The following is the text of my talk last month at Anarchpulco. The video of the speech will be released in the next few months.
Show of hands: How many of you, in your journey to anarchism, decided the media played a huge role in shaping public opinion and in driving people toward statism and blind obedience?
[My expectation was that most of the room would raise their hands; they did. :) ]
Same.
Edward Bernays, whose first claim to fame was crafting war propaganda for Woodrow Wilson’s venture into World War One, said, “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.” This propaganda has been been manipulating public opinion for a very long time. The media has long been infiltrated by CIA agents and often simply parrots what government agencies say without any true push to question (unless, that is, it’s a partisan-specific issue with Donald Trump). According to former New York Times journalist Tim Weiner, who wrote a comprehensive history of the agency:
“[Alan ]Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the nation’s leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time’s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek’s man in Tokyo.”
The media is complicit in perpetuating war, the false dichotomy of the two-party system, statism at large, and the perpetual distractions that keep people’s focus off the state’s violence and corruption:
The media outright lies, which is even documented by mainstream outlets. They manipulate reality to serve the state’s agenda. Take for example, one Reuters article whose headline claimed North Korea was unwilling to negotiate with the U.S. The article itself, however, quoted a North Korean official as saying they were unwilling to budge as long as the U.S. continued its war games. That seems like a pretty big caveat to leave out of the main title, and omitting it creates a completely different, false reality.
But many of you guys already know all this, and it’s why many of you correctly distrust the media. I’m not here to talk about that.
The growth of independent media and its similarities to the mainstream
The current media paradigm is why the emergence of independent media has been so exciting. We’ve seen new narratives emerge that fiercely question the status quo and the legitimacy of institutional staples like war, corporatism, and the state itself. We’ve seen amazing reporters with organizations like Ford Fischer’s News2Share and Unicorn Riot on the ground, directly delivering what’s happening to social media users via livestream. Ben Swann, who spoke earlier today, is a literal trailblazer and perfect example of the power and threat of fiercely independent investigative journalism.
The internet has completely freed us and made so much information available to us, giving all the journalists and news organizations listed above opportunities to thrive and reach people directly. People are able to access it themselves.
But as many wake up to the destructive nature of the state and the role the established media plays in engineering consent, unfortunately, old statist habits are coming with them into the paradigm.
A popular phrase in truth-seeking circles is “Do your own research!” But unfortunately, to at least some of the people who utter it, this usually means...fFnd an alternative saying something other than the mainstream is and that indicts the establishment and share it on facebook in all caps, scolding your non-engaged friends statist for being sheep.
While we seek truth in the world and away from the statist paradigm, empowering ourselves along the way, in the field of alternative media, we have given away our personal authority and entrusted it to outlets that are not always fully invested in perpetuating vetted truth.
It’s still absolutely true that the mainstream media has gone off the rails with its claims of fake news. They were so hysterical after the election that Anti-Media ended up on a list of useful idiots for Russian propaganda from an anonymous organization cited in a report the Washington Post eventually half-heartedly retracted.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t actual fake news in independent media. I’m in these circles every day, and almost every day I see misinformation if not outright disinformation.
In some cases, consumers of independent media believe the same types of reporting they reject as propaganda from the mainstream. For example, when anonymous CIA agents were allegedly telling the Washington Post and New York Times that Russia hacked the election, many of us knew better. We knew that you can’t just say a secret government agent who refuses to be named said something and perpetuate it as infallible fact. But then that exact same crowd — the one that knew better than to trust an anonymous government source — had no issue with an Alex Jones article about the Vegas shooting citing… you guessed it… an anonymous government source.
In another example, imagine MSNBC citing Voice of America, a U.S.-government-funded source. We’d scoff at it. But many independent outlets routinely cite Sputnik and RT, both funded by the Russian government, and few question it. This doesn’t mean everything they publish is false, but similarly, not everything VOA publishes is a lie, either. As anarchists, it shouldn’t matter which government is pumping money into news; governments are funding it. Skepticism is required, case closed.
Statist tendencies in independent media
Therein lies the biggest problem I see in independent media, both among those who produce it and those who consume it: While many of us have broken away from our subservience to the system, we retain some of our deeping programming of blindly believing what we are told.
Before I go any further, I want to say that I don’t think this is all inherently a bad thing. I think the fact that people are inclined to trust wholeheartedly without assuming deceit and bad intentions is actually a sign of the beauty of the human race. Why would we assume people are lying to us — especially from people who claim to be arbiters of truth?
Being trusting is a good thing, but it has been grossly exploited by mainstream institutions — public education discourages dissent while encouraging obedience while politicians and agencies from the military to the CIA to the FBI and DHS lie blatantly to the public. However inherently good our intentions and trust may be, statism would never survive without people sacrificing their own authority to believe what “authorities” tell them — and believing it without question.
This inherently statist belief is bleeding over into our attempts to throw off our shackles in the age of decentralized information.
I can’t tell you how many viral articles I’ve seen with misleading headlines that manipulate the actual story in order to get clicks (or out of sincere misguidedness). I recall one story that claimed an official report proved the U.S. was intentionally arming ISIS, but upon reading the cited report in full, it was clear said no such thing. That article got thousands of shares. In another example, a meme allegedly quoting George Orwell’s 1984 alluded to people being glued to their screens. This is a great quote, and it was shared tens of thousands of times across various pages and platforms, but the quote actually came from a play version of the book put on in the year 1984.
