Notes on the end of the news business as we know it
It’s personal
by Jon Rappoport
January 21, 2017
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This article goes to many places. I think you’ll find a place that works for you.
I’ve been investigating and reporting on deep medical fraud for 29 years. I’ve been around the block a few hundred times. I’ve spoken with scientists who work for the government and universities, and the media operatives who support them. I know the game.
If Robert F Kennedy Jr is, indeed, given the green light by President Trump to investigate vaccine safety, he’s going to need a truck and a chain and DOJ threats of prosecution to drag key CDC scientists into the light and elicit specific statements from them.
Even then, the odds are these scientists will keep repeating the party line: vaccines are overwhelmingly safe; they have no connection to autism or other neurological damage; the science is settled.
Kennedy could run up against an organized wall of silence—scientists refusing to speak with him, on the basis that he isn’t qualified to make judgements in their “field.”
In that case, he will need subpoena power, for starters.
Many years ago, I interviewed Jim Warner, a White House policy analyst in the Reagan administration. He had been trying to obtain medical-research information from the federal National Institutes of Health. He told me he was given the absolute cold shoulder: “If ever I’ve been tempted to believe in socialism, science has disabused me of that. These guys [at NIH] assume that it’s their show. They just assume it.”
Arrogance par excellence. Scientists rebuff the White House with a yawn.
Fortunately, Kennedy is a relentless investigator. He understands how science is corrupted and paid for. And the ace in the deck is this: there is already enough evidence in the open record to refute the CDC’s claim of vaccine safety.
Trump has blazed a trail of rejecting major media. As a result of his merciless attacks, press outlets are going mad pushing numerous outlandish fake stories. They’re ripe for further incursions on their territory.
In the past, this was the pattern: an outsider enters the scene and accuses the government of vast fraud; media operators assemble their usual cast of sordid characters, who dismiss the charges; everybody goes home and the story dies.
But that’s not working anymore. Media pomposity is exposed as fakery. Millions of people see through the ruse.
The media emperor is naked. He can prance around and around, but his fundamental nakedness keeps compounding the joke.
Truth be told, as their financial positions sink into dire red ink, press operations are trapped. Why?
Because they are partners with the high-level criminals whose activities are the very stories the public wants to know about.
Reporting on these crimes in great depth, day after day, would resuscitate the newspapers and broadcast networks. But that will never happen.
For example, these crimes:
* The Federal Reserve/a clandestine private corporation.
* Medically caused death.
* Toxic vaccines.
* Trillions of dollars of missing US government money.
* The power of the Trilateral Commission over US government policy.
* The covert implementation of the UN agenda of destruction in US communities.
And a hundred more issues.
Expose these down to the core, and people would buy newspapers off the rack like they buy coffee and beer and video games and cell phones and gasoline and underwear and toilet paper and lipstick and fast food. The Times would have to schedule extra press runs just to keep up with the demand. Its financial bottom line would soon look like Christmas.
You could talk to the publisher of the New York Times and present him with an ironclad plan for pulling his paper out of its deep financial hole, based on covering true stories like those above, and you would find no joy, because he would rather go down with the ship than go up against The Matrix.
The Times and other hoary media outlets live by the rule of limited hangout. In intelligence parlance, that means admitting a small piece of the truth in order to hide the rest.
“We’ll show you a tree in the forest, but not the forest.”
I know how it works, because as a reporter I’ve been there. I’ve approached editors of various media outlets with stories that crack the trance, and I’ve had those stories tossed back at me.
“We’re just not interested,” they say. “This isn’t our kind of piece.” Or: “Well, we already covered that.” But they didn’t cover it. They did a limited hangout on it. They ran a story that exposed one tiny corner of a whole bloody mess.
