America’s Quasi-Totalitarian News Media

by Lawrence Auster

It is well known that, when one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.

— George Washington, on the pro-Jacobin press of the 1790s

A major force in the demoralizing of America is the electronic news media. Unfortunately, like most conservative complaints about liberalism, the constant right-wing gripes about “media bias” tend to be superficial and ineffective.  Ineffective, because they can be refuted by many trivial examples of the media’s “balanced” treatment of an issue; and superficial, because the problem of liberal media control is far deeper than the term “bias” suggests.  What conservatives call “bias” is not just an unfair tilt in favor of liberals and against conservatives.  Rather, it is the systematic construction of an alienist version of reality, and the suppression of all facts and opinions that contradict it.  This process of mass indoctrination has become so pervasive that no one, even conservatives, clearly sees it as such.

To gain a correct understanding of the nature of media mind control, we need to drop our comforting image of America as a “free country” and instead see the American people as a vast, inert mass, surrounded and penetrated by the mass media in much the same way that a spider embraces and poisons its helpless prey.  While the injection of the liberal world view into the body politic is continuous, and therefore hardly noticed most of the time, the news media periodically engages in an especially intense propaganda campaign, constructing a false reality that permanently reshapes public attitudes.  It is in these special campaigns that the quasi-totalitarian essence of the dominant liberal media–and of modern democracy itself–can be best understood.

Two well-known examples from recent history will give an idea of what I mean.

For an entire year between the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers and their acquittal by a California jury in 1992, every television station in the country daily repeated, sometimes several times in a single broadcast, the famous videotape of the beating in which King is seen lying helpless on the ground as the officers repeatedly hit him.  So traumatized was the public by these images that when the officers’ acquittal at the first trial set off a major race riot, many whites, including President Bush and other public officials, felt that the riot was understandable.

In fact, the tape which the public had seen so many hundreds of times was a lie, since it showed only the worst several seconds of the beating and not the entire situation that had led up to it.  There was an early sequence on the tape in which King, a large, powerfully built man, is seen bounding energetically off the ground and leaping at one of the officers, who knocks him to the ground again.  I only saw this segment of the tape because Rush Limbaugh played it–once–on his late-night tv program.  To understand the unlimited power of the major news media to shape our perceptions, imagine that the image of King attacking the policeman had been shown as frequently as the image of King being beaten as he lay on the ground.  The public’s entire view of the incident–and of “racism” in America–would have been entirely different.

Thus the news media constructed a false reality, which became America’s common reality.  The inevitable result, when the officers were acquitted, was a devastating riot, the permanant demoralization of the Los Angeles police, the encouragement of black and Hispanic criminals and of black rage generally, a further indictment of the “racism” of white America, and the further erosion of whites’ moral capacity to resist minority intimidation.

When Los Angeles detective Mark Fuhrman’s boastful comments to an aspiring screenwriter about how he had beat and mistreated black suspects were revealed at the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1995, the image of Fuhrman as the ultimate white racist was sealed in the American psyche.  In all its coverage, the media automatically assumed that Fuhrman had actually done the things he had told the screenwriter about, even though no complaints for such behavior had ever been brought against him.

Indeed, the readily ascertainable fact that there had been no charges and no evidence against Fuhrman was never mentioned by the media.  His name simply became a symbol of white evil.  Even the chief prosecutor at the Simpson murder trial told the jury that “Mark Fuhrman is the worst,” and that “there is no room on this planet for people like Mark Fuhrman.”  More than anything else, it was the view of Fuhrman as a monstrous race-hater, as a man who would have eagerly planted evidence to frame a black man, that justified Simpson’s outrageous acquittal in the minds of blacks and white liberals.

It was not until many months after the trial that the truth finally came out.  As reported in the New York Times, a thorough official investigation had been unable to uncover a single complaint against Fuhrman for brutality or anti-black behavior.  In fact, the Times conceded, Fuhrman was in many ways an exemplary police officer.  But this one news article, which received virtually no play in the electronic media, could not undo the effects of the mass propaganda campaign that had preceded it.  Thus the media got to eat its cake and have it.  Having forever branded Mark Fuhrman (through a mass witch hunt) as the worst racist in America, the media could nevertheless claim that they had (in one news article) stated the truth about Fuhrman and exculpated him.  Therefore the media are not “biased”!

