The United States of bullshit

Ask anyone from the former USSR about gaslighting. The only difference in 21st-century America is that it's the media dealing lies instead of the Politburo.

I was watching a baseball game on TV a few days ago while running through some chord melodies. It was a really nice day, and I intended to spend it just relaxing with my kids. One of the nice things about subscription TV is that it’s generally ad-free. That’s why I like watching baseball on a subscription app with my kids—there are no ads for stuff that 6 and 8-year-olds don’t need to know anything about—things that happen to be advertising mainstays on network and cable TV. Things like gambling, alcohol, blue pills, etc.

But occasionally an ad comes through on a local broadcast, and sometimes these are inappropriate. And after watching one, my 6-year-old asked me, “Dad, you’re over 40. Do you have low T? Is that why you and mommy split up?”

Head fucking exploded. That’s it. I’ve had as much snake oil as I’m going to take, without protest, from the sanctimonious, mendacious, entire planetary atmosphere of noxious hot air and bullshit that is the American mainstream media. American corporate media, which fancies itself a mediacracy, has several completely damning issues: no actual values outside of turning a buck, blatant hypocrisy, not knowing it’s size, and occupying whatever level is two floors below godawful when it comes to getting facts straight. Which fault among these is most glaring depends only on the exact source and time of day.

I’m about as far from a prude as one can get. I’m also about as close to a free-speech absolutist as one may be. But even I have my standards, especially when it comes to the information that children consume. And right now, I’m pissed. Screw anyone who hawks bullshit around kids. Of course, the media lies to us all of the time about things that are of critical importance to entire families while hawking even worse bullshit, so what should we expect?

Our mainstream media stinks. It’s a putrid mess of fetid, stinking, malodorous, self-serving bullshit for profit. And I’m done holding my nose while pretending that it doesn’t smell really bad.

What follows is a not-safe-for-work rant, if you are using a caption reader, about our self-appointed mediacracy and what drives them. R-rated for language and implied threats of Road Runner ACME anvil violence.

Our mediacracy and their corporate overlords love the mediocrity they begat and have spent decades cultivating. The unquestioning, the unenlightened, and the obedient make the best consumers of advertising for useless dietary supplements, crummy consumer products, and insurance that wouldn’t need ubiquitous ads if it were any good. That’s what the mainstream media is: a sanctimonious, self-righteous delivery system for your eyes and ears to advertisers that alleges itself to be informative.

In my life of 68 years, every major news outlet in this country has generally covered events in a manner that is most cogent and relevant to 12-year-olds. Substance? Forget about that. It’s probably above most of our audience, and besides, it’s definitely above our snowflake staff’s ability to produce. Plus, it doesn’t deliver the right kinds of people to our advertisers.

That’s true. Informed consumers are garlic and a cross to advertising agencies. And those same informed people are not overly enamored of what passes for news coverage either. So screw ‘em and go after the low-hanging fruit. Mediocrity is great for the media because it makes everything about their job—peddling bullshit to support their preferred narratives in order to deliver profits to advertisers—much easier.

This downward media paradigm is across the board, but the decline has been most precipitous in national newspapers (though, to be fair, this is mostly because TV was never that great to begin with). As far as I’m concerned, when one opens the front door to look for the daily paper on the front steps, there’s a 50/50 chance that it’s a flaming bag of shit waiting there instead.

Forget about Democrats and Republicans; it’s the mediacracy that runs things in this country anymore. This self-beatified group of self-styled sages tells us what’s good for us, who to vote for, what to eat, what’s healthy, what we should be teaching our kids, what music is good, and who the real “experts” are. They peddle nonsense along the lines of gender being more important than sex, that climate change is worse than nuclear war, and that accomplishment and merit aren’t what they are cracked up to be. They declaim to audiences that legitimate elections are illegitimate and that anyone who disagrees is a threat to democracy.

Most importantly, we should just be good and trust them without asking too many questions. Conspiracy theorist!

I’ll give the mediacracy one thing: they do not lack for moxie. Advertising revenue must be a much better incentive to produce news than honesty or integrity. Even when the media are exposed as nakedly self-serving charlatans, they just keep on plowing ahead as if they were actually still wearing underwear. If democracy dies in darkness, it must go supernova when it collapses under the weight of massive amounts of bullshit.

To wit, The New York Times runs highly detailed stories about “deep fakes” to push a narrative they know to be false under the smug, arrogant pretense of “defending democracy.” CNN and their “experts” pontificate, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, about Russian disinformation influencing elections while peddling the disinformation about a senile old man being orders of magnitude more fit to be POTUS than his opponent.

