As the limp fight for the truth to be broadcast far and wide continues onward in Washington, the actual airwaves of America seem glaringly silent. The cognitive dissonance is real.
People of a certain class are outraged by how quickly truth and justice seem to have accepted offers of early retirement from which they seem content to watch the ideals of this country crash and burn.
Many can’t believe that the Billionaires now behind the mastheads of these storied journalistic institutions are cowering and coddling the narc child in charge. “Where did this cowardice come from?! What about the Journalist’s Creed?! What about Editorial FREEDOM?!!” they scream, perfectly reproduced, 60s protest placards held high.
Some are befuddled by the veritable existence of the catechism the Journalists Creed at all. This article may be many people’s first exposure to it. Which IS part of the problem, but not today’s focus.
But here’s the rub…those treating the sidewalks outside of old-school Legacy media headquarters like wailing walls in hopes of changing things are doing so out of a sheer ignorance of actual, sordid American history, one that even their popular culture once got off on brazenly hipping them to.
…did No One born in the last 70 years understand Citizen Kane? I mean, come on!
According to wikipedia: Editorial independence is the absence of external control or influence on journalists, authors, or media organizations in general. It is tested if a newspaper runs articles that may be unpopular with its advertising clientele or critical of its commercial owners or the state.
Being the harbinger of this “news” is surreal, but This has never existed in earnest in America.
Editorial freedom means an absence of external control on what it is that you are reporting on, or writing. That you as the writer are not beholden to anything else that can infect or alter your actual coverage of the facts or in certain situations, your actual opinion on what it is you cover.
But I feel that is a misnomer when it comes to describing what journalists are currently grappling with. What is currently being raged against is an unabashed unveiling of longstanding realities once hidden, both from the masses reading and the intellectuals jockeying to pen all journalistic missives prior to the birth of Ai.
The cognitive dissonance is real but it is wholly rooted in the actuality of what you’ve always been reading without realizing it.
These days, a journalist fights to get onto a newspaper or platform usually based on the name recognition of that platform and nothing else. But there has always been a hierarchy and “journalists” have always been “jockeying” to get onto the coattails of this and that NEWS brand, ready to do, say and write whatever could guarantee them a slot on that team. Freelance writers wore the names of the publications they wrote For like badges of honor. Because the fight to join those teams felt like war, and they’d walked in as victors, having overcome the bloodbath.
But~ the content you found at each paper, each magazine, each platform was then and is now ALWAYS shaped by the special interests of the advertisers those entities ally with. It has always been specialized, shaped by the brands whose advertisements were covering the ink on the pages and the checks.
You would go to WWD to read coverage of the pending trends and know you were going to get full spectrum coverage of the ideas of the big players in the industry, plus 1-2 wildcards that were being coddled for ascension to keep it interesting/ make said coverage look a bit equitable. You wouldn’t go to WWD for hard hitting exposes on debauchery and destruction behind the scenes at fashion companies, or any latterday coverage that was honest beyond the unspoken whathaveyous of the field. To this day, the best objective coverage of the Fashion Industry as a whole STILL happens in the Financial Times newspaper, because even though those same luxury advertisers drop exorbitant amounts to run campaigns in that paper, they do so from a different vantage point and the target market sees them from a diff pov too. That difference amps what the luxury company wants to do…and they put up with the relative objectivity that comes with coverage there for the access in a different light that may appeal to their target.
But it’s all light and shadow. It always has been colored. There’s never been true, full integrity in any of this. All of that means there’s always been an unspoken, externalized “control” on the output of these publications and platforms, so there never truly was freedom.
& Popular culture unflinchingly told you so, even from J. Jonah Jameson the boss of Peter Parker’s newspaper [ the Daily Bugle] to Perry White, the editor-in-chief of The Daily Planet.
No coverage has ever been clean.
The system as it now stands has leaned into the worst fears always just beneath the surface over the years. Especially when it came to “the News.” There was always something sinister that fed with rabid religiosity upon the overall ignorance of its captive audience, whose psyches were splayed on altars as food for the advertiser-gods.
The toxic nature of the system itself takes any purgative reaction from those who awaken within the beast, see the feeding gods for what they are and search for an exit … and commodifies the arc of their tales, re-packaging and offering them to it’s target demographic like an egalitarian option, a pattern to raise up the pole, beckoning all towards a new variant of salvation that passively proves the system’s phony benefactorial positioning. Once the attention is captured, every newly offered god is knocked off its pedestal for the entertainment of the masses by the system, that then administers to the captive feed laced with the mad cow-esque contaminated corpses of said so-called Saviors and any IP connected to them.
