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“I have enjoyed working with all of you. That does not, of course, mean that I’ve enjoyed every story that you have filed, but that’s the point of this relationship. You’re not supposed to be sycophants. You’re supposed to be skeptics. You’re supposed to ask me tough questions. You’re not supposed to be complimentary, but you’re supposed to cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power.”—President Barack Obama at his final White House press briefing
I thought many times that perhaps Donald Trump would not exist if the cameras turned away.
Cameras are oxygen for propagandists, and in fact, Trump never met a camera he didn’t like. Except Robert Mueller’s. He demurred to show up for questioning during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump-Russia. That was one camera too far.
Media creatures know their best angles, and many prominent leaders came from a media background. Among the journalists: Benito Mussolini, Mobutu Sese Seko, Boris Johnson, Pete Hegseth. Among the media creatures: Javiar Milei, Donald Trump, and Silvio Berlusconi.
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.
“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
The Sound of Silence
Watching Trump’s odd small mouth pucker inaudibly at yesterday’s press conference, he looked as he should: like a used car salesman on public access television. His ongoing attacks on media resulted in no microphone or White House pool reporters. On Friday, he’d banned three media outlets — CNN, MS Now, and Politico — from the White House.
I’m just surprised it took so long.
In my “Unmusked” report four years ago, I predicted that media in the US would become like Hungary under Orbán, who consolidated media under the government, as well as like other autocratic countries.
I wrote:
In 2018, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban encouraged owners of hundreds of Hungarian media properties to ‘donate’ them to a Government allied foundation. The Central European Press and Media Foundation (CEMPF) began absorbing cable news channels, internet platforms, newspapers, radio stations, and magazines. The result was a centralized right-wing Government-controlled media syndicate.
Freedom of the press has been on a steady decline in Hungary ever since.
Orban’s attacks on the rule of law ramped up during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he declared a state of emergency and began seizing unlimited power to rule by decree. Among the targeted groups were the LGBTQ+ community, women, journalists, academia, and asylum seekers.
Russia itself has a similar history. Two decades ago in Russia, as Vladimir Putin came to power, the media tycoon Vladimir Gusinksy said he was pressured to relinquish his empire to the Government.
He had formed a media consortium during perestroika and his organization’s coverage of the first Chechen war was critical of Russia. In addition, he refused to back down from an investigation into a series of apartment bombings that independent journalists claimed were the work of the Russian intelligence service, the FSB. The Kremlin blamed the bombings on Chechen rebels.
In the mid-‘90s, Gazprom, the state owned gas company, became a 30% shareholder of his media holdings, and this investment was later weaponized against Gusinsky, according to a human rights court. Gusinksy alleged Russian operatives declared ‘open warfare’ against him, as he was hit with repeated charges that prompted him to flee to Spain. The European Court of Human Rights determined the charges violated Gusinky’s rights.
In modern times, autocratic leaders are increasingly seeing the value of controlling social media. Former Philippines leader Rodrigo Duterte had a rabid fan base online, with an army of bloggers who defended him, and who also went after journalists critical of his savage anti-drug policies, which often resulted in bloody public executions.
“If it’s drugs, you shoot and kill”, he famously said.
Before leaving office, Duterte used his presidential power to block the franchise extension of the country’s largest media conglomerate, ABS-CBN, silencing a network that had been critical of him and which he said refused to air his 2016 political ads.
Earlier this year, an ally of Duterte’s took control of the network, causing media watchdogs to decry the move as ‘shameless’ and ‘concerning’.—Heidi Siegmund Cuda for Byline Times, 11 December 2022
If any of this sounds familiar, it should.
Ellisons Seize Control
According to breaking news from the Media and Democracy Project, the “Ellisons to seize control of Warner Brothers, as Democratic AGs cave.”
The consumer watchdog group said in a statement:
“Today is a sad day for democracy, the rule of law, workers, consumers, creatives, diversity of voices in film and journalism, investors, journalism, personal freedom and safety (data/surveillance), national security and press freedom. At the same time as the President of the United States is actively thwarting the First Amendment by barring White House access to some news organizations because he doesn’t like their reporting, including CNN, we learn that the proposed takeover of Warner Brothers by Larry and David Ellisons’ Paramount-Skydance will go through.
A coalition of state attorneys general have settled the lawsuit they had brought to stop the merger. Here is the barely enforceable, ineffective failure of a “Consent Decree” of the settlement. This will bring two major broadcast news outlets -- CNN and CBS -- under ownership control of Larry and David Ellison, whose close relationship with President Trump is already demonstrably degrading CBS News coverage. The Trump DoJ, FTC and FCC under Brendan Carr have failed the American people and approved this takeover. There have been many warning signs, but now it couldn’t be more clear: Our country’s bedrock principle of a free press is crumbling before our eyes.”