I say this—as simple fact—if any intelligent, aggressive, truly independent investigator were the managing editor of the New York Times, and if he were given free rein, he would have that paper back in the black in a year. He would have it roaring on all cylinders. He would have people fighting each other in the streets to grab the last copy off the newsstand. Journalism schools all over the country would close down in shame. Because he would be running stories that would crack the whole rotting edifice of cartel-control along many fronts, and he would be filling up a planned vacuum of truth with fire.
A decade ago, here is what a working reporter for a major paper told me: “We know what stories we can’t cover. Nobody needs to prep us. Our editors know, too. Otherwise, they’d never get to be editors.”
A player in a non-profit group once told me I could have a job with a paper on the east coast. In a roundabout way, he hinted at what they were looking for. In five minutes, I saw the handwriting on the wall. Essentially, the editor was searching for a reporter who would cover politics in Central America. The stories would have to favor the repressive governments in power. The basic cover was: these leaders were fighting the good fight against Communism. The death squads they were sending out, in cooperation with the CIA, were freedom fighters. And of course, any mention of cocaine trafficking as a means for obtaining weapons was off-limits.
None of this was spelled out. But the message was clear. They wanted a propaganda specialist. If I, as an up and coming reporter, decided to play ball, I could advance up the ladder.
Apparently, some travel was necessary. But I knew I could turn out reams of copy without ever leaving my apartment, because I grasped the fundamental angle I was supposed to pursue. Needless to say, I turned down the offer.
It was the first time I fully realized how easy the job of reporting could be. Assemble a list of reliable sources (who would support the mandatory point of view), walk right into a prepared group of corporate and think-tank allies, pull down copy from wire services, and re-write stories in a way that bolstered the idea that American Empire was really “spreading democracy” to the less fortunate. A walk in the park.
Twenty years later, I saw the same overall pattern in hundreds of major-media stories—but the point of view and the mandate had changed. Now it was all about Globalism. The covert op was the takedown of America, in order to squash the last vestige of political freedom and integrate the nation in “a new economic order.”
However, over the mountains, a new dawn was rising: the Internet. Independent media outlets. The resistance.
It was immediately obvious that, unless someone could shut this new creature down, major media would have no way to challenge the invasion. Independent news sources would gradually wreck MSM financial bottom lines.
Fronting for Globalist princes, Big News would see their bias exposed time and time again. The blowback on them would be enormous.
Trapped and corned like rats, they would attack, but their efforts would only compound their problem.
Then a populist named Donald Trump strolled on to the scene. He knew major media were suffering great losses. He knew online media were in the ascendance. He had people like Steve Bannon (Breitbart) who were bringing him up to speed. He saw how Matt Drudge was obliterating traditional news sources, even while (selectively) linking to them. A revolution was in progress.
Trump had the right stuff for this situation, because he didn’t care about offending people. He was mercurial, reckless; an opportunist. He could fly by the seat of his pants. He realized where and how, in America, the Globalists were causing great damage.
Trump accelerated the fall of major media from their thrones.
People around the world, untold millions, thought to themselves, “Trump is finally giving major media what they deserve.”
Giving the major media what they deserve is a force to be reckoned with, because there is no effective response to it. Nothing works. Who can lead the fight to preserve mainstream news? Answer: mainstream news. That isn’t going to go anywhere, because more and more people are rejecting the mainstream wholesale.
Think of major media as a ship. In full view of the passengers, the captain has just steered it into a shore of high rocks. The craft is beginning to tilt, and it’s taking on water. As the passengers scramble to safety on the beach, the captain is yelling, “Don’t leave, come back, everything is all right, I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s your fault, you’re too stupid to understand the correct principles of navigation!”
Translation: “I’m committing suicide. Go down with me.”
As a reporter starting out in the 1980s, one of my first glimpses of trouble involved a few of the papers I was writing for: they were definitely on the political Left, but at the same time they were businesses. You only had to look at the ads choking the pages to see that. They were capitalist enterprises. But they would never fully admit that. They were operating under a self-induced, self-serving delusion about fundamental economics. Eventually, larger publishers bought them out, and a few of the old guard made significant dollars on the deals. It was an old story about socialists getting rich.
