In Defense of Consuming Corporate Media

One of the central lessons of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War — ostensibly about war strategy but applicable more widely — is the importance of knowing one’s enemy.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

As I write this, a slobbering interview of Nancy Pelosi conducted by MSNBC Race Lady (as Tucker Carlson affectionately named her) plays in the background.

I regularly monitor enemy communications — MSNBC news-actor soliloquies, Swamp creature interviews in NPR, White House and Pentagon press briefings, etc. — not because I believe there is any intellectual nourishment to be had by consuming the propaganda, but because it’s critical that we on the other side understand the narratives they craft and the purposes they serve so that we place ourselves in the best position to counter them.

The reach and influence of the legacy media are rapidly diminishing, but it still enjoys impressive reach with certain segments of the American population, particularly among the governing class in D.C.

Yes, Rachel Maddow is an unbecoming lesbian and congenital liar, but she’s almost perhaps the single most influential pioneer of the Russiagate conspiracy theory that has shaped the public discourse since 2016 and ultimately may have cost Trump the 2020 presidency via censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story on the grounds that it was “Russian disinformation” (it was not).

The value of monitoring the corporate media is increased by the infiltration of the likes of the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC by Deep State actors. These so-called journalistic institutions, once ostensibly in opposition to state abuses of power, are now rats’ nests of “retired,” “former” Deep State spooks who never actually retire. Through these mediums and the reliable mouthpieces who appear on them, the Deep State often rolls out its latest narratives and issues threats, such as when Chuck Schumer openly threatened the sitting president with retribution for contradicting the Russiagate narrative in January 2017.

In the same vein, one doesn’t watch North Korean state television to find out what’s actually going on in the Hermit Kingdom. The value, the reason to tune in, is to understand how the state is posturing itself in order to better understand its motivations and likely courses of action in any given context. Effective counter-strategizing requires it.