Brian Williams, Scott Pelley, and Diane Sawyer: the three stoogesJon Rappoport Its come to our attention that these three characters are as annoying as a bad case of fleas. Caution: watch and listen at your own risk. The three stooges. Three schmucks in the fountain. Send in the clowns, dont bother, theyre here. If people are beginning to get the idea Im waging a war against against elite media, theyre right. At the same time, Im fascinated. How do these anchors do it? How do they lie so consistently, and with such aplomb, day in and day out, without going up in puff of smoke and vanishing? The Big Three anchors are a miracle, in the sense that they need a whole construction company to build the walls that permanently separate them from the truthso they can sit in a television studio in New York and believe theyre in the wheelhouse of Real News. When you see the Big Three are discussing their own footage, but you find visual clues as big as the moon that their analysis is 180 degrees away from actual factas has been happening from Aurora to Sandy Hook to Bostonand the Stooges just sit there and drone onwell, thats a CSI or a LawOrder you just cant get if you pay the best scriptwriters in the world to come up with it. Right, and the Twin Towers went down because two planes flew into them. Because the Web has been alive and humming, media coverage of every major catastrophe since 9/11 has been rejected by extraordinary numbers of people. The elite network anchors have been trying to hold the fort, but theyre failing. Their long-running stage play is closing down. Despite their traditional skills and technological backup, theyre coming across like cartoon hacks. These days, its better to be a marginally believable doofus like Diane Sawyer, who chooses to affect a persona based on depression, than to be the eternal boy wonder, Brian Williams. Williams, the smoothest of the smooth, comes across like the biggest liar, because hes the most dedicated of the lot when it comes to defending the indefensible. And Scott Pelley is Scott Pelley, the hospital doctor youd least like to show up at your bedside. He might tell you you need an amputation just because hes having a bad day. Who do we need for the most important anchors job in the world? How about Pelley? Hes utterly convinced the lies we feed into the propaganda machine are the last word. Hes sold. He couldnt look outside the box if we drilled holes in it and let him see a mountain of gold bars and 50,000 naked bureaucrats running down Broadway at high fucking noon. The Big Three strut their stuff on the evening news, executing well-oiled, high-priced transitions from one completely false/basically deceptive story to another completely false/basically deceptive story. Recall the often-quoted George Burns pearl? In acting, sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, youve got it made. But suppose the sincerity isnt faked? Then, the schmuck becomes king. My late friend and colleague, hypnotherapist Jack True, described the television-news audience: Mind control is accepting what you know to be false. You do it because you think the only other alternative is a vacuum: you either buy the news or youre left with nothing. Once in a while, you can see cracks. Scott Pelley, stewing in his juices, looks like hes ready to pull his uncles old revolver out of his pocket and fire a few rounds at the teleprompter. Diane Sawyer appears to be on the verge of sagging to her right and collapsing out of her chair, on her way to a fit of copious weeping. Brian Williams wants to say, more than anything, Live From New York, its Saturday night! Then a few coiled springs pop out of the top of his head and he winds down and stops moving. Subliminally, the three stooges are announcing: Were showing you the most important stories of our time, and each one has a television lifespan of ninety seconds, after which they no longer exist. Television news is really all segue all the time. Thats what it comes down to. The word segue, pronounced segway, refers to a transition from one thing to another, a blend. Ed McMahon once referred to Johnny Carson as the prince of blends, because Carson could tell a clunker of a joke, step on it three times, and still move to the next joke without losing his audience. Television news is very serious business. A reporter who cant handle segues is dead in the water. Hes a gross liability. The good anchors can take two stories that have no connection whatsoever and create a sense of smooth transition. Brian Williams can say, The planes were recalled later in the afternoon. And a man was castrated in a horrific accident in Idaho today And no one says, WHAT? WAIT! You take an elevator up to the 15th floor in an office building. The door opens and you step into a medieval dungeon. That doesnt compute in real life, but it does on the news. The networks basically have, on a daily basis, fragmented stories, and they need an anchor who can do the blends, the segues, and get away with it, to promote the sense of one continuous flow. So the audience doesnt say, This is just an odd collection of crap. The news is all segue all the time. Not just nationally. On the local level, too. The pounding lead-in music at the top of the show is a segue, to prepare the audience. A) Music. B) Tonight, our top story: a man ate a hot dog and died The voice of the anchor is the non-stop blending machine that ties all news stories together. Thats why the elite network stars earn their paychecks. Good segue people are stage magicians. They can move the viewers attention from item A to item B without a tremor or a doubt. Its often been said of certain actors, He could read from the phone book and youd listen. Well, an elite anchor can hold the viewers mind as he reads a sentence from the phone book, another one from a car-repair manual, a third from a cookbook, and a fourth from a funeral-home brochure. Without stopping. And afterward, the viewer would have no questions. The news is surreal because the stories are mostly fools gold to begin with; and theyre unrelated. Theyre rocks lying around on the floor. The anchor picks them up and invents the illusion of One Flowing Stream. This is what the audience wants. It feels like a story. It feels like unity. It feels like a stage play or a movie. It feels, when all is said and done, good. The anchor (as his title suggests) holds the fragments together in one place. For the audience, hes the focus. Hes the maestro. The hypnotist. You cant pull anyone off the street and have him describe car crashes, murders, storms, threats of war, political squabbles, 300 cats living in a one-room apartment, a new piece of Medicare legislation, genitalia picture tweets, and the dedication of a library, while placing and keeping millions of people in a light trance. Katie Couric couldnt do it. People were waiting for her to break out into an attack of Perky and giggle and cross her legs. Diane Sawyer does it poorly. She seems to be affecting somber personal grief as her basic segue-thread. Scott