The American Propaganda Media

They used to call it agitprop. Now, it’s become advocacy journalism.

Agitprop is short for agitation propaganda, presenting misinformation that will agitate the population toward political action. For those who practiced it, reporting the news objectively was a scam. All reporting was propaganda, so so-called journalists were tasked with distorting the news in order to produce political action.

One might say that the relentless journalistic attacks on Donald Trump and on Republicans gave rise to the 2020 BLM and Antifa riots, to say nothing of the urban crime wave in blue cities.

Agitprop was designed to produce this result, so no blue mayors or prosecutors are complaining very much about it. The crime wave resembled a rebellion, produced by the underclass, to effect justice.

If racist society prevented you from earning an honest living, you had a right to steal whatever you needed. Objectively reporting the news was a white supremacist plot. Economic activity itself, the marketplace of goods and services, was a vast conspiracy against people of color.

So, while local politicians wring their crying towels about what downtowns have become, journalists in the mainstream media no longer even pretend to be reporting the news objectively.

So writes law professor Jonathan Turley, and he is surely correct.

The University of Texas at Austin hired an agitator named Anita Varma and she is turning journalism into advocacy. She explained two years ago:

…objectivity as an aspirational ideal ends up encouraging journalists to avoid addressing what matters. . . . In coverage of issues like immigration, Covid-19, police brutality, and housing instability, the idea that observations will objectively speak for themselves is quickly off the table.

Naturally, one wonders who is paying her salary, and whether Texas politicians are happy to allow an assistant professor to undermine journalistic practice.

Thus, the marketplace of ideas, the ancient and hoary liberal practice of allowing all sides to be heard and debated, falls afoul of the journalistic wish to produce social discord.

One might even ask whether the efforts of social media companies to shut down certain sides of the debate over Covid restrictions and treatments served a political, not a public health, purpose.

Given an opportunity to discredit the Trump administration, social media companies, along with mainstream media outlets, worked long and hard to damage the country, its economy and its children.

The damage done to children’s minds by school closings is incalculable, but children who know nothing will have little choice in life but to become professional agitators or petty thieves.

Advocacy journalism does not require fact-finding. It does not require research and investigation. You need but learn the prevailing radical political narrative and find facts that sustain it. Balanced judgment, a skeptical enquiring mind, research studies-- all of these traditional journalistic practices are tossed aside in favor of the narrative. 

The narrative might involve the mindless rant called the 1619 Project, a report that declared the truth of America to lie in slavery or the Hunter Biden laptop scandal where dozens of supposed intelligence officers declared it to be Russian disinformation.

Turley asks another salient question. How much credibility will the mainstream or the corporate media be sacrificing in its efforts to become organs of propaganda? Will people cease buying newspapers or watching the television news shows because they tire of being lied to? 

Of course, the field of journalism is now attracting people who do not believe in journalism, who were cured of their interest in objective news reporting, but who want to play identity politics in the newsroom. They do not care to report the facts, but prefer to slant stories in order to make members of certain political factions feel good. It's supposed to be therapeutic.

This appeals especially to people who feel that they have not enjoyed the right measure of success in America. The message is simple and direct: you did not fail in America; America failed you. The game was rigged; you could never have succeeded. You have a right to take whatever you need.

Turley suggests that the media is losing its credibility and that people no longer trust it to report the facts objectively or fairly. How long can it continue as a business model?

And yet, it is not just the mainstream media. It is the great tech titans who increasingly have a stranglehold on the presentation of news in this country.

For that, there must be a political solution. Don’t hold your breath.