Watching Major Media Commit Suicide: Notes On The End Of The News Business As We Know ItBy Jon Rappoport This article goes to many places. I think youll find a place that works for you. Ive been investigating and reporting on deep medical fraud for 29 years. Ive been around the block a few hundred times. Ive spoken with scientists who work for the government and universities, and the media operatives who support them. I know the game. If Robert F Kennedy Jr is, indeed, given the green light by President Trump to investigate vaccine safety, hes going to need a truck and a chain and DOJ threats of prosecution to drag key CDC scientists into the light and elicit specific statements from them. Even then, the odds are these scientists will keep repeating the party line: vaccines are overwhelmingly safe; they have no connection to autism or other neurological damage; the science is settled. Kennedy could run up against an organized wall of silencescientists refusing to speak with him, on the basis that he isnt qualified to make judgements in their field. In that case, he will need subpoena power, for starters. Many years ago, I interviewed Jim Warner, a White House policy analyst in the Reagan administration. He had been trying to obtain medical-research information from the federal National Institutes of Health. He told me he was given the absolute cold shoulder: If ever Ive been tempted to believe in socialism, science has disabused me of that. These guys [at NIH] assume that its their show. They just assume it. Arrogance par excellence. Scientists rebuff the White House with a yawn. Fortunately, Kennedy is a relentless investigator. He understands how science is corrupted and paid for. And the ace in the deck is this: there is already enough evidence in the open record to refute the CDCs claim of vaccine safety. Trump has blazed a trail of rejecting major media. As a result of his merciless attacks, press outlets are going mad pushing numerous outlandish fake stories. Theyre ripe for further incursions on their territory. In the past, this was the pattern: an outsider enters the scene and accuses the government of vast fraud; media operators assemble their usual cast of sordid characters, who dismiss the charges; everybody goes home and the story dies. But thats not working anymore. Media pomposity is exposed as fakery. Millions of people see through the ruse. The media emperor is naked. He can prance around and around, but his fundamental nakedness keeps compounding the joke. Truth be told, as their financial positions sink into dire red ink, press operations are trapped. Why? Because they are partners with the high-level criminals whose activities are the very stories the public wants to know about. Reporting on these crimes in great depth, day after day, would resuscitate the newspapers and broadcast networks. But that will never happen. For example, these crimes: And a hundred more issues. Expose these down to the core, and people would buy newspapers off the rack like they buy coffee and beer and video games and cell phones and gasoline and underwear and toilet paper and lipstick and fast food. The Times would have to schedule extra press runs just to keep up with the demand. Its financial bottom line would soon look like Christmas. You could talk to the publisher of the New York Times and present him with an ironclad plan for pulling his paper out of its deep financial hole, based on covering true stories like those above, and you would find no joy, because he would rather go down with the ship than go up against the Matrix. The Times and other hoary media outlets live by the rule of limited hangout. In intelligence parlance, that means admitting a small piece of the truth in order to hide the rest. Well show you a tree in the forest, but not the forest. I know how it works, because as a reporter Ive been there. Ive approached editors of various media outlets with stories that crack the trance, and Ive had those stories tossed back at me. Were just not interested, they say. This isnt our kind of piece. Or: Well, we already covered that. But they didnt cover it. They did a limited hangout on it. They ran a story that exposed one tiny corner of a whole bloody mess. I say thisas simple factif any intelligent, aggressive, truly independent investigator were the managing editor of the New York Times, and if he were given free rein, he would have that paper back in the black in a year. He would have it roaring on all cylinders. He would have people fighting each other in the streets to grab the last copy off the newsstand. Journalism schools all over the country would close down in shame. Because he would be running stories that would crack the whole rotting edifice of cartel-control along many fronts, and he would be filling up a planned vacuum of truth with fire. A decade ago, here is what a working reporter for a major paper told me: We know what stories we cant cover. Nobody needs to prep us. Our editors know, too. Otherwise, theyd never get to be editors. A player in a non-profit group once told me I could have a job with a paper on the east coast. In a roundabout way, he hinted at what they were looking for. In five minutes, I saw the handwriting on the wall. Essentially, the editor was searching for a reporter who would cover politics in Central America. The stories would have to favor the repressive governments in power. The basic cover was: these leaders were fighting the good fight against Communism. The death squads they were sending out, in cooperation with the CIA, were freedom fighters. And of course, any mention of cocaine trafficking as a means for obtaining weapons was off-limits. None of this was spelled out. But the message was clear. They wanted a propaganda specialist. If I, as an up and coming reporter, decided to play ball, I could advance up the ladder. Apparently, some travel was necessary. But I knew I could turn out reams of copy without ever leaving my apartment, because I grasped the fundamental angle I was supposed to pursue. Needless to say, I turned down the offer. It was the first time I fully realized how easy the job of reporting could be. Assemble a list of reliable sources (who would support the mandatory point of view), walk right into a prepared group of