You might be thinking… Why does this matter? We all know the U.S. government is responsible for ISIS, and the sentiment of that Orwell-attributed quote is accurate, so who cares if some of the details don’t add up?
For one, this kind of carelessness turns off an unquantifiable number of people who might be open to the message but see all kinds of factual inaccuracies and discount independent media altogether because it’s just as misleading as the mainstream.
Further (and more important to me, at least), this apathy toward reality and fact-checking is also pervasive in people’s rationalizations for statism. They refuse to reject lies they hear from the media and politicians, all so they can justify their beliefs — we saw this with WMD in Iraq and see it now with Russiagate.
To me, this is not self-empowerment. It is not independent thinking. It is not holding people accountable or creating a paradigm for truly free thought. Statism isn’t just not believing in government — it’s taking responsibility for yourself and your own consciousness.
Intentions matter
This isn’t to say that the people producing misleading articles in independent media are all ill-intentioned. To the contrary. Based on what I’ve seen in these circles, most (not all, but most) people mean very well and truly want to make a difference but are simply not being as scrutinizing as they should be when spreading articles to literally millions of people.
I’ve done this myself. In one example, when I first became active — like, the first few months — I was sharing Prison Planet articles without ever thinking anything of fact-checking or confirming sources. I just assumed what I read was true.
Then, once I began working with Anti-Media, I covered a huge story. HUGE in my mind, at least. There had been a massive nuclear accident in 1957 near where I grew up, and the authorities covered it up and kept it from nearby residents. People have been getting sick with rare cancers for decades since. Of course, the corporatist companies, the Department of Energy, and the federal agencies in charge of clean up had completely failed, and to this day they have not provided adequate solutions.
I dove into that story and wrote a two-part piece about it, and when I went to write a third, I emailed a professor who had conducted studies on the contaminated soil. I sent him the article, thanked him for his efforts, and awaited a friendly, if not complimentary reply. Instead, he emailed me back eviscerating me for misinterpreting his research. I said all cancers had increased by a certain rate. In truth, it was certain cancers. It was a careless mistake, and I made sure to issue a correction (it turned out I had made another error, as well, which I also noted).
I was so devastated and ashamed I couldn’t write for two weeks, and that’s when I realized not only how important being meticulous about facts are, but that the truth is bad enough — as producers of independent media we don’t need to sensationalize it. We do need to make sure it is truly well-researched.
That being said, there absolutely are bad-intentioned outlets. Neon Nettle does not give a flying f*ck. They literally said Lady Gaga exposed a British royal as a lizard person and didn’t even provide proof of her saying it (I checked; if anyone has that video or audio, please let me know, and I’ll retract my condemnation of Neon Nettle).
It’s on the consumers
At the end of the day, we can’t put this all on those who run independent media. As Edward Bernays said, “The truth is that while it appears to be forming the public opinion on fundamental matters, the press is often conforming to it.”
We’re here at this conference, at least in part, because we believe in the power of the individual and of free people and markets to create a far more just, peaceful, and valuable society than statism ever could. That means we have to be accountable to ourselves and the information we put into our brains, and we also have to hold outlets accountable. We can’t just be passive subservients who take what we’re spoon-fed. That’s a statist tendency.
If a company has terrible practices, we stop doing business with them. If they don’t live up to our standards, we disassociate. We have to do the same with independent media outlets.
If we keep clicking their articles with misleading headlines and sharing content with false information, we are giving them an incentive to continue bad journalistic practices.
We are already on the right path to unadulterated critical thought, and we just need a little more discernment to get that final push away from the statism of blind belief.
Tips for identifying unreliable news
- Read the entire article and then see if it matches up to the headline.
- Check the sources; watch the videos they are embedding and claiming to be quoting
- Check the sourcing on those sources; sometimes there is a loop where a few outlets all source each other but none provides any actual evidence to back up the claims; they often just rely on an anonymous source.
- Read the reports they’re citing, or at the very least, do a page search on the quotes they’re alleging come from those reports.
When you find wrong information, call those outlets out! Email their editors. I have personally received emails schooling me on certain things. When we (at Anti-Media, at least) get our facts wrong, we correct them and acknowledge it (I actually learned the need for this from an interview with @BenSwann years ago).
If they don’t respond and don’t issue corrections, call them out publicly. Call them out on their social media pages and in the comments, but also be sure you can back up what you’re saying and prove they’re wrong.
Once you’ve identified shady outlets, stop clicking and sharing their articles!
Financially support new organizations that are honest, even if it’s just a dollar a month on platforms like Patreon. Help them get the resources they need to dig deeper. If you don’t have anything to give, like their pages and share their content to help increase their visibility.
Freedom is hard
I’ll be honest. All of this is kind of a pain in the ass. It’s a lot easier to see an article or headline or meme, be pissed off about how screwed up the world is, and share it with a lecture for the caption without ever confirming the validity of the claims.
To be more scrutinizing requires more even-mindedness, more work, and more effort, but so does being independent of statism. True freedom requires more work emotionally, materially, and in just about every other way — besides the absolute energy drain and exhaustion of being a subservient cog in a violent machine.
But that’s why we choose freedom, and with our free minds, independent media, and the continuing revolution that is the internet and decentralization, we all have the power to change the paradigm.
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