Corporate Media’s Extinction Event

MSM went “all-in” on a discredited COVID narrative.

Since the pandemic I’ve been saying that confidence in the mainstream, corporate press has been irreparably damaged. After four years of non-stop Trump Derangement Syndrome so intense that even some liberals were wondering if the press had gone overboard on editorializing – Covid hit, and a lot of normies now see the MSM for what it really is: agitprop and brainwashing.

Cancel culture and censorship reached such absurd levels that we started to see an exodus of high profile reporters (Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, et al) exiting corporate news outlets and setting up on their own, after they committed the sin of colouring outside the lines of establishment precepts (Taibbi and Greenwald having been arguably left-wing commentators, have now been designated “far right extremists”).

Glenn Greenwald & Matt Taibbi were my early journalistic heroes. But nowadays they repeat deluded & dangerous right-wing propaganda. An explanation of how those who see themselves as reasonable can end up swallowing parts of the right’s warped worldview:https://t.co/VCXPJJA46k

— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) June 17, 2021

The MSM went all-in in Covid, but every core tenet of the Covid narrative has since fallen apart:

• This thing came out of a lab
• Ecohealth and Fauci are up to their asses in it
• The lockdowns did more damage than anything else, and
• Everybody was forced to take a vaccine that not only doesn’t work but also seems to be the common denominator in an excess fatality rate that exceeds the pandemic itself.

Not good.

With the tempo being set by numerous media collapses, especially by overtly “woke” ones: Buzzfeed’s bankruptcy, Vice circling the drain – and television viewership plummeting, the stage was set for a few key moments that will be remembered as defining the extinction level event rolling through corporate media:

#1) The Rise of Dark Carlson

After Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, the number 1 pundit on television with the highest viewership today, he didn’t go to a rival network (Newsmax offered him $25 million), he decided to take his own show out on Twitter.

This is a defining moment in the extinction event hitting the corporate media these days. https://t.co/jyly9WROKp

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) May 9, 2023

Apparently, on his own, not part of any deal with Elon Musk, Carlson is just letting it all hang out. In one of his first installments, he called into question the 9/11 narrative (Why did Building 7 just fall into its own footprint for no reason?). It prompted one observer to coin the term “Dark Carlson” for what is transpiring via this channel.

#2) The Schism of RFK Jr. coverage

RFK Jr, having thrown his hat into the ring to challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, immediately drew fire from the MSM, having unilaterally decided that anything RFK says is automatically “misinformation” (see the closing remarks on “rhetorical circularity”, below).

RFK Jr, for his part, created an account on Nostr.  

Nothing epitomizes the Industrial
Age vs Network Era like these two images – screen capped back to back… pic.twitter.com/7q10zEST7z

— Mark Jeftovic, The ₿itcoin Capitalist (@StuntPope) May 11, 2023

Nostr is a fast growing decentralized social media network, contrast with Twitter – which is governed by the vagaries and whims of whomever owns it – Nostr is decentralized at the server level to relays (which anybody can run) at the the account level to individual users. This protocol is spreading like wildfire and it’s beyond censorship.

The juxtoposition between a sclerotic,  industrial era, mediocre network clutching their pearls over RFK’s “misinformation” and RFK showing up on Nostr tells us a lot.

While this is not seen as much of a big deal yet, this is a signal worth paying attention to.

#3) CNN’s disastrous town-hall with Trump

I didn’t watch it, and when you look at the reporting on it, both left and right traditional outlets are declaring victory – but the reality is that CNN pulled the plug on it 20 minutes earlier than scheduled (ten key moments here).

Love him or hate him, Trump draws attention and viewers unlike any other personality – and the fact that CNN drew the curtain early signals one thing: it was a disaster for the network and probably didn’t hurt Trump. After deftly manipulating a hostile media and leveraging social media cunning to win the presidency in 2016, it doesn’t look like the MSM has learned much.

When the media falls, so does the system it supports

When the Soviet Empire fell in 1989 – 1990, anybody predicting it even months earlier would have been ridiculed. When it happened it took everybody by surprise (even the CIA) and unfolded at astonishing speed (Victor Sebestyen’s Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire covers it brilliantly).

Things move even quicker today – where we are in the early innings of what will possibly be the final financial crisis of the fiat money system.

In another great book about Late Stage Communism,  “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More“, Alexey Yurchak chronicles the hyper-normality that saturated the zeitgeist during “the last Soviet Generation”. The “Dead Irony” chapter outlines the ingenious forms of unauthorized humour.

A contemporary parallel is when you come across a Twitter account that exhibits such over-the-top support for All The Latest Things™ that you can’t tell if its satire or not. That is a type of performative dissidence called “Stiob” (unless it’s real).

Yurchak’s examination of “the hegemony over meta-discourse” and it’s disintegration ring eerily familiar to those keeping score today. One example is what he called “rhetorical circularity” : in our case it means that anything the MSM refuses to cover is “misinformation”, because there are no MSM citations to support it.

As I frequently comment, we’re in Late Stage Globalism. While many view Covid as the gateway to a “Great Reset” technocracy – it looks to me like it was instead, the a-c-c-e-l-e-r-a-t-i-o-n event of the millenia.

I’m not an accelerationist and the elites are certainly still pushing hard for that WEF-style authoritarianism.

But I’m just an observer and I’m here to tell you, that is what’s happening. Given the nature of technological compounding (“Future Shock”, as Alvin Toffler called way back in 1970), accelerationism is somewhat baked in and we just have to watch the implosion of corporate media (not to mention the self-destruction of Woke capitalism) to know it is happening.

My next ebook is The CBDC Survival Guide and I’m sending it free to Bombthrower subscribers when it’s done (early June). In the meantime, subscribe now and get The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto while you wait. Follow me on Nostr, or Twitter.