Under quasi-totalitarianism, the truth is not totally suppressed (as it is under Communism), but it is so obscured by the mass of lies that is constantly being generated by the dominant media that it can have no meaningful effect on political reality.  Another point worth noting is that it is the media’s capacity to generate emotions–particularly outrage, indignation, and guilt–that is the key to the controlling and shaping of the public mind.  The affectless recital of the truth that cleared Fuhrman was no match for the intense outpouring of fictions that smeared him.

[Further examples I could add:  Church burnings story in 1996. 1996 Texaco surrender to discrimination suit.  1996 Army sex scandal.  Media ignoring black on white violance.  Michigan attack on white youths, May 1997.  Colin Ferguson:  the world tells him whites are evil, and he commits racial mass murder, then the media downplays the racial motive and calls Ferguson’s act “unfathomable”].

The totalist media control over the American mind is not, of course, limited to issues of race.  But whatever the issue, the media exercises this all-embracing control in promoting the alienist view of the world, in presenting facts that support that view, and suppressing facts that contradict it.

To sum up:

(1) The media, the most powerful institution in American life, systematically broadcasts lies, mainly about white “oppressors.”
(2) The media uses quasi-totalitarian methods to promote those lies.
(3) Those lies and that method are aimed at further destroying America’s European-based culture.
(4) Conservatives believe that this campaign of cultural destruction is nothing more than a matter of “bias,” which they imagine can be fixed by adding more “balance” and “fairness” to the proceedings.

The conservatives don’t see, and don’t want to see (because that would mean recognizing that America is no longer a free country worth “conserving”), that the media bias, and the dominant culture of which it is a part, is totalitarian.

— Comments —-

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

In my favorite episode of The X-Files, “José Chung’s From Outer Space,” Agent Mulder, in a brief epilogue, begs Mr. Chung (Charles Nelson Reilly) not to publish his non-fiction science fiction novel about an alien abduction that he and Agent Scully have recently investigated.  Mulder worries that by casting the investigation in a comical-skeptical light, Chung will, wittingly or not, serve the evil interests of “the military-industrial-entertainment complex.”

The line is meant to underscore Agent Mulder’s moderate conspiracy-paranoia, which might or might not be justified.  Whether writers Chris Carter and David Duchovny (who plays Mulder) meant the line as absurd or not (it riffs a coinage of Dwight Eisenhower’s), it strikes me that the phrase “military-industrial-entertainment complex” is perfectly appropriate to our present afflicted condition.  I am therefore in favor of adopting it.

In my own life I have distanced myself as much as I can from the military-industrial-entertainment complex, especially that element of it that calls itself “The News.”  I can honestly say that I have hardly read a newspaper for decades and that I have put television “news” out of my life rigorously for at least ten years.  I have also deliberately whittled down my magazine subscriptions.  I do not claim not to know what is going on.  In a media and “news” saturated environment, information, usually dubious, filters down to everyone.

Nevertheless, I have come to believe that the only purposes of “the news” are those that Lawrence Auster cited in his succinct article – and to agitate people and so prevent them from actually thinking about events and situations.  Reading newspapers and watching “the news” are simply forms of ritual submission to the military-industrial-entertainment complex, which Christians and other sane people should shun like an outbreak of Ebola.

Paul writes:

Professor Bertonneau coined a phrase—military-industrial-entertainment complex—that embodies truth. Let me suggest some tweaking: militant-entertainment complex, MECX. Pun intended.

Notice what the militants have been doing to these victims: Ferguson, Missouri; Israel; Jews; critics of Islam (e.g., Ben Affleck as a liberal militant who bases his defense of Islam on the “codified” version of Islam, not actions and the hate repeatedly spewed by its hateful founder, Muhammad); the weird but innocent Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case; the NRA; men; Catholics mostly but also other Christians; and Christmas. This is a short list. It attacks anybody who disagrees with the liberal religion.

James P. writes:

Prof. Bertonneau coins the phrase, “military-industrial-entertainment complex”.

The phrase is not apt because Hollywood and the news media are enemies of the military and enemies of industry (notwithstanding the inane Leftist claim that media and entertainment outlets serve capitalism because they are corporations and often belong to even larger ones).

It would be better to speak of the lawyer-lobbyist-media-elected official-civil servant complex. They are the ones who are in league with each other to our detriment.

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