By Mark Anderson
Stop the Presses News & Commentary
The orthodox media’s reckless, incendiary treatment of what, according to police, was a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue is a disturbing example of today’s weaponized media pushing journalism to an apparently terminal stage, which could, and arguably should, hasten the media’s demise.
Ah, but this journalistic vanguard—try as it might to portray itself as a virtually blameless haven of nobles only seeking the truth “without fear or favor”—is its own worst enemy, having cast aside even the most basic tenets of sound reporting, all for the sake of lashing out nonstop at anything that contains even the slightest whiff of perceived “right wing” thinking, with a paranoia that far exceeds that of even the most extreme “conspiracy theorist.”
The Mass Media Cartel, or MMC—the name this writer coined since “mainstream media,” wrongly implies that such a radical propaganda entity should be called “mainstream”—consists of seemingly independent corporate media outlets. But what makes the news media an actual cartel is that it while it purports to be competitive, it’s of One Monolithic Mind; in other words, it engages in “groupthink” when it comes to “the big picture” (more commonly called “pack journalism”), operating as it does under the control of six or so super-rich families who all want One World—with One Viewpoint.
To distill human thought, in all its complexities, into a One World Viewpoint, the MMC is constantly on the lookout for the advancement, no matter how modest, of any worldview that isn’t ultra-left-wing, hyper-internationalist post-modernism. Any “politically incorrect” Twitter note, off-color written or spoken remark, such as a perceived “racial slur” or favorable reference to “nationalism,” coming from anyone with some notoriety (and sometimes from relative unknowns) is automatically condemned as an undefined heresy—as if the “speech criminal” has been hauled before a tribunal, of sorts.
The athlete, politician, celebrity, artist, housewife, working stiff, alternative writer or whomever uttered the slur, nationalistic statement or other Disapproved Speech must, in effect, confess his or her transgressions and publicly apologize, regardless of the meaning, context or intent of the forbidden statement that was made. The key tactic is that we’re all told in no uncertain terms that if someone can simply claim they’re “offended” by “said statement,” then the actual intent of the speaker doesn’t matter. Thus, something that should never be criminalized—speech itself—is effectively criminalized without courts and juries.
Thus, far from being a champion of free speech, the modern media scan the horizon while on hair-trigger alert to berate, attack and penalize anyone who thinks and speaks “wrong.” Any person who runs afoul of the linguistic wardens in the media thought-prison is, typically, indicted as a virtual “Hitler,” among other libelous labels which are routinely used to smear and defame those who don’t fit the One World Mold.
The MMC’s One Worldview goes something like this: The world is a dog-eat-dog evolutionary accident. There is no God. The soul doesn’t exist. Raw power, the most money and the biggest toys rule. “Progress” is simply whatever breaks former “taboos,” which means that all traditions, no matter what they are or how well they have served humankind, must be abandoned and forgotten forever. There is no real history, save for what the world’s “governors” tell you is history. There is only Now, a precarious future, and the need to purchase the latest gadget to keep rigged the world trade system rolling. Worse still, there’s a callous disregard for the consequences of such an ultra-revolutionary ethos—where chaotic change, simply for its own sake, is the only measure of advancement.
MEDIA PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUES
While keeping the news of the Pittsburgh shooting and other bellwether events in mind, it’s important to define the tactics that MMC “journalists” relentlessly use to poison and destroy, rather than inform, public discourse. Written and verbal assaults, via carefully selected words and concepts, are integrated with psychological strategies. The main tactics are conflation and projection, which tend to coincide with one another.
Projection is a psychological term that in its simplest form is blame-shifting, where, for example, often violent leftist extremists such as Antifa accuse everyone else of “extremism,” or, amid their constant public race-baiting, they label everyone but themselves “racists.”
TRYING TO DETHRONE KING
The New York Times monitors every quirk and foible of those deemed “newsworthy” (and by extension performs mass smears of entire populations) in its blatant paranoia about anything right of center politically. On Oct. 31, the Times savaged Congressman Steve King (R-Iowa) in a most bizarre fashion, starting out: “As Pittsburgh began burying the victims of Saturday’s synagogue massacre, the head of the House Republican campaign arm all but jettisoned Rep. Steve King of Iowa from the House Republican Conference, declaring, ‘We must stand up against white supremacy and hate in all its forms.’”
