Totalised ignorance

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.

Mainstream media no longer informs us

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 for 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.
  After many decades in corporate media, I wrote my first commentaries for an independent publication, Salon back when Salon could be taken seriously, in the spring of 2013. I had concluded some time earlier that nothing more of worth could be accomplished within the mainstream of U.S. media. It was either get out or surrender one’s integrity. If anything, I was late to this judgment.
  But lurking somewhere in your columnist’s obdurately optimistic mind was the thought that a day of reckoning was to come, a day when the lights would go on and some process of recovery or restoration would begin. Publishers, broadcast executives, editors, producers, reporters – they would all come alive once again to the idea that they have a high purpose and must serve it as an independent pole of power.
  No such thought any longer lurks.

Twitter-Gate

Elon Musk, newly in charge at Twitter, began in mid-December to release internal memos revealing in black and white the extent to which the social media platform cooperated with the Federal Bureau of Investigations to censor the accounts of dissidents, those of all stripes who declined to conform to the liberal authoritarian orthodoxy. Lining up the chronology as best I can, my Twitter account, @thefloutist, was permanently blocked last year because it was on one of the lists the FBI routinely gave Twitter when it ordered en masse cancellations.

The Gerth Report on the Russiagate hoax

Of Jeff Gerth’s exposure of the media’s corruption start to finish throughout the Russiagate hoax – a word I do not mind using – I have already written¹ And again, the paying-attention among us knew from the first that the press and broadcasters were collaborating closely with the Democratic Party hierarchy and various government institutions – the national security apparatus, law enforcement, the ObamaWhite House – to create and sustain this corner of the alternate reality I have mentioned. The Gerth report was nonetheless stunning for the finality it bought to the matter.² “It is done,” I said to myself as I finished reading it.

Seymour Hersh’s report on the covert U.S. operation
to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines

The extraordinary detail – the chapter-and-verse, the dollars-and-cents ticktock – of Seymour Hersh’s account of how the Biden regime planned and executed the covert operation to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines with underwater explosives had a similar effect when Hersh published it on Substack several weeks ago.³ To me it was exactly the same as with the Twitter Files and Gerth’s report: Washington’s culpability seemed obvious beforehand, but suddenly it was irrefutable. There was no long any need to speculate or opine.

… and everything is hushed up

It is done, it is done times three. Where does this leave us? Not where we would be were ours a society that is honest with itself.
  No one at the FBI, in the Justice Department, the Biden White House, no former Obama administration official has had anything to say about the Twitter Files revelations. No one in Congress, which relentlessly pressured Twitter and other social media platforms to increase their censorship programs, has felt called upon to comment. The big mainstream dailies and the network news broadcasters haven’t gone anywhere near the Twitter Files. NPR⁴, the only exception I could find, published a pitiful piece putting the Twitter documents down to Musk’s determination to spread “conspiracy theories.” A total absence of seriousness.
  Some time after the Gerth report came out, Glenn Greenwald asked on his ever-active Twitter feed, “Remember 3 weeks ago when Columbia Journalism Review published a scathing 4-part investigative indictment of the corporate media’s serial lying and recklessness that drove Russiagate – written by a Pulitzer-winning NYT reporter – and they all ignored it?”⁵

“They simply sit there, carrying on per usual”

In three weeks one of the great, consequential stories of our time sank beneath the waves of quotidian nonsense and it is a matter of “remembering.” I wondered for years how mainstream media would manage themselves when the truth of the Russiagate ruse finally emerged. I figured they would slip out the side door one or another way. In the event they are not even bothering with the side door: They simply sit there, carrying on per usual with nothing to say, no notion of accountability crossing their minds.
  As to Sy Hersh’s remarkable report, government officials dismiss it out of hand as “false” or “fiction,” and there has been no coverage in mainstream media. This is akin to sweeping a Mack truck⁶ under the carpet.

