On the existential uselessness of mainstream media
You might care to take a look at the following:
Explosives shortage threatens EU drive to arm Ukraine | Financial Times (ft.com) Out of Shells
We should be glad, I suppose, that neoliberal news media like the Financial Times are beginning to tell it like it is (e.g. Ukraine running out of shells; the west running out of productive capacity to produce more shells; Ukraine is losing the war). But I notice that some elite media (serving people “who really need to know,” even if it costs them), and these include the Financial Times, have actually been reporting the shortage of western arms production capacity for longer than we may think, dating back to summer 2022. But so embedded were these reports among other pro-western war jingoism and distortion of the real background to the war, that nobody was paying attention, or nobody could believe that this great democratic, humanitarian, ex-imperial and so fundamentally good (Christian) and likeable western civilization could do anything other than rise to the occasion and, without bothing to actually produce anything any more, could so easily match a Russia, or a China, or a Global South. Whereas, of course, China’s productive capacity now exceeds that of the USA and Europe combined. Yes, that is the “China” that is now firm friends with Russia and with at least half of the rest of the world and whose leader is about to meet with Vladimir Putin in Moscow to talk about defense. Ukraine, economic collaboration and other such issues.
More significantly however, the story of the west’s egregious if not stunning inability to fight an industrial war (it will take it three years to even get to the starting line from which Russia and China leapt into action many months ago) is the fact that alternative media have been reporting and monitoring the gravity of this lack for many months, on the basis of resources that amount to the tiniest fraction of those media owned by western oligarchs and their favorite poodles. How do we explain this - e.g. that if the west achieves its most basic objective in shells production it will soon be producing as many shells in one month that Russia consumes in one day? That is to say, how is it possible that western mainstream media, on the most significant story of our times (apart from climate change and the near proximity of nuclear annihilation, on which their performance is not much better) are totally incapable of giving their readers the information that those readers absolutely need not only to make sense of their world, but to make sensible economic investments and sensible political commitments? The mystery is less the obfuscation and ideological blindness that we can see happening on this occasion, and more about why it happens almost all the time, most recently the shrieking silence over the Hersh Nord Stream disclosures, or to select couple of low hanging fruit from the past, the Nuland/Biden destabilization of Ukraine in 2014, or the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003.
There are two main hypotheses. First, these media are now formally incompetent to do anything other than what power tells them to do: they lack even the imagination to decipher alternative possible worlds. They did not mean it to be this way, precisely, but the tragic advertising crisis that has been brewing since the 1990s in the wake of the digital revolution that so conveniently removed media as a significant threat to power, finally brought into clear sight the possibility of their absolute implosion unless they stopped even the pretence of being independent of power.
The second hypothesis is simply that the mainstream media are now, and always have been, formal extensions of state and plutocratic power, but in disguise, a condition which is achieved through State pressures on media to do what they must or face disgrace in one form or another, disgrace that will be visited upon them by the Deep State; through defintions of “journalism” in training programs and in practice that insist on the importance of faithfully parrotting the views of the thugs in power; and through the penetration of media at all levels from board, down through senior management and down through newsrooms and individual journalists slaving away in the hope of a decent meal each night, by the parasites of the intelligence community, answerable to their shadowy overlords across the network of historic, institutional and plutocractic power.