"Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it." -Mark Twain

Before we begin, let us dispense with the notion that media has ever existed without opposition. The moment the stories of the tribe became something other than the sharing of information within the community, media was born as a tool of information warfare. That might have been for the purpose of building a leader into a myth, hiding his crimes, or finding a way to more economically manage the slaves and serfs of an empire. For as long as kunlangeta positioned themselves far enough from the ice ledge, they sought the employ of sociopathic liars.

Of course, for lies to work as a tool for social engineering, they must be surrounded by enough truths to make it uneconomical for many people to disentangle the truth from the lies. As such, the media industry has always incorporated substantial numbers of well meaning people sharing reliable information about culture, employment opportunities in the kingdom, current events, and other facts that weave into the technological tapestry of society. As such, the fourth estate has always existed in a kind of equilibrium between opposing forces within the same kingdoms, sometimes serving the purposes of powerful interests, while generally improving the quality of the public.

Over the past few years, that balance has moved into disequilibrium and it is no wonder that the truth tellers have abandoned ship rapidly, in some cases including cleaning themselves of traditional political statuses. In fact, while the media seems to be disintegrating and reconstituting itself, so too do traditional partisan and right-left alliances which themselves might be kept in equilibrium at least partially through the tools of the media. Illusions, illusions.

A few hours ago a friend made me aware of the story of a Houston Fox News reporter, Ivory Hecker, who seems to have fled the Fox family to Project Veritas after releasing tapes suggesting Fox engages in The Chloroquine Wars and The Bitcoin Wars. Hecker:

From the inside: Yes, there is a narrative. Yes, it is unspoken. But if you accidentally step outside the narrative---If you don't sense what that narrative is, and go with it, there will be grave consequences for you.

Hecker makes clear what most educated and reasonable people understand at least in part: the advertisers influence the narrative. So, supporting vaccine profits trumps coverage of inexpensive early treatment.

Why now? What thrust the media into chaos?

I'm not the first to point this out, but the internet changed the media game substantially. Consider the following sources of entertainment that boosted the profits of newspapers, magazines, and television stations that formerly had larger and sometimes even lavish budgets for more serious news items and investigative reporting:

Sports
The funny pages (opening those in elementary school was my gateway drug to the horrors of economics and geopolitics)
Culture and entertainment
The classified ads
Local ads

Today, these cash cows exist as a thin gruel in the face of ESPN, web comics, Netflix, video games, tik tok, Craigslist, and the all consuming Amazon. That is in addition to the ease of news aggregation made popular by curators such as Matt Drudge (whose own site seems more and more dependent on corporate narratives).

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

The budget for truth telling has not been this low in a very long time. As such, the mainstream media competes with the new and highly profitable Big Tech Media to prove its worth suppressing information about cheap effective medicine (take your pick) in order to sell expensive drugs and vaccines, consequences be damned, that have minted many new billionaires amid economic chaos.

Source: Seeking Alpha

Or is making money simply a means to an end. Is all the "pointing at a deer and calling it a horse" something like the corporate plan of funding some of the people as faux-anarchist revolutionaries while baiting the "the people" who have (partially) self-ruled as a democratic enterprise into self-castration?

What can we do about it?

On a level of building better media, you can support a substack like this one through a subscription or promotion of your favorite articles. I am grateful to those who have contributed to an entirely unexpected twist in my career, which is truly far more an enterprise of passion than one of money (I have given up more lucrative enterprises and clients, to be sure). But it is more generally necessary to build your own complete media portal that sidesteps the steering of gatekeepers---even if it comes with a cost. You get what you pay for. While RSS feeds helped many of us economize our time in support of better journalism, I personally look forward to the coming Web 3.0 paradigm, which I plan to write more about at a later time.

Really, any solution likely comes with a far larger paradigm shift. Perhaps that will be Bitcoin ushering the way to a decentralized economic future, in conjunction with the lessened ability to fund governments to do the job of actively misinforming citizens while protecting monopolistic patent rights that stifle innovation.

Let us at least hope a fascist world-state doesn't come first.

Aside from taking an active step in rebuilding your own information consumption as an exercise in mental nutrition, you may have to engage at a level of politics you might be ordinarily uncomfortable with. I do believe we are in the midst of a unique kind of world war because the sociopaths employed by the kunlangeta are overcommitted to their lies. They're all in at a level of mass murder and high treason. That's typically when stability breaks down. The world will quickly need new leaders to pick up the pieces, or the mainstream will devolve more and more quickly into a totalitarian Matrix. You have no choice left but to be the leader that you need, and the new media is whatever you embody.

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What Happened to the Mainstream Media?