This contradiction plagues every major media outlet today. They claim to serve the public interest, but they want to be rich. Their reporters want very nice salaries. And this is all in the service of Globalism, which aims to bankrupt economies and drive populations into the arms of technocrat planners of societies. It doesn’t add up. It doesn’t work.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be rich and working hard to achieve it. But claiming, at the same time, that you want the government to run the economy is a sick joke. A transparently sick joke, on the order of wealthy celebrities stumping for socialism, while they hire more armed security and dig bunkers on their walled properties.
Suppose you could approach a well-known and well-paid reporter for the New York Times. And suppose you said this: “For years, you’ve been writing about the less fortunate and giving back and more government support for the downtrodden and humanitarianism and so on—so I want to know, would you be willing to donate two-thirds of your salary, for the sake of equality, to those who need the money? Would you be willing to sell your co-op and give the money to the poor and move into a small apartment?”
The duplicitous and slimy major media are obviously engaged in a long con. They want their cake, they want to eat it, and they also want to appear as architects of “a more humane planet.”
They care about a more humane order in the same way an ant cares about space travel.
They care about serving their bosses, and those bosses have other bosses who are engineering a future of poverty for all, as a mechanism of control. That’s who’s paying reporters their salaries.
Do you know what a tired rich media liberal (fake socialist) looks like? Of course you do. You can see one every night anchoring the national news. Over the years, I’ve spoken with a few of these types. In every case, I’ve gotten the impression they’re sitting on a keg of dynamite. They know how precarious their position is. They’re surprised they’ve lasted as long as they have. Their spouting of liberal homilies is transparent. Where did they go wrong? Answer: the first day they accepted their first job as a reporter. That’s when they sold out. They knew it then, and under cheesy layers of vast pretensions, they still know it now. But they can’t turn around. They’ve made a commitment.
They tell themselves: “It’s business. It’s not personal. This is the business I’m in.”
But of course, it is personal. Everything is personal. We’re talking about lives and minds and souls.
That’s what these reporters traded, in the perverse corner of the marketplace. They chose the rackets, the information mafia, the law of omerta, the dishonorable underground that lives in the highest penthouses.
Whatever gloss they lay on, the trap they’re in stays in place.
And now, they’re sinking and sinking.
I could try to work up pity for them, buy why bother?
Damage is damage, and they’ve done a great deal of it.
A full confession would make a start, but that’s not going to happen.
They’re in a race with themselves. How long can they keep erecting delusions about their work, vs. their growing realization about those delusions?
It’s inescapably personal.
It always was.
The night is falling on them, and the rain is coming down, too. Their mandate is to be on the Inside, but they’re on the Outside now.
They’re the walking dead. They’ll keep walking, but things will never be the same.
As a long addendum, here is a backgrounder, an article I wrote headlined, “Howard Beale, the last sane man on television”:
The best film ever made about television’s war on the population is Paddy Chayefsky’s scorching masterpiece, Network (1976). Yet it stages only a few minutes of on-air television.
The rest of the film is dialogue and monologue about television. Thus you could say that, in this case, word defeats image.
Even when showing what happens on the TV screen, Network bursts forth with lines like these, from newsman Howard Beale, at the end of his rope, on-camera, speaking to his in-studio audience and millions of people in their homes:
“So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Television’s a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business… 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. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God’s name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion.”
Beale, coming apart at the seams, is a mad prophet. And because he shines with brilliance and poetry, he can affect minds. Therefore, the television network can make use of him. It can turn him into a cartoon for the masses.
It is Beale’s language and the passion with which he delivers it that constitutes his dangerous weapon. Therefore, the Network transforms him into a cheap religious figure, whose audience slathers him with absurd adoration.
Television’s enemy is the word. Its currency is image.
Beale breaks through the image and defiles it. He cracks the egg. He stops the picture-flow. He brings back the sound and rhythm of spoken poetry. That is his true transgression against the medium that employs him.