corporate and think-tank allies, pull down copy from wire services, and re-write stories in a way that bolstered the idea that American Empire was really spreading democracy to the less fortunate. A walk in the park. Twenty years later, I saw the same overall pattern in hundreds of major-media storiesbut the point of view and the mandate had changed. Now it was all about Globalism. The covert op was the takedown of America, in order to squash the last vestige of political freedom and integrate the nation in a new economic order. However, over the mountains, a new dawn was rising: the Internet. Independent media outlets. The resistance. It was immediately obvious that, unless someone could shut this new creature down, major media would have no way to challenge the invasion. Independent news sources would gradually wreck MSM financial bottom lines. Fronting for Globalist princes, Big News would see their bias exposed time and time again. The blowback on them would be enormous. Trapped and corned like rats, they would attack, but their efforts would only compound their problem. Then a populist named Donald Trump strolled on to the scene. He knew major media were suffering great losses. He knew online media were in the ascendance. He had people like Steve Bannon (Breitbart) who were bringing him up to speed. He saw how Matt Drudge was obliterating traditional news sources, even while (selectively) linking to them. A revolution was in progress. Trump had the right stuff for this situation, because he didnt care about offending people. He was mercurial, reckless; an opportunist. He could fly by the seat of his pants. He realized where and how, in America, the Globalists were causing great damage. Trump accelerated the fall of major media from their thrones. People around the world, untold millions, thought to themselves, Trump is finally giving major media what they deserve. Giving the major media what they deserve is a force to be reckoned with, because there is no effective response to it. Nothing works. Who can lead the fight to preserve mainstream news? Answer: mainstream news. That isnt going to go anywhere, because more and more people are rejecting the mainstream wholesale. Think of major media as a ship. In full view of the passengers, the captain has just steered it into a shore of high rocks. The craft is beginning to tilt, and its taking on water. As the passengers scramble to safety on the beach, the captain is yelling, Dont leave, come back, everything is all right, I didnt do anything wrong, its your fault, youre too stupid to understand the correct principles of navigation! Translation: Im committing suicide. Go down with me. As a reporter starting out in the 1980s, one of my first glimpses of trouble involved a few of the papers I was writing for: they were definitely on the political Left, but at the same time they were businesses. You only had to look at the ads choking the pages to see that. They were capitalist enterprises. But they would never fully admit that. They were operating under a self-induced, self-serving delusion about fundamental economics. Eventually, larger publishers bought them out, and a few of the old guard made significant dollars on the deals. It was an old story about socialists getting rich. This contradiction plagues every major media outlet today. They claim to serve the public interest, but they want to be rich. Their reporters want very nice salaries. And this is all in the service of Globalism, which aims to bankrupt economies and drive populations into the arms of technocrat planners of societies. It doesnt add up. It doesnt work. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be rich and working hard to achieve it. But claiming, at the same time, that you want the government to run the economy is a sick joke. A transparently sick joke, on the order of wealthy celebrities stumping for socialism, while they hire more armed security and dig bunkers on their walled properties. Suppose you could approach a well-known and well-paid reporter for the New York Times. And suppose you said this: For years, youve been writing about the less fortunate and giving back and more government support for the downtrodden and humanitarianism and so onso I want to know, would you be willing to donate two-thirds of your salary, for the sake of equality, to those who need the money? Would you be willing to sell your co-op and give the money to the poor and move into a small apartment? The duplicitous and slimy major media are obviously engaged in a long con. They want their cake, they want to eat it, and they also want to appear as architects of a more humane planet. They care about a more humane order in the same way an ant cares about space travel. They care about serving their bosses, and those bosses have other bosses who are engineering a future of poverty for all, as a mechanism of control. Thats whos paying reporters their salaries. Do you know what a tired rich media liberal (fake socialist) looks like? Of course you do. You can see one every night anchoring the national news. Over the years, Ive spoken with a few of these types. In every case, Ive gotten the impression theyre sitting on a keg of dynamite. They know how precarious their position is. Theyre surprised theyve lasted as long as they have. Their spouting of liberal homilies is transparent. Where did they go wrong? Answer: the first day they accepted their first job as a reporter. Thats when they sold out. They knew it then, and under cheesy layers of vast pretensions, they still know it now. But they cant turn around. Theyve made a commitment. They tell themselves: Its business. Its not personal. This is the business Im in. But of course, it is personal. Everything is personal. Were talking about lives and minds and souls. Thats what these reporters traded, in the perverse corner of the marketplace. They chose the rackets, the information mafia, the law of omerta, the dishonorable underground that lives in the highest penthouses. Whatever gloss they lay on, the trap theyre in stays in place. And now, theyre sinking and sinking. I could try to work up pity for them, buy why bother? Damage is damage, and theyve done a great deal of it. A full confession would make a start, but thats not going to happen. Theyre