A Vision of Journalism

by Jon Rappoport

July 13, 2022

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(This article is Part-4 in a series. For Part-3, click here. For Part-5, click here.)

This is another in my series on writing and writers—and it ties in with my mega-collection, Power Outside The Matrix, which you can also read about and order here.

Speaking from my own 40 years of journalism work and my preferences on the subject, yes, of course I have a bias, but it’s not narrow. It’s wide open, and it lets anyone in, as long as they think about FACT and IMAGINATION together.

Some would call what I’m talking about here STYLE, but it’s more than that. It’s how a writer decides to present information with twists and turns and flashes and cloudbursts and attacks…

What can you make facts DO?

They’re the raw material.

You could wake up one very good day and realize you’re writing satire. Comedy. Even poetry.

You’re also, in the process, exploding the mind of the reader, because it needs to be exploded and rescued from the sober drear of “here are the data, goodbye.” I mean, really. That has to go. Away.

As a writer, do you want a fact to be a martial arts instructor toiling away at a small gym teaching the same moves over and over, or do you want a fact to be a Bruce Lee, who invented new moves from his core and imagination every day to fit the situation he was facing?

If you know you want to use a fact to make a point, you’re on the right track. How do you make the point? There are an infinity of ways, and you invent them. Mostly, as you go along.

You teach yourself to be a chef with no recipe book. Your book is DESIRE. The desire to overturn official reality. So OVERTURN IT. Don’t be shy.

Read what bad journalists write. See what they’re doing. I’m not just talking about lies. I’m talking about how they tell them. Drained of juice and color. These people should be pumping gas and collecting tumbleweed in Death Valley.

As a writer, fear is not your friend. You can tell the truth and never move the needle, because you’re timid. (If you’re irretrievably timid, you’ve already stopped reading this.)

Listen. There are millions and millions of readers out there who are unsure about what they’re supposed to do. They’re in strait jackets. They don’t know whether to shit or go blind. They read a line you write and they start to smile and then they stop.

They ask themselves, “Am I supposed to laugh? That line was pretty funny. But the subject he’s writing about is serious. I’m confused. He just took that fact and used it like a hammer and banged my head. If I laugh, am I committing some kind of code violation? Is a patrol car going to show up? Will I turn into a person my friends won’t understand? Suppose I miss the meaning of a joke and laugh in the wrong place? I’d look stupid.”

The solution here is: keep pounding away. Sooner or later, people are going to catch on to what you’re doing. And here’s the capper. They’ll find the buried place in themselves where they’re doing it, too.

That’s what you want. You want THEM to see THEY intend to upset apple carts, too. That intent has been trained out of them. By all sorts of people. Dead people who still manage to walk and talk.

It’s the deadness you want to overcome.

Facts are weapons you deploy to achieve that. You don’t want gray readers digesting facts you present as gray corpses…because in that case, nothing really happens.

Yes, I’ve read Hunter Thompson. I’ve read PJ O’Rourke. And Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll. And Thomas Paine, who was a journalist and an essayist and caller to action and a poet all at the same time. They knew how to use facts to their own advantage. You can learn from them, and then cook up your own dishes.

Beware of ideological humor. These are dud jokes the writers THINK are funny. They’re sadly mistaken. The jokes rely heavily on the prior ideology, and only rubes and yokels enjoy them. “Ha-ha, he [writer] proved God is wonderful.” No he didn’t. He wrote something lame, and God shook his head, swore, turned away, and went off to play 18 holes at George Carlin’s miniature golf course on the corner of Paradise and Cackle.

Suppose God Himself wants you to laugh your way out of a strait jacket? Suppose He knows how to turn the screw with any fact in the book? Suppose He can make a fact into a sword and wave it and drive you screaming into the night—where you recover your sanity.

Why can’t you as a writer do that, too?

Because He’s the Only One? You really think His ego is that large?

Doesn’t your experience tell you it’s the most isolated, indifferent, cold sons of bitches who have the biggest egos?

— Jon Rappoport


power outside the matrix

(To read about Jon’s collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)


The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

This entry was posted in Writers.

10 comments on “A Vision of Journalism

  1. ReluctantWarrior says:

    The Predator

    A nightmare unspeakable
    Has come through the looking glass
    Transhuman Jabberwock,
    A predator from another dimension
    Has invaded our time and space
    Fomenting hate, fear and dissension
    Imprisoning the human race,
    Archon of perverted imagination
    Corrupting the dreams of mankind
    Creating an epic of cruel blood lust
    Filling living neurons with silicon fantasies
    Turning our eternal dreams to dust,
    Devouring wayward souls
    Riding the appassionata of our hearts
    Through hell’s rocky shoals,
    Tho into the unknown we must ride
    To engage our shadowy demons
    That hide behind those masks of feigned virtue
    Seeking that mythical empty place
    Where the terrifying reflections
    Of this mortal phantasm
    Chase us back to hearth and home
    Where we brood until after midnight
    Trapped by the Minatours of the mind,
    Haunted by the mystic chords of memory
    That turn our thoughts ever blue,
    Challenging our individual genius
    To rise above the bloody parchment of history
    Where love keeps changing hue,
    To embrace the passion of the mystery
    That lives through us,
    Beyond the twin sepulchers of doom
    That mock the heavens,
    For we are the wispy breath of freedom
    That rises above the wasteland
    Caressing the pastel sky
    And blessing the Universe
    With eyes of awe and wonder
    Even as whirling galaxies above
    Are relentlessly driven asunder,
    For through the gaping jaws of oblivion
    I have found the promised land
    That beckons us with
    Hymns to the brokenhearted,
    Haunted by the memories of our loved ones
    From whom we have been parted
    And through the lamentations
    Of the tortured soul
    We have unlocked heaven’s gate
    To savor the mystical manna
    That blesses our human fate
    Secret of secrets!
    For which the high Angels remain mum

    Panis Angelicus fit panis hominum
    Dat panis coelicus figuris terminum!