In this piece, published about one week before the crucial midterm elections, the Times goes on to indict King for what the newspaper calls “years of incendiary and racially charged comments,” which, the Times added, was “capped by his endorsement of a white nationalist running for mayor of Toronto and a meeting with Austrian white nationalists” even while King “is also locked in the toughest re-election fight of his career.” The Times also “informs” us that the Austrian rightists that King reportedly met with are “associated with neo-Nazi movements.”
Psychological projection is bad enough, but conflation is worse. And in the events surrounding the Pittsburgh incident, the Times exhibits a particularly clear case of conflation, which consists of taking separate concepts and conflating them (or lumping them together) with little or no factual basis for doing so.
In the case of applying conflation to Rep. King, the Times is clearly implying, while using its sources as surrogates, that no one should re-elect him and add to Trump’s congressional support because King is a white nationalist who speaks “incorrectly,” is in league with an Austrian rightist party, and that party is somehow allied with “neo-Nazis.”
So, the Times “reasons” that since the accused Pittsburgh shooter is alleged to be a right-wing, white nationalist, neo-Nazi type, then Rep. Steve King “must” be in league with a broader movement that could be prone to shooting up synagogues if it doesn’t get its way. Thus, through this stark example of conflating all these things into one “club,” King is beaten down with that club as if the Times is a jailer bludgeoning him until he repents and embraces One World Thinking.
Also consider the “reports” from mass media outlets such as Vice News (which has a website and a presence on HBO). Regarding a letter written and signed by members of Pittsburgh’s chapter of “Bend the Arc,” a progressive Jewish organization—“in light of the massacre of 11 Jewish people at the local Tree of Life synagogue”—Vice News also stressed the following, while adding immigration issues to the mix:
Nearly 20,000 people are siding with Pittsburgh’s Jewish leaders in an open letter demanding that President Trump stay away from Steel City until he fully denounces white nationalism and quits policies that harm immigrants and minority groups. “For the past three years, your words and your policies have emboldened a growing white nationalist movement,” members of the local Bend the Arc group wrote. “You yourself called the murderer evil, but yesterday’s violence is the direct culmination of your influence.”
That is textbook conflation (though it’s plainly inaccurate). Recall that while Trump often speaks of “America First,” he does not speak of it in racial or ethnic terms (though he properly understands that white Americans’ rights matter, as do the rights of all others). In fact, he often speaks of the nation’s economic betterment, which he attributes to his tax, trade and other policies, as being beneficial for blacks, Hispanics, whites and everyone else. So why would, or should, President Trump “renounce the white nationalist movement” when he speaks of America’s renewal more broadly? Of course, the media is sore at him for “not denouncing” the nationalists who happened to be white
This guilt-by-association attack on the president and his supporters pans out like this: The accused synagogue shooter, an obscure man named Robert D. Bowers, said to be age 46, who, the story goes, lives locally and is your typical mysterious loner, is assumed (via his predictable social media postings) to be a white nationalist. (Never mind that the alleged shooter, whose middle initial was suddenly changed to “G.” after a couple days passed, must go to court to determine if he really believes in white nationalism, if those social media posts which the average American never saw were actually his doing, and if his supposed beliefs verifiably influenced his alleged actions).
Ergo, President Trump’s America First references are simply assumed to mean white nationalism. And since his supporters—a large cross section of the American people—happen to lean toward nationalism (so does, say, the American Legion) and many (though certainly not all) happen to be Caucasian, then the shooting is ideologically pinned on the entire Trump movement—on millions of people.
It cannot be overstated that many such news reports came out, it just so happens, right before the crucial mid-term 2018 elections. And some of those reports referred to the above-mentioned open letter, conveyed uncritically by the press, which states that the Pittsburgh shooting was “a direct culmination” of Trump’s influence.
IMMIGRATION FORCE-FITTED INTO NARRATIVE
Then there’s the recent news reports that for President Trump to even think about being welcome in Pittsburgh, he must also drop policies which “harm immigrants and minority groups,” an obvious add-on in this conflation assault that has nothing to do with the Pittsburgh event and was launched as a pre-election salvo to try and defame Republican candidates and voters right when a caravan of Central Americans is headed toward the U.S.
