YOU may have heard about the military-industrial complex. In his 1961 farewell address, President Eisenhower warned about the ‘potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power’ arising from the entanglement of the arms industry and government. It was, in his words, a union with the potential to ‘endanger our liberties and democratic processes’.
Today we are faced with the media-industrial complex. The collusion between media and government is so extensive that the two are difficult to tell apart. As the tentacles of government spread unabated – with state spending now accounting for roughly half of British GDP – its powers grow daily. Media behemoths, staffed largely by people sympathetic to the worldview and aims of the state, are the perfect ally for those in the halls of government.
Most media outlets profess to hold power to account. Such commitment to journalistic inquiry is, however, increasingly the exception rather than the rule, with the links between those sitting on the editorial boards of newspapers and those carving out careers in Westminster closer than ever. It has become the job of media to advance the beliefs of the modern state, which manifest themselves in various mental dead-ends including, but not limited to, DIE (diversity, inclusion, equality) and climate catastrophism.
Take, for example, the debacle regarding Nigel Farage and Coutts bank. Until 2022 NatWest Group – Coutts’s parent – was majority-owned by the taxpayer, needing to be subsidised by the public because of its serious business failings. Today it is still 38.6 per cent owned by the government. It was nobody less than the CEO of NatWest Group who passed inaccurate information to a BBC journalist (another state-owned institution) to smear the reputation of one of the most successful politicians in recent British history.
Co-operation of this kind is not new. Where the media have been slow to condemn the overtly political decision against Farage – incredible given its implications for any of us who dissent from official opinion on any issue – they were happy to endorse house arrest for millions. During that sorry era journalists competed to be the most fervent in advancing the establishment narrative, the central tenets of which included that Covid was an existential risk, that vaccinations were unreservedly beneficial, and that the sole problem with lockdowns was their lack of stringency.
Even after the tide of panic has receded, the media remain resolutely uninterested in asking the vital questions thrown up by the episode, not limited to vaccine injury and excess deaths. To do so would reveal their own culpability. Perhaps more crucially, they have new axes to grind.
They cannot ride the wave of any single crisis permanently as fatigue inevitably sets in among their readers, viewers and listeners. The artillery of hysteria must be directed elsewhere to advance the cause of the Uniparty. Take the obsessing with a missing submersible in the North Atlantic while the US President’s son was having his day in court in a saga with deep implications for Joe Biden himself. Which story was of greater significance for the future of the Western world? Hint: not the one that got 1,000 times the media coverage.
Most recently, one would deduce from media reports that the entirety of the Mediterranean was ablaze, with Rhodes and Corfu soon to be little more than giant lumps of charcoal. The relish with which the media has promoted the story is part of its sensationalising mission (such companies operate on the same basis as TikTok: the quality of the content is irrelevant so long as it gets enough hits). It feeds into a narrative of imminent climate catastrophe despite the abundance of evidence, for example here and here, that refutes this overwrought assertion.
Yet by the time cooler heads have provided more rational explanations than the knee-jerk response of ‘Armageddon is at hand’, the hysteria has hit home. Decent people – no doubt considering themselves rational and informed – declare that ‘something must be done – I’ve seen photos of Rhodes on fire!’ In their haste to act upon noble instinct, they advance the cause of the cadre of globalist misanthropes who see humanity as a plague on an idealised Mother Nature.
Such coverage has the same effect as the rolling death counters of Covid: while a phenomenon occurs unremarked upon, regarded a fact of life (people die, forests sometimes burn – particularly when arson is involved), once the glaring lights of media obsession are trained on them relentlessly, people are panicked. Somewhat conveniently, the demands for action fit neatly into government’s already formulated plans.
To suggest that the media and the state act in unison is to invite accusations of being a conspiracy theorist amid loud guffaws from the self-appointed ‘experts’ in our midst. Yet, given the tendency for today’s ‘conspiracy theory’ to be tomorrow’s proven fact, it’s a chance ever more of us are willing to take.
This article appeared in Frederick’s Newsletter on July 27, 2023, and is republished by kind permission.
