The Censorship Industrial Complex — The Revolt Of The Elites

The Censorship Industrial Complex — The Revolt Of The Elites

The political establishment has constructed a new apparatus of control

By Leighton Woodhouse via ‘Public’ Substack

In 2002, the Bush administration, desperate to sell its planned invasion of Iraq to the American public, turned to the mainstream media. Every evening on Fox News, White House officials invoked Hitler allusions and implied fictitious ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Fox, however, allowed them to preach only to the converted. To forge a working national consensus, they had to reach doves as well as hawks.

So the Bush administration zeroed in on The New York Times. With reporter Judith Miller, they hit pay dirt. With breathless headlines such as “HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS, Miller stamped the President’s mythmaking about aluminum tubes, mobile weapons labs, and Weapons of Mass Destruction with the imprimatur of her illustrious employer. So critical was her reporting to the spinning of American aggression as self-defense that it’s conceivable that the White House’s entire drive to war may have failed without it.

By the time Miller’s stories were exposed as so much laundered propaganda, they had served their purpose: American soldiers were already occupying Iraq.

The invasion of Iraq marked the last time the political elite would wield the power to mobilize an entire nation merely by manipulating a handful of journalistic elites. The era of mass media, during which just a dozen or so giant print and broadcast corporations enjoyed hegemonic control over the national public discourse, lasted about eighty years, beginning roughly a century ago, when modern television was born. The incestuous relationship between the government and the media during those decades was depicted in Steven Spielberg’s movie The Post, in which Defense Secretary Robert McNamara tries and fails to leverage his cozy relationship with Washington Post editor Katherine Graham to compel the media to fall in line with the government’s suppression of the Pentagon Papers. The story is heroic because it’s so unusual; Graham’s decision was the exception that proved the rule.

That era ended two decades ago, when social media networks emerged. About a year after the invasion of Iraq, Facebook was founded. The year after that YouTube was born; the following year came Twitter. With the cheap, targeted advertising their technology enabled, the new tech platforms destroyed the business model of the mass media. Unable to compete for advertisers, the media mammoths of the twentieth century floundered. The entire industry was thrown into crisis, bleeding revenue and laying off staff.

At the same time, social media began sorting news consumers into hyper-polarized digital silos, shattering the broad political center that the traditional media catered to and relied upon to sell advertisements to a mass audience. The New York Times, CNN, and even Fox News saw their broad national readerships and viewerships contract into smaller and evermore partisan echo chambers, even as ordinary people began to forge horizontal connections with one another online, exchanging information laterally. The public began generating their own, autonomous narratives about world events, typically cobbled together eclectically from reports by various news outlets, but beholden to none of them in particular. The power to shape the national narrative devolved downward, becoming increasingly fractured in the process.

This anarchic new media ecosystem has defined the public discourse ever since. For both elected politicians and the administrative state, it has constituted a perennial crisis. Bureaucracies manage populations by striking bargains with leaders; you can’t negotiate with a mob, much less a thousand of them. From the perspective of the state, this new information landscape was essentially ungovernable. An entire regime of social control, helmed by the most powerful politicians in the country in partnership with the titans of the media industry, was felled. In the age of social media that the new platforms jump-started, the state’s ability to control world events by playing reporters like Judith Miller like pawns on a chess board withered away, as the influence of the media corporations they worked for dissipated.

The political elite stumbled through this bedlam for two decades. But over that time, new gatekeepers emerged to replace those that had faded away with the decline of the mass media.

The state created a new apparatus of control over the public discourse, one whose existence most Americans are still oblivious to.

…

Today, we are witnessing the emergence of a new so-called emergency: the “disinformation pandemic.”

Like Oceania’s distant war with Eurasia, it’s an emergency concocted expressly to justify its proposed remedy: the erection and expansion of the Censorship Industrial Complex.

…

The defenders of the Censorship Industrial Complex regard themselves as ordained to rule.

They take for granted their right to dictate to us what we read, watch and hear, as we can’t be trusted to decide for ourselves.

To them, the public is a barbarian horde that, given an ounce too much freedom, will run amok, destroying all in its path.

These are the delusions of a political nobility. In the spirit of a democratic nation, they must be stripped of their crowns and never be allowed to wield power again.

*  *  *

Subscribers can read the full note here…

*********

(TLB) published this article By Leighton Woodhouse via ‘Public’ Substack with our appreciation for this perspective

Header fetured image (edited) credit:  Media wired/by Anson Stevens-Bollen

Emphasis and *pictorial content added by (TLB) editors

••••

••••

Stay tuned to …

••••

The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)

••••

Comment Policy: As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. This also applies to trolling, the use of more than one alias, or just intentional mischief. Enforcement of this policy is at the discretion of this websites administrators. Repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without prior warning.

••••

Disclaimer: TLB websites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, health, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

••••

Disclaimer: The information and opinions shared are for informational purposes only including, but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material are not intended as medical advice or instruction. Nothing mentioned is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.