Oligarchy + Media = Hyper Partisanship, Hyper Partisanship = the death of the Republic.
There is plenty of blame to go around.
Hello TAT readers,
Today’s essay is sobering and with any luck at all, will provoke some soul-searching and reflection. Like all that I write, my only agenda is a healthy, honest republic.
Here’s the premise; we, yes us the voters and consumers, have allowed ourselves to be manipulated into hyper-partisanship, and not just politically. This is a road that leads straight towards the end of the very Republic, that I am duly sworn by my military oath, to protect from, “all enemies, foreign and domestic.” The oath actually says; “to protect and defend the constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic,” but our constitution is the written heart and soul of our republic. Please tolerate this slight personal deviation from the actual words, in order to make my points.
Since truth is the core of Truth about Threats, this begins with being honest with ourselves, and this includes me. What follows today may feel like pointed criticism for many, but it is no less than I demand of myself.
Onward
President Eisenhower was elected to his second term, the year I was born. His 1956 GOP platform was eerily similar to President Biden’s, even though he ran as a Republican. It is safe to say that I have seen a great deal in my lifetime and with my dad being a history and government teacher, I grew up with a passion for paying attention to both. Mom a lifelong Republican and Dad an FDR Democrat, both voted across party lines when necessary and often the same way. Facts and good ole’ Midwestern common-sense were the unstated rules for political decisions.
Walter Cronkite was the mainstay of the evening news and for good reason. I mostly felt like I was getting pretty close to honest reporting, even when I didn’t like the best truth available. I watched our tiny black and white TV sitting on the floor, while also serving as the remote control for my parents. I witnessed a generation’s worth of American history in detail, such as, the assassinations of two Kennedys, Martin Luther King, the combat of the Vietnam war on TV along with the regular and highly controversial, “body counts.”
To say that the sixties were turbulent, is to grotesquely understate the issue. Most mainstream media understood the positions of the mass protests about the war, racism, the communist threat revolving around the Cold War. Like every other school child, I grew up learning to crawl under my desk in case of yearly Midwestern tornados and the ever-present threat of a nuclear attack by the Soviets. My school desk wouldn’t have helped in either case, but at least we were educated about threats and what to do about them.
Skipping ahead a few years, we all learned all about one version of terrorism after 9-11 and were educated daily on threats, tactics, what to watch for and “if you see something, say something.” This is the last time our nation was unified against an external attack, as we would soon see in 2016, when the Republican party refused to back America after the Russian assault on our presidential election and still often vote in support of Putin.
We are still dangerously divided, with one party existing solely on conspiracy theories, often emanating from Moscow and the other party with their own false narratives, such as what we see now, regarding the plight of the Palestinian people. Much of the false narratives surrounding the war in Gaza, all emanate from our adversaries such as Iran, Moscow and Beijing. All false narratives are a threat to the republic. I cannot make this any clearer.
America can only be a force for good, if we tell the truth and back it with actions based on truth. Today though, the Walter Cronkite type voices are few and far between due to the influence of advertising income and investor influence over newsrooms. The other issue is that the US government is an utter failure at what is professionally called, Narrative Warfare or in plain terms, influence operations.
Tragically, the US national security community responsible for ethical influence operations, has been an abysmal failure, since before the end of the Cold War. There is little to show for the billions invested since and there is no hope on the horizon. Today’s community is obsessed with gibberish doctrine, false hope and an ignorant, all-consuming obsession with technology, including AI. It is not that technology is not important, it’s just that it is only one narrow piece of the grossly misunderstood overall puzzle of influence operations. The alleged experts who dominate the community at large today, are almost all PhDs with zero experience in the field. These big brain folks are important but not without guidance from operators.
The primary groups to blame:
Media
Oligarchs, especially in media
Voters
Today’s media is understandably consumed with staying solvent, especially in an era where record numbers of independent and mainstream newspapers/ services are folding, at a pace of 2.5 per week.
The pace of closures accelerated during the 2016 election and COVID. For example, the way that FB ethically and unethically herded news consumers to FB for the “news” or more like propaganda type snippets, most often out of context are but part of the problem.
With declining revenue, actual news entities became far more reliant on ad money and investors. Those investors and ad purchasers have agendas, and in some instances, translates into newsroom editors and reporters, with bias favorable to those who write the checks. There are though, ethical newsrooms and some truly extraordinary reporters that are the standard bearers of journalism ethics.
Since advertisers, especially those with well-established brands, generally attract their own unique audiences and place ads with others who also have dedicated audiences. Similar audiences mean similar interests, and this translates to similar political and social agendas. Add to this the role of professional influencers such as unethical marketers, political and malign influence actors, foreign and domestic and this becomes a primary player in driving our hyper-partisan schism.