The modern matrix has everything to do with how knowledge is acquired.
Television, in the main, does not attempt to impart knowledge. It strives to give the viewer the impression that he knows something. There is a difference.
Knowledge, once established, is external to, and independent of, the viewer. Whereas the impression of knowing is a feeling, a conviction, a belief the viewer holds, after he has watched moving images on a screen.
Images… plus, of course, in the case of the news, the narrative voice.
A basic premise of New Age thinking is: “everything is (connected to) everything.” This fits quite well with the experience of watching film or video flow.
Example: we see angry crowds on the street of a foreign city. Then young people on their cell phones sitting in an outdoor café. Then the marble lobby of a government building where men in suits are walking, standing in groups talking to each other. Then at night, rockets exploding in the sky. Then armored vehicles moving through a gate into the city. Then clouds of smoke on another street and people running, chased by police.
A flow of consecutive images. The sequence, obviously, has been assembled by a news editor, but most of the viewing audience isn’t aware of that. They’re watching the “interconnected” images and listening to a news anchor tell a story that colors (infects) every image.
Viewers thus believe they know something. Television has imparted that sensation to them. That’s what news is all about: delivering a sensation of knowing to the audience.
There is no convenient place where the ordinary viewing audience can stop the flow of images or the story being told. They are inside it. They don’t have the leverage of a crystalized idea or the power of reasoning to get out.
They are inside the story. Knowledge thus becomes story.
The viewer is transfixed by the sensation that he is “inside” watching/experiencing story.
This fixation produces a short circuit in his reasoning mind (if he has one). No time to stop, no time to think; just watch the flow.
When you take this pattern out to a whole society, you are talking about a dominant method through which “knowledge” is gained.
“Did you see that fantastic video about the Iraq War? It showed that Saddam actually had bioweapons.”
“Really? How did they show that?”
“Well, I don’t exactly remember. But watch it. You’ll see.”
And that’s another feature of the modern acquisition of knowledge: amnesia about details.
The viewer can’t recall key features of what he saw. Or if he can, he can’t describe them, because he was in the flow. He was inside, busy building up his impression of knowing something.
Narrative-visual-television story strips out and discards conceptual references. And lines of reasoning? To the extent they exist, they’re wrapped around and inside the image-flow and the narration.
Ideas aren’t as interesting as images. That’s the premise.
To grasp the diminishment of language, consider the current use of the word “text.” Suddenly it’s become a verb; it means a process of sending words. It also refers to paragraphs or pages of writing, as opposed to pictures. “Text” makes “writing” seem like nothing more than one functional (and machine-like) method of delivering information.
And since bone-dry information (e.g., “genetic sequences”) these days is practically considered a synonym for life, when a writer infuses his words with passion, they automatically become a “rant.” “Rant” was formerly applied to describe what a person did when he was totally unhinged to the point of making no coherent sense.
Image, not the word, is the now preferred means of acquiring what passes for knowledge.
Retired propaganda master, Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), once told me in an interview: “If you wanted to try a real revolution, you would produce thousands of videos consisting of written words on screens, with someone speaking those words. You would try to reinstate language as a medium. Poetry, formal arguments and debates, great speeches, dramatic readings. You would go up against image and try to relegate it to its proper place…”
In the American colonies of the 18th century, several hundred thousand copies of Tom Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, were distributed among a total population of only 2.5 million people, and the earth shook.
When a technology (television) turns into a method of perception, reality is turned inside out. People watch TV through TV eyes.
Mind control is no longer something merely imposed from the outside. It is a matrix of a self-feeding, self-demanding loop. Willing devotees of the image want images, food stamps of the programmed society.
—But now, something is happening. Something different.
It is to be fervently wished that the revolution against major media will also result in a revolution against knowledge as nothing more than image.
(To read about Jon’s collection, Power Outside The Matrix, click here.)
Jon Rappoport
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 emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.