Pelley is competent, but he sits like a surgeon ready to signal the anesthesiologist to clamp a mask on your face, before he cuts into your stomach. Brian Williams is the current king of segue. He does smooth-serious-affable-employee-of-the-month-I-know-all-the-news-is-true. None of these elite anchors can hold a candle to Cronkite or Chet Huntley, the past masters. Ed Murrow was the first star-practitioner of the television-news form. He was working a kind of sepulchral spin-off of Hemingway prose. Murrow got his first break, right out of college, working for the Institute of International Education, a pathetic front for what they used to call internationalists (aka globalists). Elihu Root founded the organization. Root was also founding chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In other words, one world together actually meant: all you peons down there and we wise men on top Anyway, all anchors can do segue. They are dedicated to The Blend. They put their souls, such as they are, into transitions. What do you want to do when you grow up, Brian? I want to take people from A to B. Whereas, a true version of the news would go something like this: Today, in fact just now, I moved from a tornado in Kansas to the removal of restrictions on condom sales, and Im blending into penguins in Antarctica. Im doing Salvador Dali and youre not noticing a thing. What does all this tell us? The news, if it were taken apart into its component pieces, would look quite surreal. And the anchor, by blending, manufactures a hypnotic illusion of interconnection. The audience wants to be put in a trance. Even a several-day event, like the Boston bombing, with all its twists and turns, doesnt mitigate that basic big sleep. Television news, with a good anchor, with the television screen itself, with the electromagnetic emissions and frequencies, can attain and hold the hypnotic state. Therefore, the content of the news sinks in below the level of the rational mind. But with each shift in story line, with each new breaking bit of revelation, with each disturbing image, the anchor must be there to execute the segues. He is basically saying to the audience, Im a few feet inside your personal landscape, your mind, feeding you all the turns in the river, and Ill always be here, so things are all right Elite anchors invent and maintain certain tones of voice, certain rhythms, certain cadences, certain variations of musical pitch, throughout the stage play, in order to sustain the sense of continuity. Theyre mechanics of voice. They use their skills to report the false facts handed down to conceal ops and staged events. They need to believe in what theyre doing. They need to be that stupid. Talent search: 130 IQ, inherently stupid. They can know theyre actors on television, but they have to believe theyre acting out the truth. Ends justify the means. Of course, truth often means to them: that which will bind us all together. What is the role theyre cast in? Its: Normal. Its a heavy part in the play, because this joke of a society has a prime-cut value called Normal. Okay, look, the Broadway director says to the veteran actor hes interviewing for the lead, in a billion-dollar production. This may sound strange, but youre going to have to do Normal as its never been done before. Thats what the audience wants. Youve got to come across as very, very smart and very, very Normal. Get it? I mean, you can emit a few rays of Elite here and there, but you have to do that Normal dance. The audience has to believe you somehow fit in with being a solid American, whatever the hell that is. You can be the news boy down the street, riding his bike, tossing papers on front porches (Brian Williams), wholesome as Wonder Bread, or you can be a socialite on the Upper East Side teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown (Diane Sawyer), or you can be a doctor moving briskly through his morning hospital rounds telling the interns trailing behind him what incompetent assholes they are (Scott Pelley)but it has to be Normal at the same time. Youre the brain of every other brain. Youre the conscience of every other conscience. Youre just as walled off from the conspiracy to own every inch of America and grind down the people into dust-bowl hell as all Americans are walled off from knowing about it. You know as little as they do. Youre just as clueless as the great unwashed, but you put your stupidity on display with some measure of grace and style. Got it? Youre clean, sanitary, loyal as a dog, dumb as fog but very smart. You spew absolute nonsense every second of your time on stage, but it sounds plausible, and again, Normal. You constantly change subjects, and the subjects are in no way related to each other, but you make it all seem sensible. Its a joke. But youre serious. And you have to Believe, as if youve always believed, from the moment you emerged out of your mothers body. And if you need a model for all this, just watch the news every night on the three major networks and focus on these geniuses. See the bomb exploding, the one that emits a puff of smoke straight up in the air? The one that was built in a pressure cooker? The bomb that didnt tear the flags to pieces and didnt shred the blue canopy right next to it? The bomb that didnt cause the men in yellow jackets standing in front of it to even blink? That bomb vectored at a very low angle and took out peoples legs in the Boston street. That right, America. It did. I swear it did. See the purple and pink pigs flying over the White House? Theyre bringing food from Mars for all the bureaucrats who push paper in the city every day, the people who cant be fired during the Sequester, while flights all over the country are delayed. That food from Mars keeps the paper pushers going. It does. It has special vitamins in it. See how fat the pigs in the sky are? How do you think they got that way? They ate the food. Its so healthy. Its mystical and magical. Its just part of the largesse coming to you from your eternal government. Wait a little while longer. Itll be here. There are lots more flying pigs. Theyll drop off little bags of Martian tasties on your street any week now. Its the new Normal. Get used to it. We know what you want, and were going to give it to you. We know what you want and were going to give it to you. If you have any doubts and need more information and assurance, just watch Brian, Scott, and Diane every night. Theyre narrating the Days of Our Lives. Theyre from Mars. Theyre the advance scouts for the pigs. Brians the happy pig. Dianes the sad pig. Scotts the cold pig. Theyre America. The best of America. This is why the Colonies fought a revolution against the British. So you could suck up stories, like a vacuum cleaner, from the three little pigs. Jon Rappoport is the author of two explosive collections, The Matrix Revealed and Exit From the Matrix, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. 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 www.nomorefakenews.com linkwithin_text=Related Articles: 