Journalists resist change
The corporate media exists to support the regime
Today, we feature guest-editorialist and fan of The Exit Network, James Leroy Wilson. He explains, “The corporate media exists to support the regime.” This is, of course, a TEN theme. That said, the arguments below are strictly the author’s and not necessarily those of The Exit Network.
A few months ago, Conner Habib mentioned something a professor told him: Graduate school isn’t for learning what you need to know to go out and change the world, graduate school is about getting admitted into a club, the club of scholars with advanced degrees.
It’s as if the university exists to maintain its own existence. It’s not a place to sow a social revolution that would lead to its own demise. Keep the radical political philosophy to the confines of ideas, not action, thank you very much.
Unlike most universities, media corporations are for-profit. They both, however, have similar interests. The corporate structure itself can’t exist apart from the laws of the modern State. Like universities, which rely (directly or indirectly) on taxpayer funding, mainstream media aren’t interested in biting the hand of the corporatist State to which they owe their existence.
I recently watched the film Dark Crimes (2016) starring Jim Carrey. If I had gone to Rotten Tomatoes beforehand, I would’ve skipped it. Nevertheless, I gleaned some insights from the film.
It’s set in Poland not long after it transitioned from communism. In one scene, a cop says, “See, people don’t want justice. They want good and evil. Big, bright stories told with conviction.”
He understood what’s required to thrive in a new, western-style democracy. The government earns its legitimacy, the support of the people, by the appearance of doing good things, the appearance of justice.
I was thinking of this in the context of John Ziegler’s recently-wrapped With the Benefit of Hindsight podcast, which I believe proves that Jerry Sandusky was innocent in the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, and that there was no coverup implicating football coach Joe Paterno. (I’ve written about the podcast previously, on how journalism can do a better job, and how it’s hard to believe what we’re told about anything.)
I was thinking the same thing when reading that, as Caitlin Johnstone reports, the mainstream media ignored the story that a key witness’s allegations against Julian Assange were lies.
The stories of Sandusky and Assange upset the “good vs. evil” narrative. Sandusky’s points to the corruption and greed at the heart of criminal and civil justice systems; Assange’s points out that it is the FBI and U.S. foreign policymakers who are the “bad guys.”
It’s one thing for corporate media to report on rogue officers or the scandals of partisan politicians, but to report on evils that go to the very foundations of the State, is to sow seeds of doubt in their audience. They might begin to question the State’s own legitimacy.
That’s why such reporting is usually done by small outlets that the corporate media would call fringe, extreme, or conspiratorial.
And it works. If the truth about Sandusky or Assange were actually censored, the public might be more likely to believe them; because their stories are allowed yet ignored, it’s as if they have no credibility.
The good citizens who try to “stay informed” by reading the New York Times are probably as much in the dark as those who don’t pay attention to the news at all. That’s why fundamental political and social change seems impossible: our universities and corporate media don’t want it.
Just remember that truth and freedom reside in you, not in the legal system. It’d be a better world if Assange and Sandusky are freed from prison, but in the meantime we don’t have to pledge our allegiance to systems that put them there.
James Leroy Wilson writes from Nebraska. This article originally appeared on his Substack page, J.L. Cells. You can also follow him on Facebook and Twitter. The specific contents of this article are solely the author’s opinion, and not necessarily those of The Exit Network.