Seymour Hersh:
“Mainstream American press is now more interested in media gossip”

Hersh distributed a note to subscribers after he published his Nord Stream report that goes nicely to the point. I love the goofball Times reporter he mentions in it. Referring to The New York Times and The Washington Post, Hersh writes:

“Neither paper has run a word at this point about the pipeline story, not even to quote the White House’s denial of my reporting. Similarly, public calls by officials in Russia and China for a full investigation of the pipeline story have been ignored by the US media. (I cannot resist noting that a reporter from the ‘Times’ called me on the day the pipeline story appeared. I told him that I was not doing interviews. He asked if I would entertain one question. I acquiesced. He asked how many publications had I offered the pipeline story before coming to Substack. Such silliness is a sign that the mainstream American press is now more interested in media gossip than in national security or matters of war and peace.)”

Testify, Sy. Tell it like it is.
  We are left to draw conclusions of a new kind – conclusions as stark as the hard evidence Elon Musk, Jeff Gerth, and Sy Hersh have put before us as to the nature of official and media power and how it is exercised.

“The U.S. government is fully
committed to a regime of lawlessness”

One, the U.S. government is fully committed to a regime of lawlessness, internationally and on the domestic side. It is a fundamentally defensive posture and is all the more dangerous for this. I date this to the events of 2001, when the decline of the American imperium could no longer be denied – in private circles if not in public.

U.S. media obscure lawlessness of the government

Two, mainstream American media are equally committed to obscuring this official lawlessness. How else could Washington operate a global empire and simultaneously keep this so effectively hidden from the American public?

“The disinformation industry now
operates with no apparent restraints”

Two A, what we are now calling a disinformation industry has taken shape over the past half-dozen years and now operates with no apparent restraints. At the core of this malign enterprise is the relationship, often unconstitutional, between media companies, notably but not only social media platforms, and various parts of the administrative state. Russiagate was a combination of disinformation, legally actionable lies in the cases of some officials, and omissions. Media’s silence in response to the Hersh report amounts to disinformation by omission.

“Sequestration from the American public”

Three, the American government now operates in a condition of nearly undisturbed sequestration from the American public. American media, while making this possible, at the same time partake of the very same immunity and impunity. Both institutions, the reported upon and the reporting upon, are more secure in their indifference to public opinion than I would ever have thought possible even in our very troubled republic.

Only sheer force now?

Three A, in the matter of impunity, Jeff Gerth published 24,000 words. I have not counted Hersh’s, but Sy, let’s say, is generous when he sits down to write. We must now ask if we have reached that dreadful point in history when naked power, the power of force alone, has stripped language of its own power. To date – and my qualifier is essential – we must face the reality that this is so at least as far as language has any capacity to discipline power and hold to account those who exercise it corruptly.

“The media blackout has been diabolically effective”

Four, the media blackout of the three reports here at issue – and there is no other word for it – has been diabolically effective is keeping the majority of Americans unaware of the events these reports expose. Most of the Russiagate true-believers with whom I am familiar do not even know all they took to be true has been disproven. And if they are not unaware of this, they are indifferent to it. This is the condition I name totalised ignorance.

“The crap on the wall”

Five and last, there is no precedent for our circumstances in American history. Our past cannot be our guide.
  Sy Hersh headlined his letter to subscribers this morning “The Crap on the Wall,” after a denigrating remark a government official made about his coverage, and ended it with this admonition: “Stay tuned. We are only on first base …”
  Indeed.  •

¹ https://consortiumnews.com/2023/02/07/patrick-lawrence-the-press-reckoning-on-russiagate/
² https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-ed-note.php
³ https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream;
⁴ National Public Radio (NPR) a cooperative of non-commercial radio stations in the U.S. whose stations are legally and financially independent
⁵ https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1625595631413633045
⁶ Mack Trucks: a US commercial vehicle manufacturer; known primarily for heavy-duty trucks for long-haul trucking and construction with a reputation for producing rugged vehicles

* Patrick Lawrence is a writer, commentator, a longtime newspaper and magazine correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the “International Herald Tribune”. He is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer and writes often on Europe and Asia. Patrick Lawrence has published five books; his most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His new book The Journalists and Their Shadows will be published shortly by Clarity Press. His Twitter account @thefloutist has been permanently censored without explanation. His web site is patricklawrence.us. Support his work via his Patreon site patreon.com/thefloutist.