To make matters worse, oligarchs with enormous checkbooks, invest in or obtain majority stock holdings in the most closely followed media. This allows them to play a critical role in the pervasive narratives of media and related news entities. A good example here is FOX News as owned by Rupert Murdoch. He and his family, via News Corp a massive global media giant of immense influence define the unsavoriness of being a media mogul. Murdoch and company have decisively shown themselves willing to use that influence regularly, against the greater good. Intentionally lying about COVID, masks, vaccines and treatment, in line with Republican ideology plus, their hard-core dedication to the big-lie, directly contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and an armed insurrection. Meanwhile, Murdoch and his stockholders reaped high profits built on a model of dishonesty. From 2015 on, FOX parroted conspiracy theories in support of our most dangerous enemy, Russia, sometimes verbatim.
News Corp is but one of countless heavy-handed oligarchs that control what we see and watch. From a political comparison, FOX and MSNBC Pew Research clearly shows that they are both heavily hyper-partisan.
For the obvious reason of being in the “alternative truth” era, trust in media has declined.
Claims of distrust in media overall is really, a GOP thing. The other side of the aisle still has a healthy respect for more honorable media. Americans daily are herded by convenience and unethical influence, into moving to alternative news on social media. At the heart of the matter is the problem of being herded directly into increasingly hyper-partisan media environments. This is precisely the plan for politicians and the oligarchs who support them and their party. The fact that they are receiving propaganda rather than credible news, simply solidifies their beliefs in false narratives, which are increasingly more extreme.
So far in this essay we see that trust in the ever-decreasing numbers of true news outlets, has declined precipitously and that much of that decline has come at the behest of oligarchs and their marketers/ influencers, that lend power to this elite wealth group. With nation-states having the largest checkbooks, some of those oligarchs are actually nations like Russia, China, India etc. Some are merely personal and corporate oligarchy. Still, they gain more control over all that we see, hear and experience daily, true or not. Along with the oligarchs come the advertising dollars of companies that are influenced by being associated with the other “brands” within those networks.
The threat to our republic comes oligarchical wealth’s control over much of what we associate as, “news.” This drives voters into our current “Yellow Journalism 2.0” era and its twin brother, hyper partisanship. Hyper-partisanship creates political parties with strict agendas.
I call the graphic below, the Cycle of Doom for our republic.
The formula looks something like this: Oligarchy controlling media + media controlling voters = hyper partisanship Hyper-partisanship = control over politicians which = increased political influence for those oligarchs. This is a vicious circle that becomes smaller and smaller with elite wealth increasing their dominance everyone beneath them.
Simply having elite wealth does not make a person or organization, a threat and there are some remarkably ethical 1 % elites, but conversely, they are a lesser number than those consumed by wealth and its associated power. Power in the hands of the selfish and power-hungry is good for no one but a few people and organizations globally.
Voters may see all of this as “political” but we must remember where politicians fall in the equation above. Those operating unethically, simply become the tools of oligarchy, also for selfish gain. This is but one of the reasons that we have remarkably little transparency in campaign finance. The SCOTUS/ US Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United decision, simply made this dangerous dishonesty, worse.
It’s important to realize here, that due to the US national security community refusing to understand Narrative Warfare, votes under the malign influence of media, may in fact believe themselves to be fine patriots but what are those values connected to? While that both parties exist on false narratives, only one exists on them to the point that they are best described as fake patriotism. In other words, today’s GOP exists on a cultivated set of fake American values best described as God, guns and Trump. Professionally, I call this Oligarchical White Christian Nationalism, but the former is more easily understood. In this case, the oligarchs paying for the creation and dissemination of this cultivated GOP identity, are the ones to be most concerned about. On the other side of the aisle, much of the left lives on an adversarial, cultivated and false narrative about what today are called, the Palestinian people. The use of the words genocide and occupation by campus protesters is fully dishonest, but they are the cornerstone of the current protests we see nationally.
As one of the primary mantras of my military community for the majority of my career believes, “it’s ok to complain, but offer solutions when you’re done complaining.” That is what follows in the summary. The recommendations follow the equation noted earlier in this essay. I will add it here as well, for reading convenience:
Oligarchy controlling media + media controlling voters = hyper partisanship
Hyper-partisanship = control over politicians which = increased political influence for those oligarchs.
First and foremost, our nation was never intended to put oligarchs in a position of dominance within the republic. I have written often on this and the link explaining can be found below:
Unfettered oligarchical control over media, in my lay, legal opinion, violates our First Amendment because such control, fully defeats the requirement of us all having an equal right to free speech. Free speech is partially built on the concept of equality, the bedrock of our constitutional republic. In the model of oligarchical control of media, voter’s equal right to free speech is dramatically devalued, relative to an entity that controls enormous resources to have their voice heard. There is no way that you and I as voters, have an equal voice to FOX, MSNBC etc.
