Controlling the Narrative
Elite Press Posing as ‘New Media’ Aims to Control ‘the Narrative’
The mass media cartel (MMC) fancies itself as the world’s “legacy” mediav - the world’s “official beacon of truth” that has long had the public’s “best interests” at heart, without which the population would supposedly perish in a maelstrom of ignorance. Yet, this allegedly “indispensable” institution, more assuredly than ever before, is losing its grip on the public mind; it’s only a question of how thoroughly and how quickly. And while polls are not the be-all and end-all of measurement tools, a recent Gallup Poll shows trust in the media is reaching historic lows. An Oct. 19, 2023 “News.Gallup” article on public trust of the media noted that a “new high of 39% have no confidence at all compared with 27% in 2016.” Even “Democrats’ trust [in media] is down 12 points since last year; the lowest since 2016.” And “another 29% of U.S. adults have ‘not very much trust’ [in the media].”
At the very same time, we’re being warned that “news deserts” are spreading—defined as “dry” information regions across America, Canada, the UK, and other parts of the world where small conventional newspapers have closed, larger newspapers have significantly lost circulation, and local radio stations and TV affiliates have steeply lost market share and listeners-viewers, possibly to the point of folding. Thus, this large patchwork of “information voids” must be filled somehow by someone. The key questions are: “By whom?” and “how?” With 2024 upon us, the thing of unsurpassable value is “the narrative” - the “authoritative voice” that informs the world about what those in power are doing and whether they are legitimate, trustworthy, and competent guardians for the present and future status of the peoples of the world. Money, as part of the debt-based usurious financial system, is naturally the “universal lubricant,” but the news narrative at this point in history is truly the world’s “holy grail.” And as “alternative” media grows and conventional media deflates, a fascinating race, a kind of info “civil war,” is on regarding who will possess and control “the narrative.”
LEGACY MEDIA AWARE
Unbeknownst to even some of the most watchful alt-media outlets, citizen journalists, and concerned observers, the “legacy” media is trying to fill the very same void that it helped create with its nonstop false narratives and its belligerent bullying of those brave souls among the public, in altmedia and (more rarely) in public office who have the audacity to seek the truth, come what may. For purposes of this series on the “new” legacy media, one of several relatively recent upstarts is the Civic News Company, or CNC. This 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity portrays itself as a more personable “grassroots” organization with two offshoots: “Chalkbeat,” which covers education, and “Votebeat,” which claims to constructively cover elections with an aim toward preserving and reinforcing the “right to vote” as a vital pillar of “democracy.” Consider CNC’s CEO and editor-inchief Elizabeth Green. According to CNC’s 2021 IRS Form 990 filing, she pulled down a $286,762 salary that year, with over $43,000 in perks.
Tax deductible contributions, grants, and other revenue for CNC were $6.5 million in 2017 and grew to $12.6 million as of 2021. From 2017 through 2021, the grand total of such revenue infusions hit $43.4 million. However, while CNC’s war chest is large, the company that CNC keeps is the same old ruling class. Green took part in the October 2023 “Democracy 360” conference put on by the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia—alongside not only Susan Glasser, staff writer of The New Yorker, and Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, but also Peter Baker of The New York Times and Bilderberg Steering Committee member and longtime Trilateral Commission member Tom Donilon, along with several other legacy media wonks from CBS, Fox and PBS, as well as noted White House apparatchiks such as former Obama counsel Bob Bauer, former George W. Bush Pentagon official Eric Edelman, and former Clinton strategic planner Don Baer.
Even a brief perusal of CNC’s coverage yields irrefutable proof that Votebeat’s core mission is to continue demonizing those who question the secret vote counts that have become hardwired into the “DNA” of U.S. elections. For example, a CNC-Votebeat dispatch about a recent Gillespie County, Texas election dismissed local poll watchers as rude cranks and ridiculed them for knowing the law and asking questions. And in Arizona, any citizens seriously monitoring the plethora of under-supervised ballot drop boxes, borne of the 2020 Covid scare, were similarly characterized as paranoid busybodies by Votebeat, which sees election outcomes largely as a sacrament of civic faith in the interest of a “peaceful [read: unquestioning] transfer of power in our democracy,” not as an imperfect institution whose outcomes are easily manipulable in the computer age and deserve strict scrutiny for the honesty and civic health of the republic. Votebeat and Chalkbeat do publish more innocuous-sounding reports that seem reasonably objective. Occasionally some respectable journalism happens. But don’t be fooled. The CNC-Votebeat-Chalkbeat apparatus is just one of several news networking schemes that, by all indications, are part of the legacy media’s plan to keep itself in charge of the narrative— under cover of novelty and localism. All the more reason to support AFP and other vetted alt-media. Stay tuned for more in this series.
