Some readers might be surprised that I write that I know the energy and medical rackets better than I do the media racket, but I was far later in coming to the media racket, however much I have studied it since 1990. I can’t overemphasize the learning experience that I had at the scholarly knees of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. One of the greatest privileges and duties of my life was becoming Ed’s biographer. That was a labor of love. Ed developed his Propaganda Model as a consequence of studying corporate power structures.
Ed might not agree with my characterization of the media as a racket, and oh, how I wish that he was here to discuss that idea. Although Ed never denied that there was elite “conspiratorial” manipulation of the media, he argued that it was not needed to explain media performance. As I have written about the energy and medical rackets, few members of those rackets really understand what kind of rackets they are. I have stated that the organized suppression of free energy is at least 90% structural. The same goes for the suppression of alternative cancer treatments, for instance.
What we have seen with COVID in recent years was almost all structural. There are people at the tops of the rackets who know full well what they are doing (some even have hit teams), such as in the vaccine racket, but the vast majority of what happens can be ascribed to low integrity, naïveté, herd behaviors, people’s just doing their jobs in a system with perverse incentives, and other factors, such as those that Google’s AI recently came up with in Steve Kirsch’s article: cognitive dissonance, mass formation psychosis, and emotional barriers. I have long stated that becoming a sentient species is not easy, my astronaut colleague openly wondered if we are, and it is a fair question.
While Ed’s Propaganda Model aptly described the influences that shape what the media produces, as I see it, one of the media’s key functions is enabling the other rackets. I saw it happen in energy, by our treatment alone, before I ever heard of Ed, and my medical-lab employer got similar media treatment. I was primed by my real-world experiences for Ed and Noam’s work.
On the other rackets, Ed and Noam devoted a great deal of effort to show how the media were war cheerleaders, and covered for the empire as it committed genocides and other atrocities across the planet. Ed wrote about how big banks helped rape poor nations, the media’s role was never far from Ed’s mind, and in his professional life, taking on banks was one of his favorite activities. Ed and Noam wrote about the CIA’s activities, including its propaganda function. The military and intelligence community have an outsized influence on Hollywood, as the media serves the spooks well.
One of Ed and Noam’s themes on the American media was how it enabled the American Empire. Noam argued that the Propaganda Model was only a special case of the constraints that all intellectuals in capitalist societies are faced with, as power is behind the prevailing intellectual wind in such societies. Noam also took it back to the Old Testament and the “prophets” that essentially criticized the powerful, and dissidents such as Socrates suffered fates that disobedient intellectuals often faced.
The only one of the seven cartels identified as controlling the world economy for which media enablement could be credibly challenged is for organized religion. If that is the case, I see it as the gradual obsolescence of organized religion in industrial societies. Organized religion is not as powerful for social control as it was during the agrarian (AKA “Third”) Epoch, especially after the rise of civilization. However, the ringleader of the global elite may well be the Mormon financial empire, and they were probably involved with wiping out our companies. So, maybe organized religion is not as marginal as it may seem, and the Mormon media attacked Dennis Lee, and libelously.
While the media’s enablement role with organized religion could be challenged, for the other five global rackets, the media moves in lockstep with them. I think that all of those global rackets can stand on their own in ways. Obviously, the energy, medical, military, spook, banking, and even religion rackets are lucrative, and the media could be considered the poor sister, but the new media of the Internet has made some of the world’s greatest fortunes, such as those of the founders of Google and Facebook, and all of the high-tech moguls have national-security connections or heritages. So, the media is also a power unto itself.