Media pandering to advertisers with the biggest checkbooks and elite wealth oligarchical investors, gives makes that media the mouthpiece of oligarchy, not necessarily the truth required in the ethics of journalism.
Finally, a majority of American voters are malignly influenced to accept only the narrators of their favorite media, such as FOX, MSNBC, Politicians and their party machines, or even your local religious leaders. For the record, it is illegal for religious entities to advocate for political interests, if they operate as a 501 (3) (c), a nonprofit.
Voters who do not do their due diligence are failing in their responsibilities of citizenship, when they espouse conspiracy theories and false narratives as truth, while concurrently refusing to hear truth. To make this issue crystal clear, a full 70% of GOP voters still believe that the 2020 election results were not valid. Those 70% have failed miserably to do their due diligence. It’s not just politics that matter. No one in business whether its farming or corporate finance can succeed based on fake data and knowledge. Those believing in the “stolen election” do not apply the same level of scrutiny to their own businesses and lives as they do to their political beliefs. If they did, they would starve. A farmer for example, cannot just say it rained and watered their crops. A drought is real, whether you believe in it or not. Climate deniers represent this fatal flaw perfectly.
The way that we rebuild the resilience in American voters, is to take charge of the Cycle of Doom in the chart and manage everything, within legal limits. Thankfully, Net Neutrality returned last week to the law books. DOJ is indicting those who participated in and facilitated the fake elector’s threat to the 2020 election, and this sends a powerful signal that the rule of law has returned, in the post Trump era.
These examples though are not enough. We need to clean up our SCOTUS that is overwhelmingly and unethically beholden to empowering business over people. The aforementioned Citizens United decision is a classic example. SCOTUS AJs/ Associate Justices Thomas and Alito have consciously attempted to hide their substantial gifts from oligarchs. Does this have any impact on their decisions? Their religious beliefs certainly have played a role in the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. This is about as un-American as it gets. Religion has zero purchase in our constitution. Why are they allowed to insert it without challenge? Associate Justice Alito writing the prevailing decision used a 17th century English judge’s opinion to justify the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. That judge is infamous for two important legal concepts; first to legalize marital rape and to provide the legal/ religious justification for burning witches at the stake. He also from the bench, bemoans our nation becoming less “religious.” Here we have a SCOTUS justice, overturning the US constitution by imposing his and the rest of the affirmative judges’ votes on the basis of religion.
Finally, we must drag politics out of our public schools. Free public education is a constitutional right and those like my own anti-patriot in the Governor’s mansion, Greg Abbott is but one far-right politician wishing to violate that constitutional right with vouchers. He wishes to send taxpayer dollars to private, unregulated private schools while doing all possible to insert Christianity alone into public schools. SCOTUS will eventually hear cases on this topic too. Can we trust them to put their religious beliefs over our constitutional rights again? I am personally suspect.
The bottom line is that if voters are accurately informed, we would not vote for those who twist our constitutional rights into pretzels in order to get their way. Over time all of the twisting destroys tears the pretzel apart. Our republic will be just as easily destroyed by incrementally eroding those rights.
These days, it is common to hear the most absurd false narratives about our government from those who willfully refuse to read credible sources. Addiction to learning truth, in favor of political ideology, is the sole responsibility of every single citizen. Those who understand the basics of our government such as available in most middle school classes will not have fake constitutionalism shoved down their throat.
Those who read a little bit of history from credible sources will also know that Israel hasn’t occupied Gaza since 2005 and that the accusation of “genocide” is ridiculously absurd. A five second look up of the definition in any dictionary, clearly shows this but the woe and wailing with these offensive and dishonest terms on college campus protests is as unsavory for its dishonesty as it is slanderous. Does this mean it is wrong to empathize with victims of the war on both sides, no and I respect protests for improved caution regarding what I know professionally as CIVCAS or civilian casualties. This is honorable protest. Accusing those defending their lives and national security from genocide as required by Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, is disgraceful protest.
I began this essay talking about growing up in a world where citizens were better educated, the evening news more reliable and political parties still capable of achieving great things in a bi-partisan way. There is no reason that we cannot have that again, but before casting stones at just media and oligarchy, we must all reflect hard on our role as voters, in the Cycle of Doom. If we interrupt the cycle in the most American way possible, via informed citizenship when voting, we begin our journey on the road back to respectability as a beacon of democracy.
Like I said, my agenda writing these essays, is to offer readers truth. Not one problem can be solved without it, and it all begins with us individually.
Please join me on the path of pursuing truth, and nothing but the truth. My definition below is instructive here:
All known facts presented objectively and in context. - Cobaugh
My very best for everyone’s week,
Paul