In a major development that must be frustrating to an establishment trying to sell their policies to an increasingly skeptical public, the rising popularity of independent media has made it impossible to create broad consensus for corporate-compliant narratives, and to casually denigrate, or even censor, those who disagree.
It’s been a long road.
In terms of foreign policymakers being able to control the message, the first Gulf War in 1991 was a high-water mark in retrospect. At that point, Americans were getting their national news almost exclusively from corporate sources and especially the evening news, with the young CNN (launched in 1980 the only cable alternative) adding to network coverage. With such a narrow band of options, narratives could be foisted upon the American public by the Washington establishment and their compatriots in the media, who largely shared the same social circles, backgrounds,and career interests.
Such fanciful and self-serving narratives (babies stolen from incubators and "liberating" Kuwait, the Iraqis, and especially the Kurds from the brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein) were accepted by the public pretty much without question. There was an anti-war movement in those days, but it was disorganized, and considered by the mainstream to be vaguely unpatriotic. There was a heavy Pentagon hand, if not outright censorship in the coverage of the war, a deliberate reaction to the independent and more impactful reporting of the Vietnam War a decade before.
In the run-up to the second Gulf War in 2003, TV host Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for hosting antiwar voices and, according to an internal NBC memo at the time, giving the network “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” This from a network that was itself owned by a defense contractor, General Electric, which profited hugely from the invasion of Iraq.
The media fired and marginalized its dissenting voices, including Ashleigh Banfield, a rising star who said she was “banished’ by NBC after making comments in 2003 about how Americans weren’t getting the full picture of the Iraq War. She criticized the network embeds, which ensured only compliant reporters would be allowed into the war zone. The corporate media became handmaidens of the U.S. military and the powerbrokers in Washington, allowing the war there and in Afghanistan to continue for decades, without a serious questioning of the logic.
Then something unexpected happened: public trust in media plummeted from approximately 72% in 1976, to 28% today. Part of this public mistrust may have resulted from the fact that so many of the media narratives of our century, devised in concert with the permanent bureaucracy in Washington, have turned out to be wildly wrong (for example, that the Iraq invasion would bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East, and would end a threatening WMD program; that the NATO bombing of Libya was necessary to prevent a “rape army” fueled by Viagra and methamphetamines, and would bring, again, a democracy to Libya).
But the other obvious reason for the collapse in public trust in corporate media and, by extension, for policymakers’ ability to sell a chosen narrative, is the rise of independent media in the years during and following the wars. The general acceptance of blogs and social media as a source of information coincidentally took off around 2007 — at the very moment that Washington and the corporate media’s lies and misdirections were breaking down and destroying American faith in their institutions writ large.
Today we live in a world where the average age of an ABC, Fox, or MSNBC evening news viewer is 55, and where most people get their news from social media, or from their own preferred sources, which may or may not be sanctioned by the former establishment.
If one were watching President Trump's performance during the so-called 12 Day War with Iran, Trump’s messaging and behavior changed almost daily, as comments from X influencers well known to the MAGA movement, such as Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and others criticized the President’s prior-day actions and attempted to persuade him in another direction. It was as if policy and messaging was being made in real time reaction to social media posts.
It is not hard to imagine that policymakers would long for a return to the world of the past, where they and their cronies in legacy media channels could devise a storyline, and then stick to it. This is one of the reasons we are currently seeing such a strong urge to censor independent media and dissenting voices. We see it in many guises in many countries, whether it is arresting and seeking to deport op-ed writers in the United States, pushing for an end to online privacy under the guise of “child protection” in the UK and Australia, or even the Draconian sanctioning of writers who simply diverge from the policy views of those in power, such as Swiss commentator Colonel Jacques Baud and German journalist Hüssein Dogryu, neither of whom, as we write this article, is technically permitted to make a bank withdrawal, or buy groceries.
There is also a nexus between this censorship push and the general unpopularity of these politicians. Other than so-called “populists” such as Victor Orban and Robert Fico, there is hardly one politician in Western Europe or North America whose popularity exceeds 40%, and in many cases it is less than 20%. These leaders see the writing on the wall. Their policies are unpopular, they are unpopular, and they must be extremely frustrated with their inability to sell the public messaging for courses of action that the public sees as against their interests.
On Integrity Media’s Unfettered Speech podcast, free speech advocate Gabriel Shipton recently noted that “control of the narrative has been lost by these powerful individuals and governments. And so what’s left in their arsenal now to control people is force.”
While the urge to censor has never been stronger, the strength and scope of independent media has never been more powerful. I believe there will be no going back to the time when a war narrative will not be challenged, or when policies that clearly do not benefit the population are pursued with the spurious claims that they are for freedom, democracy, or the general good. Too many people are wise to the shell game now.
But we still must stay vigilant and ensure that the independent voices that have emerged in the last decade or so continue to flourish, and are not snuffed out by this new insidious push for digital censorship that is sweeping the Western world.
