Caitlin Johnstone
[Caitlin Johnstone just keeps
getting better and better. --vanishingmediator]
15 August, 2019
The ridiculous
corporate media freakout over Senator Bernie Sanders’ entirely
legitimate accusations of pro-establishment bias continues today, with shrill,
absurd new headlines like “Sanders campaign
continues attacks on journalists” and “Bernie
Sanders isn’t sorry” featuring hysterical MSM drama queens rending their
garments over the suggestion that plutocrat-owned media outlets could be
favorable to the plutocrat-owned establishment.
In response to this cartoonish
display of billionaire-sponsored performance art, The Hill‘s Krystal Ball
and Saagar Enjati aired a segment on their online show Rising which
is as damning an exposé on the dynamics of mass media empire propaganda as
we are ever likely to witness. With startling frankness and honesty, the pair
disclose their experience with the way anyone who is critical of the
establishment consensus is excluded from mainstream media platforms, as well as
the way access journalism, financial incentives, prestige incentives and peer
pressure are used to herd mainstream reporters into toeing the establishment
line once they’re in.
I strongly urge you to watch the eight-minute
segment for yourself, but I’ll be transcribing parts of it as well for
those who prefer reading, as well as for posterity, because it really is that
historically significant. I will surely be referring back to this segment in my
arguments about plutocratic media bias for years to come, because it confirms
and validates everything that analysts like Noam
Chomsky have been saying about mass media
propaganda like nothing else I’ve ever seen. Status quo
propaganda is
the underlying root of all our problems, and Ball and Enjati have gifted us
with an invaluable tool for understanding and attacking it.
After laying out the evidence
from some recent examples of bias against Sanders in the mainstream media,
former MSNBC reporter Krystal Ball (yes, her real name) asked
rhetorically, “Now the question is why?”
“Look, obviously I’ve worked
in this industry for a minute at this point and journalists aren’t bad people,
in fact, they’re some of my closest friends and favorite people,” Ball said.
“But they are people, they’re human beings who respond to their own
self-interest, incentives and group think. So it’s not like there’s typically
some edict coming down from the top saying ‘Be mean to Bernie’, but there are
tremendous blind spots. I would argue the most egregious have to do with
class. And there are certain pressures too — to stay in good with the
establishment [and] to maintain the access that is the life blood of political
journalism. So what do I mean? Let me give an example from my own career since
everything I’m saying here really frankly applies to me too.”
“Back in early 2015 at MSNBC I
did a monologue that some of you may have seen pretty much begging Hillary
Clinton not to run,” Ball continued. “I said her elite ties were out of step
with the party and the country, that if she ran she would likely be the nominee
and would then go on to lose. No one censored me, I was allowed to say it,
but afterwards the Clinton people called and complained to the MSNBC top brass
and threatened not to provide any access during the upcoming campaign. I was
told that I could still say what I wanted, but I would have to get
any Clinton-related commentary cleared with the president of the
network. Now being a human interested in maintaining my job, I’m certain I
did less critical Clinton commentary after that than I maybe otherwise would
have.”
“Every journalist at every
outlet knows what they can say and do freely and what’s going to be a little
stickier,” Ball said. “No one is ever going to have their anti-Bernie pieces
called in to question since he stands outside the system. Their invites to the
DC establishment world are not going to be revoked, and may even be heightened
by negative Bernie coverage. “
“Back in the run up to 2016 I
wanted to cover the negotiations on TPP more,” Ball disclosed a bit later. “I
was told though, in no uncertain terms that no one cared about trade and it
didn’t rate. To be clear, this was not based on data but on gut feeling and gut
feeling that had to influenced by one’s personal experience mixing and mingling
with upscale denizens of Manhattan. I didn’t really push it; maybe they were
right. Of course TPP and trade turned out to be one of the most central
issues in the entire 2016 election. It turns out that people did, in fact,
care. Now this class bias translates into bad coverage of candidates with
working class appeal, and it translates to under-coverage of issues that are
vitally important to the working class.”
Many journalists - either for
self-serving reasons or due to genuine befuddlement - are completely
misinterpreting Bernie's media critique. The person who explained it most
clearly was Noam Chomsky in this 90-second answer to an equally confused BBC
host. This will clear it up:
Ball’s co-host Saagar Enjati
went on to describe his own similar experiences as a White House correspondent.
“This is something that a lot
of people don’t understand,” Enjati said. “It’s not necessarily that somebody
tells you how to do your coverage, it’s that if you were to do your coverage
that way, you would not be hired at that institution. So it’s like if you do
not already fit within this framework, then the system is designed to not give
you a voice. And if you necessarily did do that, all of the incentive
structures around your pay, around your promotion, around your colleagues that
are slapping you on the back, that would all disappear. So it’s a system of
reinforcement, which makes it so that you wouldn’t go down that path in the
first place.”
“I’ve definitely noticed this
in the White House press corps, which is a massive bias to ask questions that
make everybody else in the room happy, AKA Mueller questions,” Enjati
continued. “Guess what the American people don’t care about? Mueller. So when you
ask a question–I’ve had this happen to me all the time. I would ask a question
about North Korea, like, you know, war and nuclear weapons that affect
billions. Or I would ask about the Supreme Court, the number one issue why
Trump voters voted for President Trump, and I would get accused of toadying to
the administration or not asking what Jim Acosta or whomever wanted me to ask.
It’s like, you know, everybody plays to their peers, they don’t actually play
to the people they’re supposed to cover, and that’s part of the problem.”
“Right, and again, it’s not
necessarily intentional,” Ball added. “It’s that those are the people that
you’re surrounded with, so there becomes a group-think. And look, you are aware
of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what you’re going to be punished
for, or not rewarded for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether you
want it to or not, that’s a reality.”
“Every time I took that
message to ask Trump a question, I knew that my Twitter messages were going to
blow up from MSNBC or Ken Dilanian or whomever for ‘toadying’ up to the
administration, and it takes a lot to be able to withstand that,” Enjeti
concluded.
As we just discussed
the other day, Ken Dilanian is literally a known CIA asset. This is not a
conspiracy theory, it’s a well-documented and historically undeniable fact, as
shown in
this Intercept article titled “The CIA’s Mop-Up Man”. The
testimony that Dilanian’s establishment sycophancy affects not just his own
reporting but those of other reporters as well via strategically placed peer
pressure is highly significant.
For obvious reasons these
insider confessions are as rare as hen’s teeth, so we must absorb them,
circulate them, and never forget them. I’m still floored and fall-to-my-knees
grateful to Ball and Enjati for putting this information out there for the sake
of the common good. Our task is now to use the information they provided to
help wake
people up from the narrative control matrix.
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