At the very same time, we’re being warned that “news deserts” are spreading—defined as “dry” information regions across America, Canada, the UK, and other parts of the world where small conventional newspapers have closed, larger newspapers have significantly lost circulation, and local radio stations and TV affiliates have steeply lost market share and listeners-viewers, possibly to the point of folding. Thus, this large patchwork of “information voids” must be filled somehow by someone. The key questions are: “By whom?” and “how?” With 2024 upon us, the thing of unsurpassable value is “the narrative” - the “authoritative voice” that informs the world about what those in power are doing and whether they are legitimate, trustworthy, and competent guardians for the present and future status of the peoples of the world. Money, as part of the debt-based usurious financial system, is naturally the “universal lubricant,” but the news narrative at this point in history is truly the world’s “holy grail.” And as “alternative” media grows and conventional media deflates, a fascinating race, a kind of info “civil war,” is on regarding who will possess and control “the narrative.”
LEGACY MEDIA AWARE
Unbeknownst to even some of the most watchful alt-media outlets, citizen journalists, and concerned observers, the “legacy” media is trying to fill the very same void that it helped create with its nonstop false narratives and its belligerent bullying of those brave souls among the public, in altmedia and (more rarely) in public office who have the audacity to seek the truth, come what may. For purposes of this series on the “new” legacy media, one of several relatively recent upstarts is the Civic News Company, or CNC. This 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity portrays itself as a more personable “grassroots” organization with two offshoots: “Chalkbeat,” which covers education, and “Votebeat,” which claims to constructively cover elections with an aim toward preserving and reinforcing the “right to vote” as a vital pillar of “democracy.” Consider CNC’s CEO and editor-inchief Elizabeth Green. According to CNC’s 2021 IRS Form 990 filing, she pulled down a $286,762 salary that year, with over $43,000 in perks.
Tax deductible contributions, grants, and other revenue for CNC were $6.5 million in 2017 and grew to $12.6 million as of 2021. From 2017 through 2021, the grand total of such revenue infusions hit $43.4 million. However, while CNC’s war chest is large, the company that CNC keeps is the same old ruling class. Green took part in the October 2023 “Democracy 360” conference put on by the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia—alongside not only Susan Glasser, staff writer of The New Yorker, and Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, but also Peter Baker of The New York Times and Bilderberg Steering Committee member and longtime Trilateral Commission member Tom Donilon, along with several other legacy media wonks from CBS, Fox and PBS, as well as noted White House apparatchiks such as former Obama counsel Bob Bauer, former George W. Bush Pentagon official Eric Edelman, and former Clinton strategic planner Don Baer.
Even a brief perusal of CNC’s coverage yields irrefutable proof that Votebeat’s core mission is to continue demonizing those who question the secret vote counts that have become hardwired into the “DNA” of U.S. elections. For example, a CNC-Votebeat dispatch about a recent Gillespie County, Texas election dismissed local poll watchers as rude cranks and ridiculed them for knowing the law and asking questions. And in Arizona, any citizens seriously monitoring the plethora of under-supervised ballot drop boxes, borne of the 2020 Covid scare, were similarly characterized as paranoid busybodies by Votebeat, which sees election outcomes largely as a sacrament of civic faith in the interest of a “peaceful [read: unquestioning] transfer of power in our democracy,” not as an imperfect institution whose outcomes are easily manipulable in the computer age and deserve strict scrutiny for the honesty and civic health of the republic. Votebeat and Chalkbeat do publish more innocuous-sounding reports that seem reasonably objective. Occasionally some respectable journalism happens. But don’t be fooled. The CNC-Votebeat-Chalkbeat apparatus is just one of several news networking schemes that, by all indications, are part of the legacy media’s plan to keep itself in charge of the narrative— under cover of novelty and localism. All the more reason to support AFP and other vetted alt-media. Stay tuned for more in this series.
