One of the many things to spring forth from the political froth over the last decade is the level of coordination in the mass media. It was often clear that media activists were coordinating to create their preferred spin, but only with the help of conservative chattering skulls like Rush Limbaugh, who would create montages of media outlets repeating the same catch phrases. Social media now provides this service as the algorithms aggregate the stories and the repetition is too obvious to ignore.
Another thing that was not obvious is that many of the opinion makers, now called influencers, are in on the scam too. Often, they are paid by marketing companies to promote a viewpoint. The recent “soda money” scam where the soda industry paid a bunch of Twitter influencers to promote the health benefits of carbonated sugar drinks is an egregious, but typical example. The truth is, much of what the influencers do is paid for by marketing companies.
This is not just about moving product. The Israel lobby tried to secretly assemble a collection of right-wing influencers for a session with Bibi Netanyahu. Guys like Tim Pool were brought in so they could ask questions and be given instructions. Instead of paying them with cash, they get rewarded with access. This is an old trick that has worked on the media since forever. Look for Tim Pool and other famous influencers to sound remarkably like the ADL.
Payola is nothing new. In the golden age of popular music, record companies sent bagmen to big radio stations so the disc jockeys would play their songs. In the golden age of conservative politics, pens for hire were everywhere. Ben Domenech, one of the founders of The Federalist and RedState, was caught taking money from Malaysia to promote the interests of that country in his columns. Many other conservative pundits were caught up in that scandal.
This feature of the media exploded with the proliferation of digital media and the dominance of social media. It is also much easier to spot. The other day, a company hired by Ukraine did the soda money gag. This time it was a bunch of paid Ukraine supporters on Twitter repeating word for word the same erroneous claims about Chinese soldiers fighting on the side of Russia. The campaign was quickly suspended when it was too obvious to ignore.
It is not just the new school internet chattering skulls taking what used to be called payola, but also the old school types. This post by Victor Davis Hanson regarding the war in Ukraine has all the marks of pay-for-post. It has the typical neocon claims about the Russian army on the brink of collapse and the Russian economy in tatters, two stock bits of the neocon marketing campaign since 2022. Anyone paying the least bit of attention can easily spot those lines as agitprop.
The big tell that this is possibly paid opinion making is the claim that the proposed peace plan will create a DMZ along the border and the Russians will be forced to retreat back to their old border. Not only is this a fabrication, it is total nonsense. There is no such peace proposal and the only people claiming so are the neocons. They have been floating this idea since their 2023 offensive ended in catastrophe. Rather than accept defeat, they want a break to rebuild and rearm.
There are other neocon talking points sprinkled around the text. The claims about Russian losses are the most obvious. There is the crazy claim that Putin is trying to reassemble the old Soviet Union. There is also the mandatory criticism of Trump “art of the deal” negotiating style. Imagine Bill Kristol as a pinata and once he is busted open, what tumbles out are the main neocon talking points. Kids then took those and assembled them into that post for Mr. Hanson.
The Ukraine war has been highly useful in understanding the manipulation that lies behind the opinion makers. Whenever you see the phrase “full scale invasion of Ukraine”, you know you are dealing with a pundit paid by neocons, who are convinced this is powerful rhetoric. “Putin’s invasion” is another example. Normal people working at honest analysis do not use that language. These phrases are emotive signals to the neocon cult indicating a fellow traveler.
In fairness to Hanson, he is getting up there in years and he probably relies on an assistant to write his posts. American Greatness does not pay its writers, so no one can blame any of them for doing the minimum. It is a common practice for bigshot writers to rely on staff. Many of their books are written and assembled by assistants. The bigshot writer acts as the supervising editor. This is how Doris Kearns Goodwin got in trouble over plagiarism claims in one of her books.
That may be the case here. The person tasked with writing these posts simply relied on the copy provided from the neocon email list. On the other hand, Hanson has always been tight with the neocons. He has parroted their propaganda for years, so he could simply be doing the same in that post. That is the point though. In this age of zero trust, no one can be sure if it is honest error, ideological derangement, payola, or sloppy work from an old man nearing the end.
That is the world created by decades of media mendacity. As citizens trying to be as informed as possible, we find ourselves in a wilderness of lies. The “objective reporting” is all narrative storytelling to promote an agenda or a set of moral claims. Much of it is invented out of whole cloth. Analysis is often just payola, but much of it is part of a hidden agenda or a conspiracy. In a world where you cannot accept a man’s opinion as his opinion, you cannot trust anything.
