"Totalised ignorance."

The creeping impotency of language.

The great Sy. Hersh accepting the 2004 Letelier–Moffitt Human Rights Award. (I.P.S., cc by 2.0/ Wikimedia Commons.)

2 MARCH—It has been an eventful few months for American newspapers and network broadcasters and the millions of people who no longer trust them to take up their civic responsibilities in good faith. The Twitter Files, Jeff Gerth’s investigation of mainstream media’s Russiagate coverage, Seymour Hersh’s exposé of the Biden regime’s operation to detonate the Nord Stream I and II pipelines: Three significant developments that tell us a lot about the world we live in and how our corporate-owned media cover the world we live in. 

These reports confront us with matters that can no longer be refuted, dismissed, or elided. There is a certain conclusive finality in them. We are now able to see in the starkest black and white the extent of the corruption and lawlessness that are rampant among institutions that are key to shaping the world we live in. 

As to how mainstream media inform us of the world we live in, there is no longer any avoiding the reality that they don’t. I have just named the three most important news developments of the past three months – and arguably of some years. The major dailies and broadcasters have had nothing to say about any of them; the very few exceptions are those that have resorted to distortion and obfuscation.  

We must now conclude these media have not merely strayed. They have ceased to understand informing us of the world we live in to be their function. Since 2001 – and I will shortly explain why I select this date – media have taken as their purpose the creation of an alternative reality within which the reading and viewing public is to be confined to the fullest extent possible. The intent, shared collaboratively among media and the very institutions they purport to report upon, is to create a condition of totalised ignorance.