By: Aafreen Ghorbani
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Nigger Moments in the USA
09/02/2024 1:22 am
What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I'm not a nigger, I'm a man, but if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need it. Throughout my life, I’ve regularly experienced what I think of as nigger moments—incidents that satisfy a need for violent racism. It’s disturbing when they clash with my academic world and even worse when they don’t. A dinner several summers ago, with my brother Michael, at the home of one of his well-known senior colleagues at an Ivy League institution. The elegant house matched the man: both were monumental. Intricate masks were precisely placed all around. The soaring conversation helped cement my sense that anthropology was indeed the correct vocation for me. After several hours, Michael and I descended the sculpted driveway and strolled up the street past impressive properties, marveling at the many worlds our gracious host had crossed. Just as we neared the end of the block, I noticed a car approaching from the opposite direction. It swerved into the wrong lane and flirted with the edge of the sidewalk where we now stood still. A college-aged white man leaned out of the window and yelled, “Get out of here, you damn gorillas.” Then the car screeched off. When I was in graduate school, once or twice a year at least, I was hit with an instance of blatant, unabashed, Bull Conner–style racism. This wasn’t simply some working-class white supremacist aggression. It was something more complex. One moment, I was visiting a friend from graduate school overseas while she was doing fieldwork. The next, I was handcuffed in a barren room at the airport, being detained by Homeland Security on the way home. One moment, I was at a bar, casually chatting with a young white woman. The next, she is telling me that she is currently in the police academy, learning how to kill people like me. I have countless stories like this: this kind of racism has been happening all my life. But explicit racism hit me like a splash of cold water when I was getting my PhD, I think, because of these juxtapositions: on the very same night that I was in the presence of a world-famous academic, sipping wine and getting advice about my dissertation, someone was calling me a nigger and threatening to mow me down. Soon, I learned to anticipate these nigger moments. Over time, I came to understand them as reminders to remember not to forget. Other kinds of nigger moments continue to take a toll. Because of the lack of faculty of color in the elite spaces where I have worked, I am frequently expected to act as an expert on my own and other ethnic and racial groups. When a racially charged incident happens on campus, I find myself among the few faculty of color called upon to quell students’ or the surrounding community’s concerns. I have been celebrated by my colleagues for this mentorship and care, but within that praise was a subtle form of pressure. Once when I was an undergraduate, my history professor showed us a lynching photo. The kind that in the early 1900s were used as postcards, circulating like coupons and collected like stamps. The professor removed the image from a folder without saying anything and projected it on the screen. A Black teenager named Jesse Washington dangled lifeless from a tree. He was lynched in Waco, Texas, accused of raping a White woman. While looking at that picture, a long, tense shiver took hold of me, shooting up through my feet from the floor. What I felt was different from physical violence, but I felt it intensely, a queasy feeling made of despair, rage, and gnawing resentment. I could feel a glimmer of what some Black tourist, visiting the South circa 1915, might have felt when she walked into a store and saw that image perched on a news stand. Even then, I knew that the death of someone who is devalued can spark a variety of responses: sadness and shame, mocking and mourning. I was the only Black person in class that day, and therefore had the added anxiety of anticipating responses from my classmates. During the discussion, I took solace in the fact that other students were likewise sickened, not merely by the image of Washington’s body, but also by those hundreds in attendance who couldn’t contain their smiles while pointing at that poplar tree. One white student abruptly turned away. It disturbed her too much, she said. But her reaction wasn’t based on the same feeling I had. She feared that one of the white faces in the crowd might be familiar to her. It could be one of her relatives, she said. Just then I realized: the way we understood race lay between us like a chasm. I wondered if that chasm could ever be bridged. If Baldwin is correct in saying that those invested in maintaining white property and privilege need the nigger, then we should ask what the nigger is needed for today. Does the president-elect need the nigger? What will nigger moments look like during the next four years? Ready or not, we’re about to find out.