The Block the Merger coalition added: “We are disappointed and angry that the interests of average Americans have been trampled to benefit oligarch billionaires.”
The thing is, corporate and billionaire media have never really had our backs. Decades were spent building the myth of Trump and the last 10 years, despite dire warnings and investigations from independent investigative journalists, normalizing him was newsroom policy.
The constant coverage of what I call Reality TV Fascism always takes us further away from reality and deeper into the murk.
I return to a quote from Jay Rosen often, because I think it best summarizes the predicament of how to cover a regime that sells illusion and plants narrative grenades.
Six months before the 2024 election, I asked the NYU Journalism professor:
Heidi: So I’m just gonna quote something that you 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?
Jay Rosen: 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.
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.
Trump has many proxies, Vance, Patel, Hegseth, Miller, RFKjr, skilled at lying on camera, skilled at creating illusions and planting narrative bombs, skilled at the theater of nihilism. Do we mute them all, while still reporting on the actions of the regime?
Personally, I am celebrating 20 years without a television in my home this year, and I have always believed it’s my superpower.
“The Resistance Libs Were Right”
I will never forget how hard I sought answers to why cable news was so soft on Trump in the lead up to the 2016 election, when investigative reporters were bringing receipts on his Russia ties and criminality. Why did they parrot him, while obsessing about Hillary Clinton’s emails?
The answer was simple and can be told in one number: $4.6 billion.
The three major cable news networks — CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC — generated $4.6 billion in 2016.
It can also be told in one quote.
Ten years ago, disgraced former CBS honcho Les Moonves famously said, “(The Trump Campaign) may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
As I wrote in my report on Trump’s 2024 announcement speech - where I applied the lens of How Fascism Works to reveal the fascist playbook:
“Corporate media outlets continue to platform him, while failing to confront the fact that their outdated ideas of journalistic impartiality are failing the very people they’re meant to serve.”
We’ve already seen the RT merger take place, as “reporters” who were paid millions of dollars by cutouts to Russia Today, which is directly linked to Russian military intelligence, have been granted access to the White House and Pentagon.
A few weeks ago, conservative writer and veteran Republican operative who worked to defeat Clinton’s heath care plan of 1993 and was a proponent of the Iraq war, Bill Kristol, tweeted:
“In the midst of an awful lot of ever-so-sophisticated equivocating and oh-so-thoughtful-chin-stroking and too-clever-by-half-over-thinking, I just want to say, simply and unequivocally and for the record:
The Resistance Libs Were Right.”
I tweeted back: “Thank you.”
Krisol is now a Democrat.
Why Participate in Your Own Execution?'
Veteran reporter Bonnie Fuller asked a blunt question in her July report for The Media and Democracy Project’s newsletter: “Why participate in your own execution?”
In a scathing post, Fuller questioned every member of the White House press corps and their editors for their willingness to participate in the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner on July 24.
She noted of the original event:
Donald Trump, who has viciously disparaged the press and has worked assiduously to destroy the credibility of fact-based American journalism ever since his presidential campaign in 2015, was the guest of honor at the black tie event.
He is openly at war with every concept embedded in the First Amendment - especially freedom of the press. Why he was being honored in the first place was questionable beyond belief.
Trump, who was also honored at what she calls July’s rescheduled “masochistic dinner,” recently subpoenaed “reporters at the New York Times and…the phone records of their relatives” — what Fuller calls “a major escalation in Trump’s war on freedom of the press” and “straight out of the authoritarian playbook.” In addition to calling women reporters “piggy,” “stupid,” and “ugly,” he supported Pete Hegseth’s removal of “all fact-based media from the Pentagon” and labeled journalists as “enemies of the people” — a Stalin quote, she reminds us.
Fuller added:
All in attendance should forever be stained with a red-scarlet letter “T” for their compliance and inactions in defense of the Constitution… After all, they will be honoring an aspiring king and their would-be executioner…
“The biggest story today in American news - the biggest since the Civil War - is Trump’s plan to destroy democracy and replace it with his own brand of authoritarianism. The media who are members of the White House Correspondents’ Association have done an excellent job of not covering that story.”
In my comment on yesterday’s brief moment of Trump on mute, I wrote:
“Propaganda dies in silence.”
We desperately need more independent investigative reporting, not less.
As reporter Maria Ressa cautioned:
“First they came for the journalists. We don’t know what happened after that.”—Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize recipient, 2021
But corporate media hasn’t done much substantive reporting in a decade.
Perhaps no one will notice if they’re not in the room.
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