A Swan Song for the MSM

The Citizen Journalist Will Write Its Epitaph

Photo by Siim Lukka via Unsplash

It is not an exaggeration to say that the mainstream media is nearing its inevitable doom, and it’s no longer a question of if they/it will die, but when. In some cases, the death certificates have already been signed.

The collapsing of an industry always has dire consequences and isn’t typically an event that one feels compelled to cheer; however, there are few industries more worthy of such a gruesome and undignified demise as modern mainstream journalism.

As you might have guessed, the schadenfreude most of us citizen journalists are currently experiencing in the independent or “decentralized” media space is palpable.

Back in 1996, the author, mystic and psychonaut Terrance McKenna predicted the inevitable demise of “office culture” and the mainstream media in particular.

“Mass media is finished… mass media is one-to-many communication, and what the internet offers is any-to-any.”

His prediction is proving to be right on the money.

Over the last several weeks, widely recognized media organizations, such as the Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, NBC News, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, and Business Insider, have either experienced significant workforce reductions or have been forced to the verge of extinction.

Buzzfeed, the outlet responsible for breaking the Steele Dossier—one of the most notorious instances of fake news—completely abolished its news division in 2023.

Last month, the L.A. Times laid off 25% of its already-decimated newsroom in just one day, just months after it laid off 13% of its workforce.

In this SubStack, we’ll go over the many such cases of mainstream media implosion, observe the history between spooks and the media and dissect a recent video from the most lamentable tragedy of a journalist, Taylor Lorenz.

A Most Anticipated Funeral

When Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign came up against the full weight of establishment power aligned behind Hillary Clinton, it represented more than just another contest between Republicans and Democrats—it represented a confrontation between the once-voiceless masses and a ruling political class.

It also served to showcase how entangled the media had become with the Western establishment. You don’t have to like Donald Trump to understand why this is dangerous.

America cannot be truly governed by the “will of the people” so long as there exists a permanent political class in Washington DC that are beholden to special interests.

Similarly, a free press cannot carry out its vital societal functions when it’s executives incentivize promoting establishment agendas over factual reporting. This is exactly why an acrimonious relationship between independent and mainstream media exists today.

In case you were wondering how that power struggle is going, just take a look at the state of both media today.

The independent or “decentralized” media, despite the powers that be doing just about everything imaginable to impede its success, continues to grow and thrive.

Journalists in this space have had to contend with demonetization, deplatforming, public ridicule and even allegations of treason for spreading foreign State disinformation—all in their effort to provide a more grounded counterbalance to the woefully biased mainstream narratives.

It’s worth noting that independent media is opposed by Big-Tech and the major financial institutions as well.

And yet, despite these challenges, the industry continues to grow at a rapid pace—that is the power of the truth, and a testament to how thirsty the American public is for it.

On the contrary, the mainstream or “centralized” media (MSM) has been on life support for some time, and even as I write these words, the cold, stale breath of the reaper is blowing down its neck.

Donald Trump and the rise of populism is often billed as the sole cause for the slow death of the MSM, but that explanation is only offered because the nauseating mainstream journalists of today are completely averse to any kind of self reflection.

If anything, Donald Trump temporarily saved the cable TV punditry single handedly. Because of him, once-disinterested liberals became maniacally obsessed with politics in the age of “the great tyrant” Donald Trump, and began flocking back to mainstream staples like CNN and MSNBC, both of which were hemorrhaging viewers before Trump.

But even that surge was too little, too late, and like all sugar highs, it would wane with time.

The MSM was terminal well before Donald trump. Barack Obama knew as much when he signed the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016, and established the Global Engagement Center to:

To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.

Labeling any incriminating evidence of establishment corruption “Russian disinformation'“ would serve as an effective go-to strategy for years—a strategy that still persists to this day.

As long as I’m using terms like “Independent Media” and “Mainstream Media,” we might as well define those terms clearly.

Back in 2017, there were 6 major conglomerates that lorded over all mainstream media, be it broadcast, print, internet, radio, or film— very little existed outside of their umbrellas.

The “Big Six” at that time were Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, Sony, National Amusements (now Paramount Global), and Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp.

WebFX

While it may have seemed like these big six were competing, the truth was that even these major conglomerates were mutually owned by the world's largest institutional investors—asset managers like Blackrock Inc., the Vanguard Group, State Street and Berkshire Hathaway—all of whose representatives remain regular fixtures at elitist policy think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum. (#,#,#,#,#)

So really, the “big six” are just the propaganda arm of the big 1—the Western establishment, the system of systems.

This is what we mean by centralized media.

