Beware the Media-Industrial Complex

President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about the military industrial complex at his farewell speech.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Indeed, this is as true today as it was in 1961. We failed to adequately heed his warning and this disastrous rise of misplaced power threatens Democracy itself. It infected our trusted media institutions to such a degree that the public no longer trusts them.

Profit motive drives progress in capitalist economies. We normally expect news companies to compete in this market by delivering the latest news in the most innovative ways. This works if readers are willing to pay for content. I suspect that people reading are generally unwilling to pay for news content, so news companies make money from advertising.

This creates a perverse market incentive to deliver advertising propaganda instead of news. It encourages media to suppress bad news about their advertisers and report good news. It encourages partisan party politics. It encourages spectacle over informative content. Generally neutral points of view were one of the first things out the window.

A particularly blatant example I recall was a story on 60 minutes several years ago about General Motors and Lee Iaccocca. It was basically a one-hour advertisement for the company and it paid off too, as they were doing well for a time. Unfortunately for CBS, nothing will ever restore my confidence in that news source.

News may not be reported when advertisers pressure media companies. Several stories about Round-Up and cancer risks were suppressed by Monsanto. Monsanto has paid out $11 billion in nearly 100,000 lawsuits and somehow most people have never heard the story.

Independent media used to be a virtue. Sometime in the early 2000s this changed and the narrative changed to, "News outlets are supposed to be biased."

This is just simply false. To put it into leftie terms, "gaslighting". They made this up to justify actions that they know are wrong. They think they can make this claim and expect us to believe it.

The claim falls flat and the action damages their integrity regardless. The claim is rejected as untrustworthy because the source is untrustworthy. There is no universe in which biased reporting is better than unbiased reporting.

Grab some popcorn and watch MSNBC and Fox News? I have better things to do.

Sensationalized media is another problem. The Occupy Wall Street protest could have been a very popular mainstream movement. Everyone was sick of Wall Street shenanigans back then just as much as they are now. As soon as you throw a couple of clowns in the mix, the entire story becomes about them.

The entire story about the backroom deal President Obama made with Wall Street was mostly dropped. The American Public suffered the result, including the people who should have but didn't write those stories. Where do people go when they aren't getting the story from mainstream media?

They head to Independent Media. The wild west of information. You may get something deep, or you may get a conspiracy theory. Nobody knows. Independent media has bright spots like shining beacons of truth in a sea of propaganda. It also has very dark places producing thinly-disguised totalitarian propaganda.

Independent media have an advantage in not being beholden to advertising interests. It allows them to cover topics that the mainstream media cannot. Their relative obscurity makes them less likely to be sued, but also incentivizes them to print libelous material.

We were taught to trust mainstream media outlets in school. The justification was that these outlets are trustworthy. Unfortunately, the government propaganda disagrees with observed reality. This causes the population to mistrust the government.

When a trusted media source breaks the news covenant it is a permanent loss of trust. The only way to restore trust is to build integrity. You cannot restore integrity when the public refuses to watch your content for fear of propaganda and lack of validation methods to determine otherwise.

I would be curious to see the latest polling data on government and media trust. My prediction is a hockey stick pointing down and for good reason.