Fred-on-Everything on the controlled lockstep USSA mass media (and, I might add, the fake alternate media as well).  Fred knows the score!
Balkanizing the News
         Separation of People and State
         December 12, 2014
It is curious:  Though I have spent a lifetime in journalism, I do not read a newspaper, not  the 
New York Times nor the 
Washington Post nor the 
Wall Street Journal. Nor do I have television  service. 
         Why? Because,  having worked in that restaurant, I know  better than to eat there. The  foregoing media are quasi-governmental  organs, predictably predictable and  predictably dishonest. The truth is  not in them. 
         Within the news  racket, this isn’t news. More interesting is  that a large part of the intelligent  population agrees. We now have a  press of two tiers, the establishment media  and the net, with sharply  differing narratives. 
The internet is now primary. The bright get their news from around  the web and then read the 
New York Times to see how the paper of record will pevaricate. People increasingly judge the media by the  web, not the web by the media. 
         The major outlets  (this will not be a blinding insight) as  always are in near-lockstep—that is,  controlled.  Reporters understand  the  rules perfectly. You do not, not ever, criticize Israel. You don’t  say anything  remotely interpretable as racist. Women are sacrosanct. Do  not offend the sexually  baroque. The endless wars get minimal coverage  and almost nothing that would  upset the public. Huge military  contracts get almost no mention. 
         None of this is  accidental.
         It is well and  slickly done. We have all heard Lincoln’s  dictum, “You can fool all of the  people some of the time, and some of  the people all of the time, but you can’t  fool all of the people all of  the time.” Being a pol, he didn’t add the  crucial, “But you can fool  enough of the people enough of the time.” Here is  the secret. 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.
         Or was enough.   It was enough in part because there were no  means of lateral communication among the  public. CBS could put its view  of the world on your screen and, though in  principle you could write  the network a letter which someone might read, you  had no access to  differing views, and no way of knowing what other viewers  thought.  Bingo.
         This system is  breaking down under the onslaught of the  internet. Papers are losing both  credibility and circulation. So are  the networks.
         Race is the  obvious example of the decline in control. The  spin and censorship have become  so heavy-handed as to be comic. For  example, there recently appeared in the St.  Louis 
Post-Dispatch a  story recounting that three, er, teens  had beaten a man to death with  hammers. (By now, everyone knows that when a  writer says “teens,” feral  blacks are meant.) Predictably the police chief  discounted racial  motives, though obviously those were the only motives. While  the 
Post-Dispatch is a third-rate  paper, it closely follows the rules of the 
Times et al.
         
However, readers on the paper’s site who commented  on the story  overwhelmingly expressed anger that the racial provenance  of the killing was  being covered up. One pointed out that one sees  headlines, “White Cop Kills  Unarmed Black,” but never “Blacks Kill  Unarmed White Man,” which is what  happened. 
         Here is a stark  example of the evolving two tiers of the news business. Editorially, the 
Post-Dispatch  peddles the mandatory  narrative while what appear to be a large  majority of its readers know it is  lying.  Readers, seeing the comments  of  other readers, learn that they are not alone in their disgust:  Lateral  communication. This may have consequences. 
         Papers do not like  this at all. It seems that they are  beginning to pull their comment columns.  Few dare publish views that  contradict the anointed  story line. With respect to race, the comments  reveal a very real and major  racial anger that does not involve only a  small number of KKK members. 
         Barely possibly,  papers will be pushed into, or at least  toward, honesty if they want to keep their readership. As I was writing  this, a friend sent me a  link to 
a  new Post-Dispatch story  about a Bosnian woman beaten unconscious and left  beside the road by  several blacks. The story actually said “blacks.” An almost  unheard of  admission.
         Another problem  that the internet poses for papers is the  divide between the intelligent and  the rest. Again we see two opposed  poles, though in this case blending imperceptibly into one another. The  major  media are not comfortable with intelligence. Television is worst,  the medium of  the illiterate, barely literate, stupid, uneducated, and  uninterested. It  cannot afford to air much that might puzzle these  classes. 
         Newspapers can  assume that their subscribers can at least  read but, intelligence being  pyramidal in distribution, have to focus  of the lower end. They also have to  avoid offending the advertisers,  the politically correct, or the corporate  ownership.
         By contrast, web  sites have few of these problems. Since  they aggregate their readership from  the whole planet, they do not have  to concern themselves with grocery ads in  St. Louis.  They cost little  to run. They  do not need the bottom end of the distribution. And they  have become multitudinous. Collectively you might call them "a free  press."
         There are for  example 
Taki’s Magazine,   leaning hard to the political Right but thoughtful, beautifully  written,  fearless, and possessed of a beguiling aristocratic  snottiness; the 
Unz Review, leaning hard in all directions at  once but written by and for a cognitive elite; 
Anti-War.com,  not sucking up to military industry; 
Tom  Dispatch, extraordinarily informed analyst of imperial policy; 
Counterpunch, hard Left but highly  intelligent, and the 
Drudge Report, half  grocery-store tabloid and half unintimidatable teller-like-it-is, sort of  America’s thermometer. 
         These and  countless others are all over the spectrum, any  spectrum, every spectrum, off  spectrum, but in most cases assume a  post-graduate intelligence and knowledge.  No newspaper of which I am  aware comes close.
         It amounts to  distributed cognitive stratification. 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, and list  serves put  people of like mind in Canberra, Buenos Aires, Bali, and Toronto in  the  same living room, so to speak. 
         Which we all know  already. But what does this globalization  do to newspapers? How can they  compete for the intelligent market? Or  for readers who simply do not believe  them? They are dull because they  have to be, bland because they must avoid  offending anyone, controlled  because they can be. They write to the least  common denominator of  their clientele because they have to be comprehensible to   non-specialist readers and, in the UnitedStates, are  quasi-governmental.  (Note that the decade’s biggest story, Edward  Snowden, was broken by a  Brazilian reporter in an English paper.)
         The future? Good  question. A reasonable guess:  We will see  growing global intellectual electro-Balkanization. Declining   circulation of newspapers as fewer see any reason to read them.  The  separation of people and state. Television  becoming even more of a  cultural slum, if that is possible. Decreasing ability  of the  guberno-media complex (I actually said that, didn’t I?) to control   opinion. Because of lateral communication, growing ability of voiceless  groups  to realize that they are numerous and have interests in common.  It’s a new ball  game.
http://www.fredoneverything.net/TwoTiers.shtml