Any media existing outside of these conglomerates could be seen as the decentralized media, where there are no emissaries of the think tank class telling journalists what to write and how to frame it.

Historically, the primary mandate of a free press was to act as a counterbalance to keep rampant establishment powers in check, but today, the media is not only failing in its role of keeping the establishment in check, the media IS the establishment.

Instead of acting as a counterbalance, today’s press has become little more than the propaganda arm of the state, and it’s working directly in tandem with the United States Intelligence apparatus and the Military Industrial Complex.

Most people understand that there is something wrong with our society, though they can’t quite put their finger on the cause. There’s no shortage of ideas about how to improve the world, yet nothing ever changes.

Our collective attention is constantly being redirected from one issue to another so frequently and fruitlessly that the endless stream of corporate junk-food media begins to appeal more to a weary mind than solving complex social issues and addressing the rot within our own government.

Political scientist Bernard C. Cohen said it best in his 1963 book, The Press and Foreign Policy, when he famously wrote:

"The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about." (#)

The MSM was very successful in shepherding Americas attention for the better part of the 20th century, but things would eventually become a little more complicated.

Today, as the West has moved into a more domestically turbulent era, and people are starting to realize that there’s more to the corporate media than simply turning a profit.

This internal turbulence had been simmering in the background of Western society for decades, but came to the forefront of public consciousness in the wake of both Brexit and the rise of a populist, anti-establishment leader in Donald Trump.

For many Americans, this was when the veil first started to lift, when the friendly faces of their local news team were suddenly conduits of social pressure.  

The Sad State of the Media Today

Outside of corporate influence—and its concerning relationship with the intelligence community—the MSM today is plagued by rampant mediocrity.

What passes for journalism these days contains little to no actual value, it does not offer what most people are looking for, though it’s great if all you’re looking for is substance-free affirmations of the modern liberal cult-of-personality talking points—the same is true of Fox News’ catering to garden variety conservatives.

The emphasis is highlighting our differences and smugly asserting why “our team” is better than “their team.” If you don’t believe me just try to sit through five minutes of Joy Reid or Jen Psaki’s god awful MSNBC shows (I actually try to do this semi regularly, it takes a strong stomach). The same was true of most Fox News hosts.

I understand that it’s the nature of the beast, and that there’s a market for partisan focused news, but it seems like that’s all there is today. You get establishment democrat talking points or establishment republican talking points.

Additionally, you’ll notice that the Fox News crowd won’t touch the difficult, but important topics you see thoroughly discussed here on Badlands Media, and similarly, you won't see the corporate hacks at CNN reporting on things you might see on The Grayzone or Consortium News.

Even though these mainstream outlets appear to be offering two opposing perspectives, they’re really just two heads on the same wretched snake.

It’s also worth noting that, with corruption abounding in the West, the MSM can’t really afford to hire journalists worthy of the title; effective journalists of integrity are a literal security risk for the security state.

Mainstream, historically spook-friendly outlets like the Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Atlantic tend to hire people who are already naturally inclined to support the narratives handed down from on high.

These people live and die by the modern liberal orthodoxy; their primary skillset involves venomously seeking out anyone on the internet who deviates from this orthodoxy, and doing whatever they can to ruin said persons life.

One of these individuals, who’s decided she’s the quintessential millennial journalist success story of our age, is former New York Times and Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz.

Lorenz began her career on the social media beat, engaging in a sort of “tattletale journalism,” which is just about the worst way I could imagine breaking into the industry. She oozes all of the worst aspects of modern leftist culture: she’s encouraged teen TikTok influencers to attack their peers by publicly branding them as racist or misogynist, and has even tried to turn Kellyanne Conway’s underage daughter into a left-wing celebrity to instigate a family feud.

Lorenz gained a greater degree of notoriety with the American Right after she doxed the popular account Libs of TikTok, and then had the audacity to go on a media tour complaining about online harassment in its wake.

A common theme with journalists like Lorenz is the complete inability to self reflect or consider whether or not they are deserving of the ire they’ve invited onto themselves.

Taylor Lorenz, whose self-importance has reached amazing new heights, went on TikTok to give a sort of “State of the Media” address recently. In the video, she talks about how her entire generation has completely destroyed an industry. I think it's really worth listening to what she has to say, not because there's any wisdom in her words, but because it perfectly encapsulates the rotted pathologies that have led to the collapse of her niche of media.

The video is included below, but I will quote from it for those of you who listen to the audio version.

