This is not quite a transcript, but it is more of a summary of the audio. Substack provides transcripts of the audios that are not too bad. Also, you can turn on closed captions while listening to it by using Google’s Chrome browser and turning on Live Captioning (under “Settings” and “Accessibility”). You can also select any part of the transcript and Substack will play that sound clip. I am continually amazed at how these kinds of technologies are progressing. This is decidedly a less formal way of presenting my work, and we will see if people find it helpful.
I plan to make many audio posts about the subjects that I write about. This will be on my media studies. I memorized the books that my parents read to me soon after I could walk. I was a bookworm by age eight and won my school’s spelling bee when I was nine, which was also the age when I began reading the daily newspaper. Little did I know that I was being brainwashed by it. But the brainwashing came from many directions, such as the “history” that I was taught. I won the first spelling bee at that grade school, which I now know was named for the Hitler of California, who was literally sainted in 2015. Christopher Columbus and George Washington were also presented to me as heroes. I never knew any differently until after my first stint with Dennis Lee, after I had been radicalized.
I learned about eating healthily at age 12 and had my first paranormal experiences at age 16. While those were critical events in my awakening process, I had so far to go and that journey never ends. I left home at age 21 for the university, and there I “graduated” to reading the Los Angeles Times each day. When I began my career in LA, I also subscribed to Christian Science Monitor, thinking that was getting something a little more thoughtful and in-depth. I still had a lot to learn.
I stopped watching TV at age 18 when the shock of college hit me, and during the next 15 years I only watched it when I hung out with roommates who were watching it, but it was background chatter that I mostly ignored. To this day, I almost never see any traditional TV, and it is pretty disgusting when I do, largely to watch the stray sporting event. Mainstream TV news is all propaganda, from whatever political stripe it issues from. Although I began tamely questioning my indoctrination after college, it took my journey with Dennis Lee to really awaken me. That process began on the day that I met him, when he spoke at the Seattle Center in front of a thousand people and several camera crews. A week after that, I saw the only positive TV coverage that I ever saw Dennis receive, from a Canadian TV station. A week after that, a Seattle station ran a clip, which I eventually learned was slanderous.
When I became Dennis’s partner in Boston and we put on our first shows, a small local paper had positive articles on us, and it was the only time that I ever saw an American mainstream newspaper report positively on Dennis. The big media in Boston ignored us, while New England’s electric companies had secret meetings to decide what to do about us, which led to Dennis’s audience with New England’s most powerful electric executive, while the global elite got involved. I am sure that the press in Boston would have become very negative if we had stayed longer, as the officials were sharpening their axes.
When we moved to my home town of Ventura, I was about to get the media education of my life, which began the day after the raid. Every article about us in the local paper, the one that I began reading at age nine, was libelous, at least until a reporter was subpoenaed during the prosecutorial misconduct hearings, when I saw him write his first accurate article. He knew how to write accurate articles, but that was not his job. The LA Times was similarly libelous, and in February, 1989, after reading its “investigative” report on Dennis for an hour, I said to myself: “They can simply make it up as they go.” Those were the newspapers that I grew up reading, and perhaps the impact on me was greater because of that.
In early 1990, during the misconduct hearings, one day while driving to my job in a medical lab, which was subjected to a similar government/media attack, to try to put us out of business, on a talk radio show, on about the only station that the radio in my Pinto wagon could pick up, I heard somebody promote a new magazine named Lies of Our Times (LOOT). By that time, I was very ready for its message, and later that year, after I moved away to Ohio, I began subscribing to it. I subscribed to it for several years, until it went out of business, but the first page of the first issue is the one that I remember best, as the New York Times simply made it up as it went along in “translating” Arabic script. I doubt that Goebbels went that far.
I first heard of Noam Chomsky from a roommate when Dennis was in jail, and Noam authored an article each month in LOOT, which had an editor, Edward S. Herman, who also contributed at least one article a month. I grew to love Ed’s writing, which reflected keen intelligence, integrity, and a wonderful, dry wit. I soon learned who those guys were, and in 1992, there was a documentary on Noam’s life that briefly featured Ed. Like how Dennis’s only positive TV coverage was in Canada, that documentary was the most popular documentary in Canadian history to its time, but it has never aired on a mainstream TV show in the USA. That kind of says it all about the USA’s mainstream media. Watching that documentary drove me from my sleep soon afterward to write a 17-page letter to Noam, which began a brief correspondence.
When LOOT went out of business in 1994, I subscribed to Z Magazine, in which Ed wrote a monthly article, and Noam was regularly featured in it. By the year 2000, I had read most of Ed’s books since the late 1970s, and saw him as my Uncle Ed. I first contacted Ed in 2001, our correspondence lasted to his death in 2017, and I became his first and so far only biographer. Ed even signed an email or two to me as “Uncle Ed,” to my lasting amusement. I got a regular dose of Ed’s work for 27 years, and I learned more about why the media works like it does from him than anybody else. I even encountered Ed’s academic work in college.
Nearly 40 years after he first proposed it, Ed’s Propaganda Model has never been credibly critiqued by anybody who sought to invalidate it. Ed’s Propaganda Model was the basis of his last book that he co-authored with Noam, titled Manufacturing Consent, and it is the most famous book that either wrote. Ed’s last words published in his lifetime were, “The Propaganda Model lives on.” Ed’s Propaganda Model will be relevant as long as there is a capitalist media.
I have read several dozen books on the media, at minimum, since I first read LOOT, and thousands of articles. In the end, the media’s performance is just another example of my lifetime’s primary lesson, which is complemented by Brian O’Leary’s question of whether humanity is a sentient species. I believe that those ideas explain the media and many other situations. In a world of scarcity and fear, these outcomes for the social animals called humans become highly predictable. Every day, I read the media’s outrageous articles, as it has become all propaganda all the time. Internet censorship reached unprecedented levels in recent years, with the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
As I look back at my life, that was quite a journey, from my cradle to now, on the issue of information. With my scientific and accounting backgrounds, with their focus on hard facts, it was initially disorienting to see how far from the physical reality the media strayed, but I eventually learned that it was far from isolated, and science and accounting were subjected to similar corrupting influences. As long as we have a world based on scarcity and fear, these dynamics will persist. I have a way to end this world of scarcity and fear, if I can find the people who can help, and time is very short.
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