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Hopeless corruption.
Another way of spotting them is if they are on FOX News. They never met a neocon they didn’t like.
Correct. They got rid of Douglas Macgregor and Tucker Carlson for obvious reasons.
My post is not about the Russians or the Ukes. My favorite hobby horse about the dishonesty of the media is the Dateline NBC Chevy pickup truck hoax. The pickup trucks had what was called at the time ‘side saddle’ gas tanks that sat between the skin of the truck and the frame. The truck getting t-boned would potentially rupture the tank. Dateline got a hold of a test facility and a bunch of Chevy pickups and started to ram into the side of them, hoping for an earth shattering kaboom. All they had was a bunch of ruined trucks… Read more »
That one I give them a pass on. It’s TV and TV is about interesting pictures.
js
ive said what’s happening now to white people is a sort of racial euthanasia
Frustrating that no one offers to pay me to comment on sites.
Your message can go here…
Do you want me to write about babies masturbated to death by Hamas? Show me the money!
Orange Hitler is going to destroy the economy with tariffs? I can provide bank account number for a quick and easy deposit.
Maybe this is just another sign of discrimination against white goys.
The more you learn, the more you discover how much you’ve been lied to. It’s an art to figure out who to trust and takes a lot of work to build up a foundation of knowledge to rely on.
I’ve never had a high opinion of Hanson, whom I’ve always considered an establishment dullard. I know you often write disparagingly of US conservatism. I consider Hanson to be a big chunk of the problem. In fairness to him, I think he still has his wits about him but that just makes his prostitution all the more contemptible.
AND he’s an anti-Southern bigot.
“…you cannot trust anything.” That phrase should be uppermost in the minds of everyone who comes here. I scan headlines from news aggregators with this firmly in mind. Almost instantly, my first thought before clicking on any of these stories is, “Why is this story here?” My next step is to see which news company the story is coming from. Most of these pieces are erupting from New York corporate sources, and we know what this means. I really don’t like visiting these corporate websites, because every click merely helps them. The sooner we wean ourselves completely from the clutches… Read more »
“You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.” – Mark Twain.
Part of what we’ve discovered over the past 20 or 30 years is just how easily it is to buy influence. Put together $50 million (which isn’t that much if you have a cohesive group like Jews or Muslims or a bunch of billionaires) and you move mountains politically and culturally. Form PACs, NGOs and legal groups and then start bribing/threatening your way to influence.
Of course, the real power comes with bribing and blackmail which is where the usual suspects have such an advantage, but, still, bribing/threatening will get you a very long way.
I respect VDH as a historian and his work on the ancients. Yet I cannot take anything he says about current affairs seriously and have not been able to since he equated the United States to the 300 after the movie came out.
As for beanie boy, what can you even say? How stupid is he? Does he not see the Daily Wire imploding? As EMJ often says, it’s over for these people and these narratives. Nobody is taking them seriously anymore. Nobody is going to watch a conservative justify genocide and war crimes anymore. It’s not 2004.
Payola one of many reasons you shouldn’t trust the media. Z has also written about the Gell-man amnesia effect bias. There are lots of pitfalls lurking in the wilderness of lies. Always look for the funding, that’s the tipoff.
As others have pointed out, the West and by extension its media lackeys devote all their Ukraine agitprop to negotiating with itself, dreaming up nonsense like a DMZ or a freeze in the battle lines or nonexistent European “peacekeeping troops” or a no-fly zone. The minor inconvenience that Russia must consent to such plans in order for them to even begin to happen never arises. The fact that she has repeatedly explicitly rejected such plans might give a real statesman pause, but the West has no statesmen. Even Trump looks oblivious to this.
The first time I remember being shocked by this was the “gravitas” comments that echoed through the media during the 2000 election. I had not heard that word used much until then, and it disappeared afterwards. It is shocking how much coordination, gatekeeping, and payoffs are used to keep all us little sheep on the farm. I laugh now when they talk about some other country not having a free press like we do.
I’d like to watch Z eviscerate Hanson…in print.
I might have mentioned this before here, but several months ago, listening to the WarStrike show (on Odysee), Eric Striker revealed that he had been offered money to keep doing what he’s doing, except to not ever talk about Jewish influence and power.