Caitlin Johnstone — How Plutocratic Media Keeps Staff Aligned With Establishment Agendas

The way I see it there are only two possible explanations for the unanimous consensus in mass media on these issues:

Explanation 1: The consensus exists because the mass media reporters are all telling the truth all the time.

OR

Explanation 2: The consensus exists because there is some kind of system in place which keeps all mass media reporters lying to us and painting a false picture about what’s going on in the world.

Those are the only two possibilities, and only one can be true, since any mixture of the two would result in the loss of consensus.

Most mainstream westerners harbor an unquestioned assumption that Explanation 1 is the only possibility.

I don't think that this binary is necessarily follows. There is at least one other alternative.

Based on my training in logic and philosophy, systems thinking, cognitive studies, and related subjects,  I think highly likely  that many if not most reporters do believe that they are telling the truth. I don't mean to imply that this covers all of them, for example, those on the payroll of intelligence services, who may believe in the cause but not the content. That this happens is no longer conspiracy theory. And a journalist doesn't have to be a bot for intel either to be so devoted to the cause of "patriotism" to find it "virtuous" to shape the narrative.

This has an explanation that can only be surfaced in the scope of this comment. It's a huge subject and one that is absolutely essential in approaching the historical dialectic.

This "paradox of truth" is the result of alternative world views. German has a term for this—Weltanschauung It is an import into English. Google Translate renders Weltanschauung as "world view," but "world view" is relatively rare in  English while Weltanschauung is common in German.

World views —Wittgenstein called them "world pictures" (Weltbilder) — are ways of "seeing as" through the lens of language, where meaning is determined largely by use in context. This can be expressed as ideology, but world views are the ground of ideologies and as such are not articulated themselves since they are the lenses through which all of us "see" the world as a system.

It's not just reporters here. Journalists are embedded in a social system. Everyone acquires a world view shaped through "nurture"—family background, education, enculturation, tradition, institutional influences, class, etc. Everyone is also influenced by nature in the sense of inherited disposition. While every individual is unique as an individual, we are "the same" as human persons in sharing "human nature."

The notion that the mind is a mirror-like reflection of "reality" is called naive realism. That is not the way it works. "Reality" is perspectival. Whoever controls the narrative controls the mass perception of reality based on the norms of the world view. "Truth" is a social phenomenon that is socially constructed.

Of course, this doesn't mean there is no truth. It only means that reaching is it limited by bounded rationality.  There is a price to pay for do so and most are unwilling to pay the price. So they go along (with group-think) to get along.

At the same time as being unique individuals and human persons (presumably sharing equal rights), humans are highly social animals and shaped by their social milieu and its influences. An individual's world view grows out of this soil, and people tend to gravitate toward others like them and affiliate with those who share similar views based on a common world view.

One of the logical functions of a world view is to provide criteria for judging. These criteria become ideological norms. They are privileged assumptions whose function is similar to definitions, axioms, postulated and stipulated rules in a formal system, forming the logical structure of the system.

In addition, there is also professional investment involved. Hiring and promotion is based on holding the "correct" positions with respect to the norm.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"— Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), ISBN 0-520-08198-6; repr. University of California Press, 1994, p. 109. (Wikiquote)

This is just the way highly organized social systems operate logically. Those people that don't fit into a system or are unwilling to conform to it are forced out of it, like parasites attacked by an immune system before they can kill the host.

So it is not surprising that most of journalists, professors, and other influencers are bots of the system.  Academic training is largely about acquiring the "normal" paradigm and being able to function seamlessly in it. That is just the way the system works. It is also a reason for system rigidity, dysfunction, recurrent breakdowns, and eventual transformation or collapse.

I think that Caitlin Johnstone would largely agree with this based on other things she has written. It is also contained to some degree in this post. I am just trying to clarify an important point that is not understood widely enough even though it is "old knowledge."

Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
How Plutocratic Media Keeps Staff Aligned With Establishment Agendas
Caitlin Johnstone