Media Creatures and the Theater of Nihilism
Many of the most democratically destructive politicians worked as journalists and ‘media creatures’ and are using their training to make nihilistic theater
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I often turn to my archives for clues on how to combat the authoritarian surge. What I call Reality TV Fascism is infecting not only America but other parts of the world where vulnerabilities to brainwashing by mass communication remain. I just learned that Lithuania’s democratic government is now at risk to a Tik Tok party with extremist, hateful views that’s infecting its body politic. The country that offered safe harbor to the family of the real president of Belarus — Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya — who lived there in exile since her 2020 election victory was stolen — was just denied her security detail and is no longer recognized as an ‘official guest of the state.’
“The Tik-Tok party has been working from the same script as parties in Romania, Moldova, Georgia. Ideas, words, divisions created – we have seen that already, and it almost always feels as if the guidebook was written in Moscow,” writes Gabrielius Landsbergis, a former foreign affairs minister of Lithuania
This morning I thought of an interview I did two years ago with Ruth Ben-Ghiat and the Byline Times team exposing hypocrisy of the faux populists:
As always with Ruth, you learn so many important details in one interview, and it stayed with me that numerous authoritarians and far-right leaders were actually trained journalists and media operatives earlier in their career — she calls them ‘media creatures.’
Among the skilled journalists: Benito Mussolini, Mobutu Sese Seko, Boris Johnson, Pete Hegseth. Among the media creatures Javiar Milei, Donald Trump, and Silvio Berlusconi.
When I saw Hegseth video of the world pushups record at a football game I thought of my many years in broadcast news, producing live spectacles for anchor participation to gain ratings. I used to produce segments for Lauren Sanchez at nightclubs during sweeps — the goal was always ratings. That Hegseth just ordered a makeup studio next to the press briefings room in the Pentagon makes my point for me.
As I watch the current batch of media creatures create unreality with every appearance and expect masses of people to live in their make believe worlds, I think there must be some way to turn it all off.
Our minds can only absorb so much news porn, war porn, trauma porn, lie porn before we are unable to believe in anything, and that quite frankly is the goal.
“We live in a world of mass persuasion run amok, where the means of manipulation have gone forth and multiplied, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, deep fakes, fake news, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump…”—Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda
So if trained journalists and media creatures are constantly on television and social media playing victim, causing outrage, telling lies about immigrants, and using their camera skills to break your mind so to disable you from stopping their power grabs, then how do we find a way out of this evil matrix? They are performers in the theater of nihilism, and we need to leave the seats empty.
Next year, it will be two decades since I turned in my cable box — living without the assault of cable news is vital to my well-being and ability to do this work with clarity.
The constant coverage of Reality TV Fascism takes us further away from reality and deeper into the suck.
I return to a quote from Jay Rosen often — I think it best summarizes the predicament of how to cover a regime that only sells illusion:
Six months before the 2024 election, I asked the NYU Journalism professor:
HSC: So I’m just gonna quote something that Jay wrote:
“Clown car hearings exploit a weakness in mainstream journalism’s source code, which gives no clear instructions for how to report truthfully on events that are themselves false, meaning they spring from a propagandistic intent and taking them seriously just furthers the scam.”
That brilliant tweet is something I return to all the time because it’s so incredibly accurate. And my question is, what do we do about that weakness in the source code? What’s the solution?
JR: I wish I knew the answer. But you’re right — that is the big question, and it’s really hard to address because we don’t even have a language for it. We are losing reality. That’s accurate. But it’s also disempowering, because it’s so big and abstract and weird that it doesn’t lend itself to piecemeal reform.
I think one of the answers to that is a very interesting fact about the current crisis in the United States, which is that if the topic in the coffeehouse that you go to is national politics it’s going to be total culture war, from the first word to the last. But if the subject for conversation in real life is the bridge that was broken, or the quality of our schools or keeping kids safe in a world where we can see and hear and feel and touch reality, it doesn’t have the same divisiveness.
So the culture war works best when people are isolated and alone, and not in touch with their neighbors and where weak local journalism is also part of the picture.
An atomized crowd of people who are linked only at the national level through media are the best customers for creeping fascism, which we do see in the United States.
So that’s my only real answer is somehow reality is going to come back to us first in local life and local journalism. And we have to, even though it’s incredibly hard, start there.
Read more on that interview here:
I have been trying to solve this specific problem for a decade: how to cover the Trump clown car when the coverage of it furthers the regime’s objectives to demolish democracy, one live shot at a time, one presser at a time, one lie at a time, one staged photo op at time.
The 1976 film, Network, also tried to answer these questions. An anchorman cracks up and then gets his own nightly show where he rages against the TV machine:
“You’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell… We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds... We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal… This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion!”
He then pleads with the audience to turn off the TV.
I often thought that if Trump woke up to no cameras, he would be without oxygen. But he now has his proxies, Vance, Patel, Bondi, Noem, Hegseth, Miller, RFKjr, Leavitt, skilled at lying on camera, skilled at creating illusions, skilled at the theater of nihilism.
Those illusions breed conspiracies and conspiracies enable fascism.
There was a time when the guy with polio or even the woman in the pantsuit could widely be seen as the wise choice for assuming the grave job of leader of the free world. Not sexy, just hardworking public servants delivering democracy for all.
We need to see the world that way again — not through media creatures performing nihilism for ratings.
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Below, The Guardian report on Milei performing on stage at his book release party.
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