Socialism is our default nature, our instinct.
Humanity lived in communal, socialistic societies for tens of thousands of years before this new arrival of private property, of wealth and poverty, possession and possessionless.
The atmosphere and sun are communal, shared by all living things, the “deserving” and the “undeserving”, the “just” and the “unjust.”
Communal living is the law of nature.
Life would cease without communal living.
The only way to counter human nature is by force.
The only way to counter the law of nature is by force.
The only way to maintain the system of wealth and poverty is by force.
Think on this, you who pretend to oppose totalitarianism, you whose entire culture and way of life is built upon the subjugation (domestication) and extermination of the free.”
