The greatest knowledge we can bestow on our youth

Like the castle in its corner
In a medieval game,
I foresee terrible trouble
And I stay here just the same
—Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, “Dirty Work”

The most important thing one may know, in order to function with minimal comprehension amidst the constant shot and shell of contemporary misinformation, is that mainstream media are controlled.

Without that knowledge, one is lost in the modern world, an idiot useful to the establishment for the fallacious spread of corporate-viewpoints and national security state propaganda.

What makes this so difficult for any of us to convey, is that an audience may immediately jump to the conclusion that controlling most of the information is not probable.  They ask, “Are all of the media people—newspaper columnists and reporters, cable news staffs, local TV news anchors—all propagandists? This doesn’t seem possible.”

And the answer is difficult to communicate.  Lengthy books have been written in an attempt to make the point, but most modern Americans do not read lengthy books, if any.

Ignorance has led us to impending catastrophes in the USA.  Americans are mostly unaware that we are destroying our own natural environment.  Mainstream media do not advocate for addressing this.  Their owners and investors make a great deal of money from environmental pollution—pushing us in that direction.

We are stockpiling thousands of nuclear warheads with which to “justify” the manufacture of intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear missile-firing submarines, and nuclear warhead-delivering bomber-aircraft at a monetary price exceeding the entire defense budgets of most nations.  Mainstream media do not speak out against this, their owners and investors make a great deal of money from war and what euphemistically passes as “defense spending,” thereby making us vulnerable for global, thermonuclear war, as other nations see us doing this and stockpile their own nukes.

Most citizens seem to be unaware of how the system is rigged so that the rich get richer and the poor suffer without end.  The mainstream press do not address such things by supporting legislation that would fairly tax the wealthy and their corporations, redistributing the wealth so that those who work to produce it, are allowed to fairly share in it.

Instead, they cover up.  In my youth I didn’t know that I was getting from mass media a corporate viewpoint with a national security state bias.  In fact though, there were obscure attempts at getting public interest truth to the citizens, since, largely abandoned.

One such program was The Great American Dream Machine (GADM), briefly on PBS.  In its early days, fifty years ago, PBS really did try at times to serve the public interest, but has since become another arm of corporate media.  I was amazed at the way GADM addressed the scams in our capitalist system, since I didn’t see anyone else in major mass media doing it.

On one program the GADM spokesman, Marshall Efron, picked up a bottle of Bayer aspirin and used it to take on Big Pharma.  He read the ingredients on the bottle and then picked up a brand X aspirin bottle, noting that the ingredients were exactly the same.  They must be the same, he said, because the Food and Drug Administration requires them to be the same.  If you call your product aspirin, it must contain these exact ingredients.

So why is brand X half the price, with twice as many aspirin?  Marshall Efron told us it was ridiculous to buy Bayer aspirin, you were wasting money thinking you were somehow buying a superior product because you paid so much more for it.

This would not happen today in mainstream media.  Any effort to criticize corporate profits would be shut down, the criticism would never reach the public.

I recall seeing an interview decades ago, of a director explaining why he quit working in television.  He said in one scene, a wagon train was to ford a river in the Western he was directing, for a serialized weekly.  He was overruled by a corporate executive who told him he couldn’t use the word “ford” because they might be getting a sponsorship from Chevrolet and such a sponsor would not want free publicity for a competitor (Ford motor company).

Note that the problem wasn’t even there—Chevrolet was not a sponsor.  But somewhere in syndication, as the years went by, Chevy might just pop in with a sponsorship, so this must be anticipated.

American TV exists for corporate sponsors, and the last thing it cares about is the truth, particularly in its news programs.

Many readers of this web site are aware of the fact that it puts out information which is censored in corporate media publications.  The Washington Post once lied that Intrepid Report is funded by the Russians.  Corporate media cannot help themselves, they cannot tell the truth or would lose their funding.

I’m an old man losing my eyesight and thinking, if I don’t get the eyes fixed, perhaps I may have to give up writing, a thing I love, and this could be my last article.  I can hardly make out these words as I ask you to make a contribution to Intrepid Report, so that valuable censored information can get to the public, without charge.

And I promise you that the Russians do not assist Intrepid Report in any way, but the Washington Post does take money from billionaires and transnational corporations, the people and entities for whom they publish.

Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.