Taken together, this means that Trump, and anyone who supports him, must be a white nationalist who blindly hates all immigrants and is a would-be gunman who may very well harbor tendencies to shoot up a church, school, mosque or synagogue. This is mass-libel on a titanic scale.
But not to be outdone, New York Times, casts an even wider net. The illustrious “newspaper of record’s” insinuation is that, because Bowers apparently utilized alternative social media outlets, then anyone else who does could be Bowers’ conspiratorial soulmate. As the Times remarked online Oct. 27:
Mr. Bowers took to Gab, a social network that bills itself as a being dedicated to free speech and which is increasingly popular among alt-right activists and white nationalists. After opening an account on it in January, he had shared a stream of anti-Jewish slurs and conspiracy theories. It was on Gab where he found a like-minded community, reposting messages from Nazi supporters. ‘Jews are the children of Satan,’ read Mr. Bowers’ biography — The New York Times
We were never shown exactly what those slurs and theories were. So, we are left with taking the word of the MMC and the police as to what Bowers supposedly wrote, since it’s all too “shocking” for the public to handle and only MMC editors and police, you see, should be anointed to read Bowers’ “hateful” scribblings. And, for the record, no photos placing Bowers at the crime scene (such as pictures of him being handcuffed on the synagogue grounds upon his reported arrest) are published, in a world with hundreds or thousands of phone-cameras per square mile.
FAILING BASIC REPORTING
This is indicative of MMC’s slop-shod reporting practices on even the most basic level. For another instance, look at the opening paragraph (also from the Oct. 31 Times) under the headline, “Weapons Used in Massacre Were Purchased Legally, Inquiry Finds.” The story begins: “The accused synagogue gunman, legally purchased the guns he used to kill 11 people . . .”
The problem is clear: If someone is “the accused” then strict journalistic standards mean that you’d have to qualify that statement like this: “The accused synagogue gunman, according to police, legally purchased the guns they say he used to kill 11 people . . .” Or a responsible reporter might even state: “The court will determine whether accused synagogue gunman Robert Bowers legally purchased the guns that police and prosecutors say he used to kill 11 people.”
In other words, it’s not up to the press to be the prosecution; it’s up to the prosecution to be the prosecution. You’d think that the Times would understand that.
And take note that the media claims that Bowers posted pictures of his guns online well ahead of the attack—which, you’d think, would have prompted police to proactively question him in an age when police closely monitor social media accounts.
But the Times’ reporters and editors would rather project, conflate, libel, slander, misdirect, deflect etc., so they can try and sell the notion that any worldview that is not their worldview of borderless internationalism and moral relativism should be a thought crime, evidently with the eventual goal of making the mere talk of nationalism a punishable offense, while likely targeting correlative concepts such as all but the most mild forms conservatism, along with constitutionalism, Christianity, etc. If that’s the goal, then this means that the MMC’s intent is to corrode public thinking to the point that anti-internationalist / pro-nationalist views can be categorized as a pathology and seen, perhaps, as a mental disorder requiring state intervention.
To summarize, it’s noteworthy that Vice News cannot grasp reality even when its own words about Trump’s media views offer clues.
As Vice News noted: “While the president has denounced anti-Semitism, he hasn’t gone as far as condemning a white supremacist movement that has harbored racism and at times encouraged violence against minority groups. Instead, he blamed the ‘Fake News’ in a tweet . . . for “the division and hatred that has been going on for so long in our Country,” adding, “Actually, it is their Fake & Dishonest reporting which is causing problems far greater than they understand!”
Exactly, Donald, though it’s much more than dishonesty. Treachery is the proper word.
While firm figures are hard to nail down, there’s a detectable growth in the number of people who don’t trust or believe the prestige press anymore. Let’s hope it’ll gradually dawn on the mass of people that the “mainstream” media needs to go the way of the Whig Party. As the internationalist extremists in the corporate press labor to uphold their image as the one and only “legitimate” source of news—while often viciously writing off the alternative media as a motley menagerie of sloppy second-handers and ultra-paranoid conspiracy theorists—there is a distinct probability that a tipping point will arrive whereby the MMC will cease to have the influence it believes or hopes it still possesses. They need to be dispossessed of that influence.
So, cancel those mainstream newspaper subscriptions, turn off the television news networks and get involved in uncovering the truth in a proactive fashion. That’s the alternative that most alternative media have been urging all along.