She starts the video off by saying,

The entire journalism industry is basically in a freefall. Today. The Los Angeles Times laid off 115 employees. They wiped out their entire DC bureau in an election year. They laid off pretty much all of their sports teams. They killed their entire tech and business section. They laid off breaking news writers, social media editors, the list goes on. But what's really dark is this is just the latest in months and months and months of layoffs in the media industry. In fact, tens of thousands of journalists have been laid off in the past year. Major media companies like BuzzFeed News have completely shuttered their news operations. Time Magazine also just laid off a ton of people, and Sports Illustrated basically shut down last week. Pretty much the entire digital media ecosystem that myself and a lot of other millennial journalists came up with has been completely hollowed out. And it's not just digital media. 

Personally, there are few things as morbidly satisfying as hearing Taylor Lorenz’s unbearable voice utter the words:

“[…]the entire digital media ecosystem that myself and a lot of other millennial journalists came up in has been completely hollowed out.”

She’s actually speaking the truth here, something that is uncharacteristic of corporate liberal journos, but it does still occur in nature, albeit infrequently. This is 1,000% what is happening right now, and as sad as it is to see an industry fail, it is happening for good and valid reasons.

She goes on:

[…] Not just digital media sites. Local news has been obliterated. The newspaper industry is cratering. Radio is essentially dead, aside from NPR, which has been gutted. Meanwhile, hundreds of workers at Condé Nast, the parent company of pretty much every major magazine from GQ to Vogue to The New Yorker to Vanity Fair, are on strike because they're also facing impending layoffs. Even mainstream national media outlets owned by billionaires like The Washington Post, where I work, and The Atlantic, where I used to work, have done layoffs. If you're a young journalist, there's almost no onramp to traditional journalism. Even if you do get a job, journalist salaries have been stagnant and even declined. And by the way, we don't make that much to begin with. I don't think people understand how bad the world would be without journalists. 

I’d hate to burst Taylor’s bubble, but we all know very well how bad the world would be without journalists—that’s kind of the exact predicament we’re in today: Lorenz and her ilk are not actually journalists.

They do not perform the journalistic function in our society.

The journalistic function—and if you go and look at what people for hundreds of years have been describing as the core purpose of the press—the reason there's a freedom of the press guaranteed in the First Amendment is that we need a mechanism to confront, undermine, subvert and check institutions of authority and the most powerful people in our country.

Taylor Lorenz has never challenged or exposed any consequential lies, dark secrets, or corruption in the CIA, the FBI, Wall Street or the military industrial complex like Julian Assange or Gary Webb have. No, she’s more concerned with trying to get people canceled for saying the word “retard.”

Still, I really shouldn’t rag on her so hard. Taylor Lorenz herself isn’t the problem, she’s just a symptom of the problem. The problem is what the industry has devolved into. It is anti-journalism. Their focus today is on propagandizing the public and policing thought.

But the news is changing.

We Are the News Now

Among these changes is the rise of the citizen journalist.

Citizen Journalism is based upon public citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information."(#)

Courtney C. Radsch defines citizen journalism as: 

“… an alternative and activist form of news gathering and reporting that functions outside mainstream media institutions, often as a response to shortcomings in the professional journalistic field, that uses similar journalistic practices but is driven by different objectives and ideals and relies on alternative sources of legitimacy than traditional or mainstream journalism" — from The Revolutions will be Blogged: Cyberactivism and the 4th Estate in Egypt

There’s nothing that the Western establishment fears more than the success of a capable and honest decentralized media. They know that a self-organizing industry of citizen journalists operating on principle would render the mainstream obsolete.

This threat has led to the creation of an entire industry whose sole purpose is to cripple independent media and snuff out all dissent. This industry is now popularly referred to as the Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC,) which is a topic that merits its own SubStack post.

You could see the emergence of this CIC as an indicator of panic, a sign that the Western establishment isn’t quite as invincible as previously believed.

They’re afraid, and they should be afraid … not only of the decentralized media, but of its audience, because at the end of the day it’s the audience that will decide who has won this war.

More and more people are waking up to the game with every major psyop, false flag, or piece of deceptive reporting. And once you wake up, there’s no going back to sleep

Despite the full weight of establishment powers being arrayed in opposition to it, the decentralized media continues to grow at a rapid pace—that is the power of the truth, and a testament to how thirsty the American public is for it.

The smug talking heads in the MSM would have you believe that Journalism is something complex and far beyond the grasp of the average, untrained citizen. 

This notion is absurd. 

Journalism is not some fine art. A good piece of honest journalism is not something that will be marveled at for centuries, like a painting or a poem—it simply serves as a means to convey information to the public accurately and without bias. 

It’s not complicated.

Yet the corporate media has continuously failed to provide this simple, yet vital function, so the American people are doing it themselves.

The corporate news media is dying, and the citizen journalist will write its epitaph.

We are the news now.

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Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.

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