The Mass Media Will Never Regain The Publicās Trust

Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond
From Venezuela and made by Venezuelan Chavistas
By Caitlin Johnstone – Apr 26, 2021
This year hasĀ marked the first time everĀ that trust in news media dropped below fifty percent in the United States, continuing a trend of decline thatās been ongoing for years.
Mass media punditry is divided on where to assign the blame for the plummet in public opinion of their work, with someĀ blaming it on RussiaĀ and othersĀ blaming it on Donald Trump. Others, like a recentĀ ForbesĀ article titled āRestoring Public Trust In Technology And Media Is Infrastructure Investmentā blame it on the internet. Still others, like aĀ Washington PostĀ article earlier this month titled āBad news for journalists: The public doesnāt share our valuesā blame it on the people themselves.
The one thing they all seem to agree on is that itās definitely not because theĀ billionaire-controlled mediaĀ areĀ propaganda outletsĀ whichĀ manipulate us constantlyĀ inĀ conjunction with sociopathic government agenciesĀ toĀ protect the oligarchic, imperialist status quoĀ upon which the members of the billionaire class have built their respective kingdoms. It cannot possibly be because people sense that they are being lied to and are fed up with it.
And actually it doesnāt ultimately matter what mainstream pundits and reporters believe is the cause of the publicās growing disgust with them, because thereās nothing they can do to fix it anyway. The mass media will never regain the publicās trust.
Theyāll never regain the publicās trust for a couple of reasons, the first of which is because theyāll never be able to become trustworthy. At no point will the mass media ever begin wowing the public with its journalistic integrity and causing people to re-evaluate their opinion of mainstream news reporters. At no point will peopleās disdain for these outlets ever cease to be reinforced and confirmed by the manipulative and deceitful behaviors which caused that disdain in the first place.
A propaganda outlet will never be anything other than a propaganda outlet. A lot of half-awake people with one eye open and one eye closed will notice how the news media donāt practice journalism and donāt report the facts, and theyāll assume that something went wrong at some point. āJust do your jobs and report the news!ā theyāll shout in frustration.
But nothing has gone wrong, and they are doing their jobs. They are doing their jobs extremely well.
Telling the mass media to ājust do their jobsā and report the news is like bursting into a shoe factory yelling āJust do your jobs and start manufacturing dentures!ā Their job is not to report the news, their job is to manipulate public perception for the benefit of the media-owning class. And toward that end theyāve been immensely successful.
Thereās no point admonishing the mainstream press for the publicās plummeting trust in it, because a thing that has only ever existed to administer propaganda canāt suddenly become journalism. Itās like yelling at a rock for not being a tree.
The mass media are completely and utterly irredeemable, and always have been. Itās a waste of energy to try and get plutocratic propaganda institutions to suddenly begin doing journalism; thatās not what theyāre for. Instead, our energy is better spent teaching people to stop seeing them as journalistic outlets.
RELATED CONTENT: Today, Defense of The Revolution Rests with the Media
The other reason the mass media will never regain the publicās trust is that humanityās relationship with narrative is evolving too far beyond the level that once saw Americans gathered around the television listening with Bambi-eyed faith to the words of Walter Cronkite. That level of widespread blind credulity in the official stories of the day will never again exist.
Our old relationship with narrativeĀ is crumbling, and peopleās old ways of understanding whatās going on in the world just arenāt holding together anymore.
As cold war tensions with Russia and China continue to mount while the US-centralized empire fights with increasing desperation to retain its dominance, weāre seeing propaganda hit white noise saturation levels to such an extent that weāll likely soon find out how aggressively the collective consciousness can be pummelled with mass-scale psyops before it snaps.
America just went through four years with a president whose words had no relationship with facts or reality, and who made no attempt to pretend otherwise.
The mainstream public is becoming increasingly aware of the widespread nature of disinformation and propaganda.
Deepfake technology means we soon wonāt even be able to trust video anymore.
Ordinary people are hurting financially while Wall Street is booming, a glaring plot hole in the story of the economy thatās only getting more pronounced.
There are numerous different narratives about Covid-19 and the government responses to it running parallel to each other with everyone still to this day absolutely certain that their position is the only correct one.
The entire media class is acting stranger and stranger, now routinely reporting bogus stories en masse like theĀ Russian collusion narrativeĀ orĀ the āBountygateā narrativeĀ and then simply acting like itās no big deal when those stories theyād fed us with such urgency are completely discredited.
RELATED CONTENT: The CIA Used to Infiltrate the Media. Now the CIA is the Media.
Now weāre evenĀ seeing headlines about UFOsĀ in esteemed mainstream publications, not justĀ onceĀ butĀ regularly, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.
You canāt twist and shove the collective consciousness around like that without something snapping. Without people beginning to look at the thoughts in their heads with suspicion and beginning to question their sense of reality. Without people wondering ifĀ everything they believe is a lie.
Narrative Is Crumbling
"We are now, as a species, collectively squeezing ourselves out of our old unhealthy relationship with narrative."https://t.co/iYK2oC7YXf
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) July 26, 2020
Weāve been seeing signs that humanity is moving into a new relationship with narrative for some time now as people learn across all sectors of society that so many of the seemingly solid rules we once took so seriously are just empty thought fluff that we are free to rewrite at any time.
Atheism and secularism, once fringe positions, are now mainstream as people have discovered that they donāt need to allow their lives to be controlled by words written by long-dead men in far off lands from cultural and historical contexts which have no relevance to our own circumstances.
People are beginning to recognize thatĀ money is made upĀ and we can collectively change the rules of how it works whenever we want, with the rising popularity of both socialism and cryptocurrencies capturing the public imagination of whatās possible.
People are beginning to understand that what we call gender is a large network of conceptual constructs which we have overlaid upon human anatomy, and that we are free to disregard and re-author those conceptual constructs if that feels right to us.
People are beginning to understand that romantic relationships donāt need to look the way theyāve been modeled for us across the centuries, with unmarried, same-sex, polyamorous, or other relationship models also being perfectly acceptable options.
People are beginning to understand that āfamilyā doesnāt need to refer to people to whom we are related by blood, with the concept ofĀ chosen familyĀ gaining in popularity.
People are beginning to understand that the failed drug war is an immoral abuse and that we should be allowed to experiment with our own consciousness using whatever substances we see fit.
These are all signs of a growing awareness that the āHow It Isā narratives weāve been fed by culture do not have the concrete reality to them that we once assumed they did. Weāre beginning to see them as what they are: stories. Stories that we are free to ignore or re-write to whatever extent we find useful.
For propagandists whose manipulations depend on their targets imbuing their narratives with a great degree of significance, this recent development is very problematic. If a How It Is narrative isnāt taken seriously, it canāt be used to manipulate the way people think, behave, and vote. And this seriousness is exactly what weāre seeing deteriorate in humanityās relationship with narrative.
This could end up being a very, very good thing. All human destructiveness is ultimately caused by our taking thought seriously instead of simply using it as the tool itās meant to be and setting it down when weāre done with it; look at any manifestation of human self-destructiveness, no matter how large or how small, and youāll find a belief being taken too seriously underlying it. This shift in our relationship with narrative could end up being what saves us from our self-destructive patterns as a species.
But it wonāt lend itself to trust in the mainstream media. This too would be a very good thing.
Featured image: File Photo
Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerrilla poet. Utopia prepper.