Life and death in the fake news business
By Jon Rappoport
I wrote this piece based on my knowledge of mainstream
reporters and their work, their lives, their forgotten hopes, their
realizations (in some cases) that they're trapped in a system.
Most of them don't want to get out. They become creatures of the night they once wanted to illuminate.
You're a mainstream reporter striving to stay afloat. The
word has drifted down from the top that this is the season for
inflicting wounds on Donald Trump, no matter what, no matter what
happened or didn't happen on a rumpled bed in a hotel room in Moscow, no
matter what Putin did or didn't do to influence the election, no matter
who leaked the DNC emails to WikiLeaks, no matter what Michael Flynn
said or didn't say to a Russian on the phone, no matter who or what
James Comey is fronting for; every real or possible or non-existent
detail needs to be blown up into a gigantic scandal of the moment, this
president has to go, and your assignment is to keep cutting him, it's
beyond the point where anybody in your business cares who he is and what
he's done and what he's doing, so pump up the hysteria, shove in the
blade wherever you can, THIS is how your success will be measured, you
want a light to shine on you, so attack, attack without let-up, don't
think, don't think about what's going on here, the important thing is:
The news business is: careers.
Having a career is life. Losing it is death.
Your career is on the line.
It doesn't matter what you've done over the years, what you've written, what you've said, this is the big one.
You can't lose your career.
You know what losing it means.
It means the end.
Losing your career is hanging around a bar until closing time
and silently cursing the boss and the other reporters who are climbing
faster up the ladder, it's worrying about where the next story is coming
from and how it can zing the editor's brain so he grunts with
satisfaction like an ape on a little throne, it's all the while knowing
that NO ONE at the newspaper or the network can put out a piece that
will cause serious ripples in the behind-the-curtain power structure,
and you know that because in the past, in what was supposed to be your
finest hour, you carefully peeled just one glove from the body of a
scandal that should have been stripped entirely naked for the public to
see and then you were stopped; suddenly, for you, losing a career is
desperately clinging to the biased political stance of the news
division, clinging to it as if it were a message from God, it's taking a
piece of info that smells like a rotten slug from an anonymous source
and turning it into caviar because it decorates a story that has no
foundation whatsoever, it's pruriently hinting in a story that the
enemy, as defined by the editorial staff and the publisher and the
corporation that owns the soul of the publisher, is a despicable traitor
who should be carted off in the middle of the night and dumped on a
boat to the 10th circle of Hell, it's being wired into who at the news
division is moving up and who is moving down, who is the teacher's pet
and who is the bad boy at the back of the room, it's scouting out jobs
that are coming up at rival networks, it's knowing when dreaded staff
layoffs are emerging over the horizon and how flimsy the severance
packages will be, it's grinding on preposterous assignments that have no
function other than filling space, it's pretending one political party
or another will stave off the end of civilization, it's your paycheck
that handles the mortgage and the kid's college fund although how does
the kid get into college when he can't even write a coherent paragraph
unless he plagiarizes it from Wikipedia, it's finally getting your teeth
into a good story only to be told there'll be no follow-up and you know
exactly why because you know which person or corporation or advertiser
would be rammed into handcuffs if you dug down a foot deeper, it's
forgetting you were once smart and sharp and alert and ready to roll as a
member of the fourth estate on a mission to protect the public from the
raging excesses of government, it's sitting for a half-hour with a
Congressman and listening to him lie so extensively you can't believe he
knows he's lying anymore because if he did know, how could he
consciously keep up the charade every waking moment, it's looking at THE
elite anchor of your network and knowing he's a complete cartoon of an
ego on parade, it's wondering how the public even in the depths of its
trance can believe what is coming out of the mouth of that ego, it's
lying in bed at night not recalling whether you took a sleeping pill,
it's tearing the cap off a bottle of antidepressant with shaking fingers
after coming out of the drug store where you filled the prescription
and swallowing a pill and three hours later sitting in your
work-cubbyhole thinking with great and rising surety that you want to
burn down the newsroom, it's standing in the kitchen of your silent
apartment remembering you wrote a paper in college about the 1776
revolution although you can't bring back one word of it now, it's
rubbing elbows with celebrities at a cocktail party on the Upper East
Side and sensing a few B-listers are giving you a quick once-over to
gauge whether you can do them any good and deciding you can't, it's
having a dream you're drowning in your bathtub and your editor is
standing above you grinning with pistols in his hands, it's sitting in
the antiseptic office of a therapist who is telling you that getting a
dog as a friend will rescue your state of mind, it's standing in the
newsroom on election night watching so-called analysts on big screens
talking numbers and trends and possible outcomes and you're thinking
you're supposed to be on the screen yourself but it hasn't worked out
that way, it's wondering whether selling Porches or hawking real estate
would be a better option at this point, it's wondering by what method
you would commit the oh so grand gesture of suicide, because it should
be grand, it should have some significance in the scheme of things, it
can't be a mere disappearance, can it, there would at least be a need
for some sort of plan, would it be gun or slit wrist or rope or
leap---and then you laugh---AND WHY DOES IT SOUND LIKE MUSIC---and then,
THEN you recall that in your desk drawer there is a fat folder full of
documents proving a major prime-cut number one advertiser for your
newspaper, a major advertiser and a colossus apparently beyond the reach
of any president with its far-flung global interests in brain-crippling
pharmaceuticals and carcinogenic pesticides and real estate and banking
is also---and how perfect is THIS---is also a giant HOG-RAISING FACTORY
(millions and millions of oinking pigs) that has polluted the soil of
half a southern state with hundreds of toxic chemicals and untold
numbers and types of germs and the corporation has bribed its way into
permission to create gigantic hog-feces lagoons that sit out in the
sunlight year after year festering and percolating and seeping down into
the groundwater and poisoning every form of life, and you sit there and
nod to yourself and open the drawer and take out that fat folder of
documents and you find a piece of blank paper and without thinking you
write a brief note of resignation to your ape editor and you stand up
and walk out of the newsroom carrying the folder and you hit the night
street and walk along with the surging crowds and you feel your blood
coursing through your veins and you realize there are a few tears on
your cheeks and you grin a savage grin and head home to write the story
that will rip that hog-colossus a deep wound and you look up at the moon
and a shiver goes through your body, it's almost midnight but it's not
your midnight, all of a sudden a cockeyed sun is coming up for you
between big buildings and through some strange unfathomable equation
you're hitting your stride because you just lost your career and a new
and unnameable SPACE is swimming into view, and you're already writing
the first paragraph of the REAL story and THIS is the drama you were
imagining so long ago, so long ago when you believed in working a real
beat as a real newsman...
OR...
IS THAT ALL A FANTASY, MR. NEWSMAN?
YOUR CHOICE.
YOUR CHAPTER ONE.
OR YOUR END.
YOUR CHOICE.
It's life or death in the news business.
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