In journalism, what is assumed is more important than what is said.

Imagine two articles about a new technology that measures our vital signs, then shares it with some company, which analyses the data, and gives us feedback on our risks of developing significant disease.

In the corporate media, this is presented as a triumph of science, technology and social organisation.

In the people’s press, meanwhile, it is presented as a threat to our privacy and the intrusion of the corporate sphere into the social.

In this hypothetical however, we fail to notice a very subtle way in which both articles share the same underlying assumption, namely that the adoption of this technology is inevitable. (At Technical Politics, we are no doubt as guilty of being drawn into this paradigm as anyesone else.)

There are two things going on here that the discerning reader should be aware of: agenda-setting and determinism.

Corporate media uses agenda-setting effectively all the time to achieve its poorly-disguised political aims, and has made increasing use of it in recent years, particularly following election of Donald Trump. This marks a change in approach: the corporate media appears to be realising the colossal folly of its 2016 strategy of giving Donald J. Trump maximum airtime to fool the GOP into nominating the most “unelectable” candidate. Rather than running negative stories on Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán or Marine Le Pen, it has taken simply to ignoring them; likewise with many other political figures of a nationalist, economic nationalist or conservative hue. Better simply to ignore politicians you don’t agree with.

Another way in which the people’s press buys into the globalist agenda is to accept their determinism. From their perspective, it does not matter whether you think that some new measure is good or bad. What matters is whether you believe that it is inevitable. If the people’s journalists accept this assumption – if they buy into the view that ever greater globalism, centralisation, social control, population control and so on are inevitable, even if they are criticising it, then they are doing the globalists’ dirty work for them.

If, on the other hand, the people’s press remains within the age-old paradigm that faith, flag, family, community, localities, nations, self-determination, boundaries, tradition, localism, rules-based property ownership, free commerce, self-defence, conflict and conflict resolution, unmediated interpersonal relations, personal autonomy, resilience, human dignity, respect for others and mutual trust are natural and fundamental aspects of human relations, and refuses to buy into the determinism of the left, then it will be far more effective in undercutting the corporate media’s subversion of society.

Article Licence: CC BY-ND 4.0