Whenever I find a news article about a report, they never link to the report. Whenever I read a quote, they leave out the rest. And when they talk about an issue, they give you a conclusion and not context. The reading at hand rarely gives you further reading. They never recommend any books, but just another shallow article. I think the news makes you actively stupider. I avoid it like the plague.

The plague, unfortunately, is catching. And it's unavoidable. Whenever I search for research, I find news reports clogging up the results, making them completely useless. Knowledge is buried in a shallow grave. For example, I was trying to find a Castro quote and the results were all US news outlets (and NGOs) slandering him in not even relevant ways. It was the worst people on earth, telling me someone else is bad, over and over again. But what about the guy's words? Nevermind, let some idiot from Vox explain him. It's like this for anything I search, I get a lot of paper thin news articles repeating the same propaganda, literally burying any actual information underneath. I realize now, the news isn't there to cover the world. It's there to cover it up. As Trump's adviser Steve Bannon honestly said, they're flooding the zone with shit.

If I do manage to dig through the shit and find a kernel of knowledge, I still have to cross-reference it to explain anything. And they don't make it easy! Sometimes they'll talk about a report, but all you get is a few quotes and barely a name. Then I have to find that name, and find the document on their janky website, but where? I have to site:search or manually go through non-helpful menus, or sometimes even hack the URL to just guess. But why am I doing this? Didn't the journalist read the report, couldn't they just link a brother up? Unless—as I increasingly suspect—they haven't read the report at all. I increasingly think these journalists just copy a press release or copy each other, former a perfect ouroboros of ignorance. These people should be worried about AI replacing their jobs, cause they're not doing much thinking either.

Let's say they're talking about a country in the western media. They'll have a bunch of quotes from 'international' (re: White) organizations that 'cover' the place, if you remember what 'cover' actually means. If you dig you find that half these people are actually paid by the military industrial complex to market new places to bomb, but aren't journalists supposed to do the digging? How are ordinary people supposed to do this?

There's this deep idea in White media that you need a White person explaining anything, so you end up with panels of people discussing a country, with very few people from that country, as if we don't have Internet and the ability to translate. It's amazing how many stories about a country include no voices from that country, except as a bit of local color, literally. The 'experts' are people that that spout the same propaganda, and the people they talk about rarely, if ever, get to speak for themselves. If they do cover a foreign leader or group, it's very thinly and dismissively, always through the lens of their own propaganda, never trying to understand people on their own terms, in their own words.

For example, Westerners constantly speculate about what Xi Xinping is thinking, but the man has literally published volumes called Xi Xinping Thought. They're always speculating about what the Communist Party of China is doing, when the party publishes five-year plans. You never see this covered, instead you get mendacious morons imagining what is happening in China, and other morons nodding sagaciously. They start every story from their own ignorant assumptions, with no context or conscience. Thus you get constant stories that China is simultaneously taking over the world and imploding, like 1984 in Technicolor. What Orwell got wrong (among many things) was that you didn't need to memory-hole information, you could just bury people in even more information until they couldn't remember anything. Beneath all the repeated lies is one constant truth. China (Russia/Iran/whoever) bad, us good!

America journalists don't have a style guide, they have a propaganda guide. They're told not to use the word Palestinian, or genocide, or apartheid, and twist themselves into stylistic abominations to make the propaganda work. They even insist on getting the CPC's acronym wrong (calling it CCP and confusing me endlessly), as if being ignorant and disrespectful is some sort of moral victory. Or they call Yemen's AnsarAllah movement 'the Houthis', what is the point of this petty pedantry? To anyone with any knowledge, it's obvious that they're lying, cause they even make their own names up.

There's just a lot of dumb shit western audiences believe because they get answers without even understanding the question. People are immediately told to bomb X, Y, and Z without knowing anything about them. Just a few cherry-picked facts (or lies, doesn't matter) that confirm a really broad thesis, usually that these people should be deceased and western corporations should take their stuff. And the journalists are paid off, they get the advertising rights to the latest atrocities. The West doesn't have a free press, they just privatized propaganda. 'Journalists' fail upwards in this system by being the most shameless, it's a meritocracy of morons.

Once I was sitting with a writer from the Jon Stewart Show and he told me Winnie The Pooh is banned in China. But there's Winnie The Pooh rides in Shanghai Disney World! I was shocked that this guy, who gets paid infinitely more than me, has never looked this up. Do they just sit around repeating lies to each other and nodding and laughing at the various countries they're attacking? I think they do. The writers are as dumb as the readers/viewers. They eat their own dog food, which is actually dog shit. These people actually believe their own propaganda, ignoring the first rule of propaganda. Deceive your enemy, not yourself!

The biggest media trick is purely Pavlovian, repeating a name over and over again until the dogs of war salivate for blood. First Al-Qaeda was evil incarnate, then they seamlessly transferred the association, to Iraq, to Syria, to ISIS, to Hamas, and now Hezbollah. These are all very different things if you read anything, but if you don't, then it's just a code word for 'scary Muslims.' It's a cunning confabulation, they can free-associate and daisy-chain destruction for decades, making trillions in filthy lucre. At no point do their supposed journalists interrogate whether these things are the same, or whether some of them are created by the American state. No, it's all just scary Muslims and they simply repeat lies until millions of people are lying in their graves, uncounted. Then they do it again. Why wouldn't you? It's the perfect war crime. They just keep rebranding the enemy and selling more bombs.

My issue here is not the evil, which is evil, but the lack of depth. After 25 years of getting non-stop coverage of the Muslim world, western audiences know nothing about the Muslim world. They don't understand anything about the people they hate, they only understand the funhouse mirror of bad assumptions that they're trapped in. The carnival barkers they call a Congress loot their own treasury, then retire as board directors at arms dealerships. And Americans themselves are stuck with a military that's a lemon and only good for killing civilians.

And yet, at the same time, all the information is somewhere in the system. Just covered up with a thin layer of newsprint, but not especially well-hidden. Hence, if you can dig through their strange websites, US military reports will tell you how they're falling apart. Or you can get the actual words of Hamas and Hezbollah through imperial university or journalist translations. The key to western censorship is not disappearing information but flooding the zone with it. Rather than controlling 100% of the information space, they just fill it with 99% bullshit, and that works a charm.

The imperial information control is a mile wide and an inch deep. You can find seeds of truth in the shit they publish, and great reading recommendations in the people they condemn. But by God it's exhausting. Sometimes I wish I could just search for an answer and not get assaulted by propaganda. And sometimes I wish news would make even the most meagre attempt to connect to history, so I could learn something.