cover photo from the book Looking Forward to Being Attacked. LOL, whole book has crazy pics. Classic!

What if a nuclear bomb killed millions and CNN didn’t report it?

The media are quasi-governmental organs, predictably predictable and predictably dishonest. The truth is not in them.

It is a press of two tiers, the establishment media and Twitter, with sharply differing narratives. The brightest get their news from Twitter and then read the New York Times to see how the paper of record will prevaricate.

The major outlets consolidate themselves into CNN perfect lockstep.

Reporters understand the rules perfectly.

• Don’t say anything remotely interpretable as racist – unless it’s convenient, in which case do it unabashedly.
• Women are sacrosanct. Sometimes.
• Do not offend the sexually baroque.
• The endless wars get minimal coverage and almost nothing that would upset the public.

None of this is accidental.

You don’t need to ban unwelcome books, because the only people who read them already agree with them.

You don’t need to kick in doors at three in the morning to seize forbidden typewriters, people might revolt against that sort of thing. Just keep prohibited topics off the networks and out of the papers. It is enough.

Lateral communication

It amounts to distributed cognitive stratification.

Distributed cognition is a theory of human cognition that describes how information processing is dispersed across people and their workplace, their technologies, and their social organization and how information processing evolves over time. Essentially, distributed cognition describes how information is transformed and propagated throughout a system. It is one of a family of social cognitive theories known as situativity theory, all involving interactions between people, their environment, and the resources at hand.

Before the internet, people who wanted a high level of intellectual community had to move to a large city or live on the campus of a good university. Magazines of small circulation delivered by snail mail helped a bit, but not much. Today, email, specialized websites, put people of like mind in Canberra, Buenos Aires, Bali, and Toronto into the same living room, so to speak.

But, what if a nuclear bomb killed millions and it wasn’t reported on CNN?

The End?

NOTE: I greatly mangled, or mangled greatly, the many of the sentences and paragraphs from an article by Fred Reed that I since can’t relocate. Although his was on a different subject, the CNN’ity of his commentary on journalism gave me some further thoughts and this, is them.