The Washington Post dismisses accurate COVID information as dangerous, conspiracy-laden nonsense while promoting disastrous economic, social, and medical responses to the pandemic that are based on zero evidence. Pravada, excuse me, NPR, can’t even get one side of a story right but has no problem compelling us to pay for the privilege of basking in the luminous radiance of their driveway moments.

ESPN personalities inveigh about integrity in athletic competition while promoting men as participants in women’s sports on a screen with a QR code on the lower left, which enables viewers to place instant bets on the games crawling across the chyron just to the right. Gambling problem? Call the 800 number. Loser.

That nickel-56 lighting up the sky is from the implosion of sanctimonious, self-serving media assholes under the weight of their own pretentiousness. No one trusts the media anymore, and they are right not to. None of this is good, and it does not make me happy. I’m just the messenger.

I just came across a piece in my inbox: Traditional media and Substack can grow together. In the piece, the author makes a case for Substack writers partnering with the usual suspects in the mediacracy to make the world a better place. By way of disclosure, I’m a hybrid writer myself. Much of what I write on Substack finds its way into a few newspapers. I’ve been a newspaper columnist and magazine feature writer for decades.

But I could not disagree more with the premise of this piece. Having the current mediacracy subsume independent writers will not make the world a better place. And the feel-good part of this piece may be, as far as I’m concerned, parked where the sun doesn’t shine. There’s nothing “feel-good” about the mainstream media.

The last thing that I, and I daresay many independent writers, want is to grant editorial control of our voices to the same nimrods who ten days ago were calling us names if we questioned the obvious age-related mental decline of the President of the United States. I, for one, refuse to “partner” with the same assholes who worked with our government, in violation of our First Amendment, to suppress speech on social media and badmouthed platforms like Substack every chance they got. Every person on X, Substack, or anywhere else who questioned the mediacracy’s narratives surrounding COVID, election interference, Biden’s health, and much more, was a target for their mendacious slagging.

Screw that. I’d rather remain of modest means and relatively unknown, with the unfettered ability to stick to my guns. It took a while. But Thomas Paine is now venerated. There will be veneration (and vilification) aplenty, I think, down the road. All it will take is some time.

I was a university lecturer in physics and astronomy for over two decades. During my career in science, I dedicated most of my time outside of classrooms and laboratories to rooting out and exposing pseudoscience, bad science, and bullshit hiding behind some imprimatur of respectability. I took on chiropractors and 9/11 conspiracy theorists, purveyors of Bigfoot nonsense and the unregulated supplement industry, cold fusion, and awful forensic "science," which was actually about a half click away from Voodoo.

One of the reasons that I chose science as a career in the first place was that it was ultimately a method of seeking something for which I have high regard—the truth. I’m for the truth, whether it’s pleasant or not. The truth will set you free. I despise bullshit. I always have and always will. It’s just the way that I’m wired, and I’m just fine checking out that way, even if it means that I’m headed for the same type of memorial service as Thomas Paine.

I always thought that the world would improve in this regard over time. Imagine my bitter disappointment at where we now find ourselves. It’s bad, but I get it. When people figure out that a good chunk of what they’ve been spoon-fed by the media is bullshit, it’s much easier to simply disregard everything that the media says.

I used to work with a number of scientists who emigrated from the former Soviet bloc after its dissolution. One of the things that I noticed about these folks, all of whom were very bright and good at their particular jobs, was that they harbored some strange quirks in their thinking. One insisted that it was dangerous to live in a house below an altitude of 5000’ or above 7000.’ Another insisted that it was possible to detect small amounts of fissile material hidden in cargo containers from satellites in Earth orbit. I briefly had a colleague who used to talk about the Jovian moons of Saturn. When I corrected him, he went off about things that the authorities were hiding from us. More than one of them believed in nonsense like cold fusion and lots of medical quackery.

This is what happens when you gaslight people for long enough. Nothing is sacrosanct—not even things that you can see with your own eyes or measure with your own instruments. The Soviet government abused its own citizens so badly through gaslighting and misinformation that, after a while, even the brightest among them had difficulty discerning between what was real and what was not.

The playbill for The United States of bullshit. This is a disgrace.

That’s where we are in America right now. The only difference in 21st-century America is that it's the mediacracy doing the gaslighting instead of the Politburo. At least the Soviet government believed enough in Marxism to justify peddling lies for the greater good. Our mediacracy does it for advertising money. Scum. I’ll grab the pitchfork; you grab the tar and feathers.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.