I don't consume news anymore. This is from bitter experience more than anything. I have seen how mainstream media slanders dead people I know and dead people I don't know and I cannot forgive them for it. Once you see how the media covers something you know about, you realize how badly they must be covering everything. A few stories might be right or even insightful sometimes, but it's like finding biryani in a bomb crater. Fine, but I still don't want to eat it.

You are what you eat and you are what you read and corporate news is processed food for the brain. It looks like food and it tastes like food but it isn't actual sustenance. This sort of news is a highly processed product that gives you brain freeze and verbal diarrhea. Do I mean all news? No, I'm specifically talking about the Western (or Westernized) media that props up a very particular worldview, while calling themselves 'unbiased'. Their command of language (within my brain at least) is such that they mean 'news' to me.

And yet I still get 'new' information which, collectively, might be called 'news'. But I consume it through other people, not through corporate machinations. If something major happens someone tells me, either someone I know or someone I follow. I follow some interesting people on Twitter (though its worst user bought the damn thing) and subscribe to emails and read refreshingly anciently designed websites from individuals. If I want more context I read a book, and I honestly find the best context from people hundreds or thousands of years ago.

Ergo, I still get news the old way, effectively through word of mouth, which my brain is simply more adapted to. Neurologically, humans have adapted to filtering information through many village idiots whereas we simply can't process the omniscient voice of global corporations. The mass media sounds like the voice of God, though it's really just some rich assholes. You're expected to think that you're ill-informed if you don't participate in this privatized propagandization, but they're really just making us ill.

In my own reading, I have a heavy bias towards primary sources, which I find that the news has a heavy bias against. Sometimes I have to go to a news article for research and I always try to find the speech or report they're referring to and read it directly. What I find interesting is that they almost never link to it, I have to dig through weird government file systems or do a lot of internal site searching myself. I think this is on purpose. Most news stories bury the context and give you a tombstone written by the killers. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Putin, for example, are the subject of many news stories, but are almost never allowed to speak for themselves. But you can actually follow them on Telegram and read their speeches and, in context, they actually make sense. I'm not saying you need to agree with these groups, but they are rational actors reduced to a crude pantomime in the western press.

Instead of hearing from the actors directly, the western news buries them in 'analysis'. It's like reading reviews of a play by the dumbest people in the audience and never seeing the thing yourself. You get entire panels of white people talking about different countries, as if modern communications technology doesn't exist. Or you get un-bylined hit pieces in the Economist, as if they're the omniscient narrators of history. But they're not. These are actually the people with the worst record in history, thinking that they should keep writing it.

An entire class of people are paid by corporations to espouse a certain world view, and we're supposed to believe that this is free speech. But they're literally paid to do it! These so-called journalists act as objective observers, but they're paid to say certain things, and fired if they think different. As Noam Chomsky said to a newsman once, “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.” Or as Upton Sinclair said, it's very difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.

Once you look behind the meat puppets of the mainstream media, you can see the 'invisible hand' of the market that's actually running things. Thus one of the inherent (and invisible) biases of the corporate media hides in plain sight. It actually expresses the views of corporations!

Corporations, in my view, are just a species of the artificial lifeforms that have been consuming the planet since the VoC first IPO'd in 1602. These AI algorithms have been programmed to enslave and strip the planet and all the human shareholders and employees are just so much bacteria in their giant guts. Corporate media is just an extension of the corporate behemoths that have been chawing us in their maw for centuries now.

We're expected to think that this media holds power accountable, but why would they care about anything but their own accounts? When news is corporate, why would it attack corporate power? Why would its human employees bite the hand that feeds them? The entire act of believing corporate news is the act of believing that corporations have any duty beyond their fiduciary duty and they, programmatically, don't. Believing that a corporate journalist cares about you is like believing a prostitute loves you. It might make the experience better, but it's not true. I mean that with all respect to an honest profession (prostitutes). We're all prostituting something, but journalists and politicians would have you believe that they're somehow the one business exempt from the basic rules of business. And they're not. Corporate news is just heavily processed information, heavily biased towards the corporate power that actually rules.

If you look at corporate media like any other business it's obviously run in the interests of its shareholders (treasonous humans) and paying clients (corporations). Yet we are expected to believe that these private companies support the public interest because… vibes? At the same time, we're been told that publicly owned broadcasters are in fact the evil ones, ignoring the basic ownership/control concept of Business 101. Corporations are designed to make money and media is just another way to get into the only orifice that matters to them. Your pockets.

If you look at corporate media like anything else in the economic ecosystem, it's clear that it has to make money to survive. And if they want to make a killing, they need to make a killing. War is great business for them, and during the staged rebellions the west calls elections, they also get the advertising rights. War is great for this business model, as is culture war, as is conflict in general. Division between humans multiplies their earnings and subtracting context adds to their bottom line.

As I've mentioned there are professional outlets and professionals that somehow do good work within this context (and the Empire just confesses periodically), but it's like picking chocolate out of a giant pile of shit. Why go through the aggravation? That's why I've reduced my mainstream media diet to zero and only consume clips of people dunking on them. And I think I'm honestly better informed just by not being so flooded with bullshit. Corporate brain food is like corporate processed food. It's designed to make money foremost and to sustain you only coincidentally. You're much better off just talking to or reading people directly, who are at least not giant machines programmed to deceive you, and whom your meagre ape brain can process without losing your mind.