in a race with themselves. How long can they keep erecting delusions about their work, vs. their growing realization about those delusions? Its inescapably personal. It always was. The night is falling on them, and the rain is coming down, too. Their mandate is to be on the Inside, but theyre on the Outside now. Theyre the walking dead. Theyll keep walking, but things will never be the same. As a long addendum, here is a backgrounder, an article I wrote headlined, Howard Beale, the last sane man on television: The best film ever made about televisions war on the population is Paddy Chayefskys scorching masterpiece, Network(1976). Yet it stages only a few minutes of on-air television. The rest of the film is dialogue and monologue about television. Thus you could say that, in this case, word defeats image. Even when showing what happens on the TV screen, Network bursts forth with lines like these, from newsman Howard Beale, at the end of his rope, on-camera, speaking to his in-studio audience and millions of people in their homes: So, you listen to me. Listen to me! Television is not the truth. Televisions a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. Were in the boredom-killing business We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. Were all you know. Youre beginning to believe the illusions were spinning here. Youre beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In Gods name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion. Beale, coming apart at the seams, is a mad prophet. And because he shines with brilliance and poetry, he can affect minds. Therefore, the television network can make use of him. It can turn him into a cartoon for the masses. It is Beales language and the passion with which he delivers it that constitutes his dangerous weapon. Therefore, the Network transforms him into a cheap religious figure, whose audience slathers him with absurd adoration. Televisions enemy is the word. Its currency is image. Beale breaks through the image and defiles it. He cracks the egg. He stops the picture-flow. He brings back the sound and rhythm of spoken poetry. That is his true transgression against the medium that employs him. The modern matrix has everything to do with how knowledge is acquired. Television, in the main, does not attempt to impart knowledge. It strives to give the viewer the impression that he knows something. There is a difference. Knowledge, once established, is external to, and independent of, the viewer. Whereas the impression of knowing is a feeling, a conviction, a belief the viewer holds, after he has watched moving images on a screen. Images plus, of course, in the case of the news, the narrative voice. A basic premise of New Age thinking is: everything is (connected to) everything. This fits quite well with the experience of watching film or video flow. Example: we see angry crowds on the street of a foreign city. Then young people on their cell phones sitting in an outdoor caf. Then the marble lobby of a government building where men in suits are walking, standing in groups talking to each other. Then at night, rockets exploding in the sky. Then armored vehicles moving through a gate into the city. Then clouds of smoke on another street and people running, chased by police. A flow of consecutive images. The sequence, obviously, has been assembled by a news editor, but most of the viewing audience isnt aware of that. Theyre watching the interconnected images and listening to a news anchor tell a story that colors (infects) every image. Viewers thus believe they know something. Television has imparted that sensation to them. Thats what news is all about: delivering a sensation of knowing to the audience. There is no convenient place where the ordinary viewing audience can stop the flow of images or the story being told. They are inside it. They dont have the leverage of a crystallized idea or the power of reasoning to get out. They are inside the story. Knowledge thus becomes story. The viewer is transfixed by the sensation that he is inside watching/experiencing story. This fixation produces a short circuit in his reasoning mind (if he has one). No time to stop, no time to think; just watch the flow. When you take this pattern out to a whole society, you are talking about a dominant method through which knowledge is gained. Did you see that fantastic video about the Iraq War? It showed that Saddam actually had bioweapons. Really? How did they show that? Well, I dont exactly remember. But watch it. Youll see. And thats another feature of the modern acquisition of knowledge: amnesia about details. The viewer cant recall key features of what he saw. Or if he can, he cant describe them, because he was in the flow. He was inside, busy building up his impression of knowing something. Narrative-visual-television story strips out and discards conceptual references. And lines of reasoning? To the extent they exist, theyre wrapped around and inside the image-flow and the narration. Ideas arent as interesting as images. Thats the premise. To grasp the diminishment of language, consider the current use of the word text. Suddenly its become a verb; it means a process of sending words. It also refers to paragraphs or pages of writing, as opposed to pictures. Text makes writing seem like nothing more than one functional (and machine-like) method of delivering information. And since bone-dry information (e.g., genetic sequences) these days is practically considered a synonym for life, when a writer infuses his words with passion, they automatically become a rant. Rant was formerly applied to describe what a person did when he was totally unhinged to the point of making no coherent sense. Image, not the word, is the now preferred means of acquiring what passes for knowledge. Retired propaganda master, Ellis Medavoy (pseudonym), once told me in an interview: If you wanted to try a real revolution, you would produce thousands of videos consisting of written words on screens, with someone speaking those words. You would try to reinstate language as a medium. Poetry, formal arguments and debates, great speeches, dramatic readings. You would go up against image and try to relegate it to its proper place In the American colonies of the 18th century, several