It’s All Infowars: A Brief Review of the News Industry
On August 6th, YouTube finally banned alt-right charlatan Alex Jones and his conspiracy-peddling vlog Infowars. This long overdue decision sent the mainstream pundit coterie into an ecstatic frenzy. Finally, the dangerous calumny of Jones and his fake news had been stopped and now true, noble reporting could fill the void left behind. Despite the fact that Infowars was basically a chain of memes that a mostly invisible grouping of extremely online white men paid attention to, the paranoiac programming of Jones was considered by the agitable media class to be a grave public ailment and apparently an existential threat to the sanctity of our great Republic.
In reality, Infowars was a scapegoat. Don’t get me wrong. Alex Jones is bad and his brand of commodified delusion that has directly incited white supremacist violence needed to be purged, but his project of misinformation was a minuscule fraction of the spurious narratives produced by the propaganda machine that is Western capitalist journalism. It’s more convenient for reporters and pundits to place the stigma of falsehood onto Jones then reckon with the distortions and class antagonisms of their professions.
According to Jean-Francois Lyotard, “knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided? In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government.” In America, the press has always been regarded as a fourth branch of the state, an institution that checks the power of the other branches by insisting on transparency for the concerned citizen. This is a rose-tinted depiction that has very little historical support. To claim that the news industry is a government watchdog is to deny the unambiguous objectives of social conditioning mass media has long been utilized to achieve. Since Trump’s ascendency, “Fake news” has become an utterance that induces recoil in journalists, but this is ridiculous posturing. Broadcasts and opinion sections have always been a useful apparatus of bourgeois power, a tool of disinfo delegated to television and the newspapers to repress class-consciousness, justify imperialism, and desensitize workers to the horrors of capital.
CNN, The New York Times, Fox News, etc etc. These are the dominant entities of public discourse that have normalized perpetual war, legitimized white nationalism as a valid political ideology, and furthered myths about the supposed impossibilities of social welfares. I could list more despicable assignments deemed dignified newsgathering, but my point is clear, The News™, be it national syndications or local operations, is equal parts a racket for the overclass and a printing press for the State Department. Unlike the ludicrous science fiction of Infowars, these corporations have evidently disaffected the world.
The capitalist state and its machinery of knowledge fluidly coordinate with each other. Historian Michael Parenti discusses the cooperation of mass media and the government, and its imperious goals, in his work, Inventing Reality:
“In the 1970s, with funds from the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Advertising Council launched campaigns to educate Americans about the blessings of private enterprise and the evils of inflation. Some 13 million booklets, distributed to schools, workplaces, and communities and reprinted in newspapers across the nation, informed readers that only they could whip inflation and make the system work better by themselves working harder, producing more, and shopping smarter. The anti-inflation campaign, reaching some 70 million Americans, listed government regulation as the primary cause of inflation. The solution was to keep the lid on wages and prices and roll back regulations. The Ad Council’s campaign seemed to have an effect on public opinion. In 1975, 22 percent of those polled thought there was too much government regulation; by 1979, 50 percent; and in 1980, 60 percent. By the 1980 electoral campaign, “deregulation” had become a widespread, ready-made theme utilized to advantage by presidential candidate Ronald Reagan.”
Considering Americans find self-actualization in our iPads, it doesn’t take an unfathomable amount of investment to design what everyone comes to believe is fact. With just 5% of his net worth and a whim, Jeff Bezos could decisively shift the public opinion on whatever topic he desired and also bankroll any major politician content with being his lackey. The phrase “controlled press” connotes a dystopian (and for many uninformed people, a Soviet) image, but it’s important to remember, we are currently living in said dystopia.
Hurrah. Infowars has been removed from its main platform. Now we are left with the pressing question of how we are going to address a significantly more massive and formidable media leviathan.
As detestable as Alex Jones is, it’s not like his ideology would be out of place in a GE boardroom or the House of Representatives. Coke-fueled ranting aside, his calls for deregulation, union-busting, and a multiplicity of other GOP policies would cozily fit into the Washington Post’s editorial page. Reptiloid conspiracies are maybe .005% of the falsities that are beamed into our eyes daily. While broadcasters are cheering on the dissolution of Infowars, they also are gladly spewing out rationalizations for invading North Korea, or equating Antifa activists with literal nazis. Fake News isn’t a social malady endemic to Infowars, and Breitbart, and the like, it’s the foundation of all popular American media.
When Donald Trump declares that journalists are the enemy of the people, he’s unintentionally asserting a partial truth. The press is undeniably a necessary institution when contemplating an idealized polity; however, we don’t exist in the abstract. As previously noted, American media has been consolidated into six companies dictated by a covey of tycoons. These hyperwealthy bosses have a fundamental incentive to serve the capitalist state by managing the public’s perceptions and understandings, which in turn ensures the stability of the political structure and the further accumulation of their wealth. These CEOs, and their peons below, are most assuredly enemies of the working class. Of course, when Trump attacks newscasters, he is merely pouting at MSNBC for detailing his child concentration camps, a fact that his cult of gnarling troglodytes will never apprehend.
So, it’s all a lot of fake news, or more accurately, headlines biased towards promoting the machinations of capital. This assessment could come off as a nihilistic motive to just remove oneself from the political sphere, but on the contrary, it’s a call to be dutifully wary of the accounts directed at us by the omnipresence of reactionary media. Yes, it’s pertinent to periodically read the New York Times, honestly it’s inescapable, but foster a personal skepticism and don’t rely on the alleged verities of CNN reporters. They are serving forces that seek to maintain our contentment with immiseration.
One final thought on the consumption of news media, a succinct rule of thumb offered by Malcolm X; “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
