Most of what we consider public life in modern societies is public reactions to things done by the powerful. The New York Times makes up a new hoax and the week is spent on the hoax. The usual suspects swear by the obvious lies and normal people spend days picking apart the lies. Occasionally, we get the reverse where some uncomfortable truth gets loose and the usual suspect go bananas trying to “debunk” it while normal people cling to it as blessed relief.

This is the news cycle in a nutshell. There is very little news. It has been at least a generation since the major news outlets in America have done reporting. Most of it is just stenography. The “journalist” copies what a government spokesbot has sent to them and dresses it up with some commentary. Then there are the narratives that are designed to give the public a way to repeat the official truth that sounds convincing to them and their acquaintances.

The source of this is the “new journalism” that emerged in the 1960’s. The late British reporter Chris Munnion chronicled this in his book Banana Sunday. He spent most of his life covering Africa for the Telegraph. In the 1960’s he noticed Americans showing up with pre-written narratives. They would seek out quotes and pictures to fill out the story they had prepared for the trip. Even if the facts contradicted the narrative, they stuck with the narrative because that was the new journalism.

Narrative journalism is just accepted these days. The “news” has always been a form of passive-aggressive political activism so its evolution into story telling on behalf of powerful interests seems natural. When you think of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal as propaganda arms of their respective clients in the managerial elite, it all makes sense. Instead of the Ministry of Truth we have the mainstream media “speaking truth to power.”

That last bit gets mocked by normal people on this side of the great divide because they have woken up to the reality of this age. As if often the case, however, there is a kernel of truth locked in this media fabrication. The people inside these disinformation operations genuinely fear the public. When they say “speak truth to power” they mean broadcast their truth to you in the hopes that you will buy it. Modern mass media is mostly a defensive weapon of the elites.

That is why it is worth thinking about what goes on inside these operations and what types of people work there. For example, here is a post in the Washington Examiner from someone calling himself Jaimie McIntyre. The Examiner bills itself as a conservative news outlet, but McIntyre is a far-left conspiracy theorist who has spent most of is career at operations like CNN and NPR. His post is a story comparing the suicidal holdouts in Mariupol to the Alamo.

Now, the “facts” in this tale are supplied by a group called the “Washington-based Institute for the Study of War” which sounds quite serious. When you look them up you find they have a web site and a staff listing. That staff listing is a who’s who of neoconservative warmongers. There is Kimberly Kagan of the infamous Kagan clan and Bill Kristol, the head loon at the Never Trump clan. These are the people responsible for the disaster unfolding in Ukraine.

Jaimie McIntyre is a crack reporter and he has access to the internet, so he surely knows the nature of his primary source. He makes no mention of it as that would have deflated the narrative. In other words, he is lying and he knows he is lying. Most likely the bulk of the narrative was supplied to him by the neocons. They have been pushing this theme since the start of the war. They think Americans will fall for the claim that the Ukrainians are innocent victims of the evil Putin.

In the Washington Post we have another version of the Alamo narrative. This one is authored by a someone named David Stern. The Post identifies him as a journalist based Ukraine. In reality he is most likely an operative of the American foreign policy establishment charged with peddling their narratives in Western media. Note that his copy does not mention that the holdouts are Azov fighters. The Post does not want anyone noticing those guys in the story.

If you scan the Washington Post, what you quickly see is that most of their Ukraine “reporting” relies on operatives from NGO’s and the intel community. They know that the information they are being fed is from partisan sources. That would be fine if they made that clear, but they go out of their way to conceal this truth. Their job is to sell the official lies and they take that job seriously. They are lying and they know they are lying but they keep lying because that is their job.

Of course, a real journalist would be curious about these sources that all seem to say the same things about current events. For example, a story on the “Institute for the Study of War” and who pays their bills would be interesting. It would provide the public with some understanding about who is trying to convince them that nuclear war is the price we must pay to defend Ukraine. Instead, they investigate a popular Twitter account called The Libs of TikTok.

That last bit is another good example of the mendacity of the media. This story was created by the Washington Post. They assigned credit for it to a vulgar dingbat calling herself Taylor Lorenz. This woman is so dumb she could count her boobs twice and get the wrong number both times. The real source was German intelligence who employs a former Twitter employee named Travis Brown. He works for the Protoype Fund, which is funded by the German government.

Again, like the Examiner piece using the “Institute for the Study of War”, the real story her is a foreign government attacking an American citizen. A real news organization would want to know who facilitated this. The Post surely knows that Taylor Lorenz is too stupid to work a phone so she did not call Travis Brown. Of course, that story will never happen because that idea would never cross the minds of the editors. Their job is to sell the official lies and they take that job seriously.

That is the main point of this exercise. At all levels of what is called journalism you will find people who lie with enthusiasm. The selection pressure is all in favor of people who enjoy lying to the public. They like the scheming and the deception. Like all sociopaths, they are shameless about it. Shame requires a soul. As Solzhenitsyn put it, “We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.”

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