In this way, even affection for the abruptly ended arcs/careers ensures reinfection that entangles said target even deeper in the mire of supposed inescapability from the Maya.
All of this activity is nothing more than tenderizing fear- filled flesh to be fed off of immediately or down the road, occasionally storing slabs of society as a whole in the salty, segregative stupidity of their own stunted assurances of superiority. That feasting often shows up as the leopards eating face phenomenons that get responded to as expressions of just desserts by onlooking sectors.
The desire to hear and violently speak the truth in reaction to an information system that one now gets was always lying to the populace and was actually ALWAYS propaganda and branded content collaborations between major names in various industries makes sense, game theory-wise.
It was bound to happen.
But those still refusing to face what they’ve been ensnared in or by cling to news outlets like the psychological life rafts they’ve been stylized and sold to us as, doing everything they can to ignore the scream of “Shark!” from survivors who somehow safely swam to the shore.
For a good two decades the actual news has been predominantly being delivered by actors who look the part of newscaster, with none of the journalistic integrity, field experience or education that was once the expected foundational norm in the field. Attractive automatons dominate desks delivering supposedly unbiased reportage keyed to whatever brand of fear-mongering for market capital the local “channel” is affiliated with.
Stylized robots reading the same screenplay in multiple markets across the nation exploded after the early adoption of 24/7 consumptive cable news, honoring the same pauses, cues and head tilts written into the margins of the original scripts that trickled down from legacy media mountaintops.
In 2025, a light take is that the news itself can barely be trusted.
That valid mistrust of an institution that used to pride itself on the PR of being objective naturally stirs up a desire of true truth in people…which starts them searching for it closer to home and eventually leads down rabbit holes truth never atmospherically existed in.
What we are currently in the cloaked death throes of is us living through the expression of an oxymoronic yet sacrosanct reality.
There is only ONE Truth| Everyone’s truth CANNOT be the same.
But what must be understood is this is not an ending, but a return to the beginning.
Even the days of “give it to me straight” journalism were b/s.
Dan Rather was “the voice of reason” that told the American public what was what for 55+ years, cut from a cloth of journalistic integrity that has long since left the building.
But even his coverage, banter and demeanor stayed in key with the brand he hocked his wares under. Think of the times you’ve seen the interviews of Barbara Walters clones in hindsight and seen that they was obviously in league with whatever the current media “take” was on someone they interviewed, operating with no actual journalistic integrity at all, even as they were held up as the female bastion of such a thing.
The lie’s been the lie forever.
The insult of the “institution” these days is that instead defaming and destroying the lie…which old school journalists would’ve fought against but surely lost with some semblance of valor…the institution just made the lie communicable and culturally attainable for all to keep “itself” going, even losing all it’s luster as it does.
Instead of facing, dealing with and then purging the false actors in the media game who are using the title Journalist when they are literally just whored-out shills for “the man,” then putting more objectively balanced beings in that cleared out space… The system has amped up opportunities for “everyone” to be that bought shill, christenings new, lesser gods to ensure it would, as a brain worm continue to be spread.
Hear ye, hear ye. to whomever is willing to be false actors on behalf of brands solely interested in grabbing attention to hock tchotchkes that fill the airwaves in lieu of bettering them~!
Systemic “job” listing copy.
I do not see this as a convergence.
For it to be a convergence means there should be true evolution up towards something. This is outright, in your face dissolution that we are witnessing and living through, almost a defragmentation happening in a system out of a viral refusal To heal.
This is rot.
…From the head, down.
This is a few steps beyond the sublime beauty inherent in decadence. THIS current state is when the body of the beast starts to smell.
what is being labeled a convergence is really akin to the Victorian era where they were obsessed with dousing themselves in heady perfumes because they also as a collective held the concept of daily [weekly…or monthly bathing] to be abhorrent notions in civilized society. Even though they believed bathing was bad, and perfume was the answer to all that ailed them, eventually there was an olfactorial tipping point where fibers disintegrated under the funk of both.
Something had to fester and then give. And just like today, in some spots sooner than others, it surely did.
We are societally in a similar headspace. Western culture is consumed with cannibalism, and will be thoroughly reduced once and for all by feeding on itself, conceptually or otherwise.
& that is the North, the East, the West and the South of it that will never have an expose done on it. Because the gluttony of the blind feeding is the enlivening factor of it all.