  2. William R Hall Jr says:

    The world needs more good honest writers.

    When a kid grows up and turns out to be a bad person the parents take the blame. It’s certainly not the intention of the parents to raise a bad person so it is chalked up as a failure to communicate.

    I feel that it’s the writers in this country that are to blame for a large portion of the country believing the official narrative of 911.

    Right after it happened I thought “Well, that’s obviously a controlled demolition, it’s only a mater of time, maybe a few weeks, and the people behind it will be brought to justice.”

  3. Donna Guillaume says:

    Fantastic, Jon! (btw, I was married to a Jon. After the divorce, he now calls himself Jonathan.)

    I’ve read a lot of how-to and/or opinion pieces on writing. This has got to be the best! I’m in your age bracket. It seems that it’s the time to live freely and to write freely and to free one’s self from descriptions/inscriptions/conscriptions/prescriptions which limit life’s expression.

    Carry on!

  4. Sean says:

    I knew it.

  5. Roundball Shaman says:

    “… how a writer decides to present information with twists and turns and flashes and cloudbursts and attacks…What can you make facts DO? They’re the raw material.”

    Clay in an artist’s hands can be fashioned into countless shapes and forms. Can be made to look like anything. Or nothing.

    Words and thoughts are like clay. In a Writer’s hands, they can be fashioned into anything one can imagine. And then, beyond what one could imagine.

    Writers are artists that use thoughts and ideas instead of clay to achieve whatever ends They set out to achieve.

    Readers are the lucky folks who get to wander through the Art Gallery of the Word and gaze upon those sculpted words and phrases and experience them and ponder them in any ways they wish. Like a painting.

    “Sooner or later, people are going to catch on to what you’re doing. And here’s the capper. They’ll find the buried place in themselves where they’re doing it, too.”

    Good writing changes the reader. Gives the reader information they didn’t know before. Gives them ideas they’ve never considered before. In short, good writing changes the reader… forever. They started out as one thing and after they’ve read something they are changed and someone else. Happy… sad… giddy… angry… challenged… touched. In whatever ways, somehow changed. Opened up. Bigger. A new creature. Until they read the next thoughts when They become changed again.

    “Suppose God Himself wants you to laugh your way out of a strait jacket?… Why can’t you as a writer do that, too? Because He’s the Only One? You really think His ego is that large?”

    One of the worst blasphemies about The Almighty is that ‘Himself’ has a big ego. The biggest. Possessive. Angry. A stern schoolteacher-type wielding a big stick and wearing a long beard and constant look of disgust. Relishing on handing out heavy punishment in all directions.

    The Almighty is nothing like that. Never was. The Almighty is our Father/Mother who loves us unconditionally and not just when we meet some contrived standard of acceptable behavior.

    A lot of people just can’t seem to really wrap their minds around that. These folks seem to want to feel bad. Want punishment. They have taken all the hurts and disapproval they have received during their lives and made a false god out of all that crap. A substitute god who is nothing like the Real One. And that is sad beyond belief.

    God ‘knew’ everything you would say and do thousands of years before you were born. And with that, ‘Himself’ brought the infinite number of impossible circumstances together over the years to allow you to come to this Earth. With all your ‘sins’. And all your ‘failures’ and disappointments.

    Try to fool God. Just try it. Try to make God not love you. Just try it. Try to do something that God didn’t already know you were going to do. Good luck with that.

    And with everything… you are still loved.

    And maybe someday more people will finally realize that. And the World will be changed forever. And you, too.

  6. Jim S. Smith says:

    Kind of curious, Jon,

    HOW am I supposed to share some of your well-written wisdom on several of my Telegram channels – if your best reporting has been moved over to a paid-subscription substack channel? ? ?

    Doesn’t this kind of defeat the whole purpose of trying to educate as many people, around the world, as I thought you originally intended to do?

    Just curious, that’s all.

    I don’t see much in the nature of your solid reporting on here – in substance – very much anymore.

  7. Paul says:

    OBSCURE & HIDDEN WITHIN

    “Turn round tailor,
    Assaulting
    All the mornings
    Of the interest shown.
    Presenting one another
    To the cord.
    All left dying,
    Rediscovered
    Of the door
    That turned round.
    To close the cover,
    All the interest shown.
    To turn one another,
    To the sign,
    At the time,
    Float your climb…”

    ~ Jon Anderson

  8. ReluctantWarrior says:

    “Some would call what I’m talking about here STYLE, but it’s more than that. It’s how a writer decides to present information with twists and turns and flashes and cloudbursts and attacks…”

    It seems that in growing as a writer one comes into one’s own style….and you know you are on the right track because the main stream objects with insults or a general lack of understanding. I remember showing my dear departed mother some of my poems. She was a successful main stream writer. After she read them she said to me ‘I just don’t get it.’ I was hurt and taken aback at the time but in retrospect I now understand why she said this. I was attempting to create new worlds and she was living in the old one.

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