hundred thousand copies of Tom Paines pamphlet, Common Sense, were distributed among a total population of only 2.5 million people, and the earth shook. When a technology (television) turns into a method of perception, reality is turned inside out. People watch TV through TV eyes. Mind control is no longer something merely imposed from the outside. It is a matrix of a self-feeding, self-demanding loop. Willing devotees of the image want images, food stamps of the programmed society. But now, something is happening. Something different. It is to be fervently wished that the revolution against major media will also result in a revolution against knowledge as nothing more than image. The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine. Image Credit Media is morphing from being controlled by a small elite to decentralized independent researchers and reporters. This is happening because the major MSM corporate lobbyists coerced Congress into removing such things as the Fairness Doctrine. Subsequent to that ideological windfall, all restrictions on truth-telling where abolished. This allowed MSM to dig whatever deep holes they wanted to without liability and now theyre falling on their swords, right into the graves they dug for themselves. Slay the beast support decentralized independent media in whatever ways you can. I wish I could share your optimism, but Im afraid corporate propaganda will continue to dominate. There are a few independent voices on the fringes, but the vast majority of the news on the web is controlled opposition. Ed Snowden, the Intercept, and that old fraud Chomsky provide the thrilling alternative while Colbert and Maher serve the naughty. All of them fall right in line when it matters, so we will never see a realistic presentation of the events of 911, Obamas forged birth certificate will soon be forgotten and there will be American footprints on the moon for generations to come. The Denver Post is a typical libtard paper being pushed out with, oh so subtle, yet articles that deflect independence and push the hive mentality.Left good right bad. I refuse to indulge in that paradigm. BTW: Jon Rappoport you are da man. Are we allowed to post links to videos here or not? Im going to stop coming here because you mislead the commenter into believing their post, with linked videos, is waiting to be approved and then you remove the comment. There was nothing wrong with the video I posted, it was information sharing in which this site is apparently opposed to. Later days information suppressors! That is one of the best articles on the mainstream media I have read in a long time. thank you for this. keep up the good fight The LSM Presstitutes can continue to wear their purple revolution uniforms and spew their talking points propaganda all they want. They have made themselves irrelevant. The oligarch-owners have already invested in their replacements by buying AI computers to write their fictional stories of the future. The Fifth Column will be lined up at the unemployment office. After all the campaign to label alternative sites as fake news, it has fallen back on the doorstep of the mainstream media. The lies go on but are people as drawn in by it? I love Rappoports writing. It flows so smoothly from one idea or point made to the next that one is hardly aware of the ground laid out by Rappoport that they are covering. Brilliant writer that we are so fortunate that he had the moral fiber to make the right decision he writes of here so many years ago. Can you imagine if he was writing for those opposing the Resustance? I havent had the stomach to watch television news for about five years and it was waning long before that. I give full credit to those that do and then report back on the misdirection or out right lies being told through that medium. Ive had mistrust of the printed media for far longer as I used to but I.F. Stones weekly when in high school, if I could scrap together the bus fare and purchase price to retrieve it from a downtown socialist used book store in the seedy section of the city. Another great article among many written by J.R.. Major Media outlets have been doing the same thing for many years. i remember in the 1980s the major networks reported on the epidemic of random freeway shootings around LA. i was stationed in in Alexandria, VA at the time. There were 5 times as many shootings around the Beltway (I-495) during the same period in the Spring that year. The major networks never mentioned it. Today, it is the same. If a story does not fit their agenda, it is not reported. For instance, after the election, CNN did not mention the members off the MLK family who met with and all praised Donald Trump. Media outlets do claim they have already covered stories. What passes for coverage these days is akin to a report on the Titanic that says People left Europe and people arrived in New York. And now for our next story. . Jon, I have tons of respect for you and all your knowledge. But there are a few aspects you are not taking into consideration here. Trump has a personal engagement in the vaccine lies b/c obviously something is wrong with his 11 yr old son, judging from the boys body movements during the inauguration. A parents power can move the mountains! 1. Never underestimate a parent. 2. Never underestimate Trump. 3. Look at all the things we thought impossible, yet they happened: We live in an unpredictable world! I would not be surprised if Trump, once all his appointed ppl get approved and are in place, he declares Martial Law, rounds up the criminal vaccine and chemical industry/Monsanto etc and puts them in prison or FEMA camps and takes down all the worthless 3 letter gov agencies. You dont think this could happen? I think anything can happen! I was born and raised in the former East Europe. My relatives lost all their businesses when the country was taken over by communists and all private property nationalized overnight. There was a satire theater in Prague and I remember one funny sketch where a factory owner talks to Death which is predicting that the rich guy will be robbed of his business. The man says no, no, you are wrong, a thief can steal my wallet but how could anyone carry away my factory building? The Death laughs. Well said, Jon. 