The Functionality of Petty Liars Like George Santos and Jayson Blair
In the aftermath of the two great propaganda operations of our era — Iraq WMD claims and the dismissal of pandemic lab origins — the media focus on the lies of bit players to avoid a reckoning.
Ben Bagdikian, the late author of The Media Monopoly, would talk about how Big Media will sometimes try to gain credibility by going after small time corruption — by exposing a small business that’s cutting corners or the like — while letting the big fish off the hook.
The two most monstrous edifices of lies that enveloped US culture through media platforms in my adult life were:
The claim, which peaked in 2003, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The notion that the Covid pandemic, which turned billions of lives upside down, could not have had lab origin.
Both of these had various corollaries and were associated with other Big Lies: that the US government was moral and upholding international law in invading Iraq, that the murderous sanctions in the years prior to the invasion were justifiable and so on. And in the second case, that the actions of various officials and organizations like the WHO were based on honest scientific assessments in pursuit of the public good.
But those were the two cores.
The media and political system has ways of distracting and defending itself. Big Media mouthpieces like Lester Holt continued lauding fraudulent figures like Anthony Fauci as he left office even though the structure of his lies, like planting pivotal stories in the media and then citing them in interviews, was remarkably similar to that of Dick Cheney.
Another way of letting the system off the hook after it lied us into a catastrophe is to focus on falsifications of small time liars as Bagdikian suggested.
It’s become the media obsession du jour that George Santos lied about his resume. By focusing on this, Big Media attempt to paint themselves as upholders of the truth, and by inference, give a measure of credibility, at least relatively speaking, to other lying political figures from Biden on down.
Indeed, in a culture drenched with useless people who are famous for being famous and which operates on lies, it’s almost fitting that someone should become a celebrity for lying.
Santos now is playing a similar role to that of the long forgotten Jayson Blair, pictured above. In May of 2003 Blair resigned from the New York Times following charges of plagiarism and other malfeasance in stories he filed for the Times.
And back then, media was abuzz with what a crooked journalist Blair was. This had the effect of distracting the public mind from methodically scrutinizing the lies around the Iraq invasion, which was completed the prior month.
Focusing on relatively inconsequential lies of petty crooks is one tool of the overall political media system to obscure and distract in desperate attempts to maintain some measure of legitimacy it in no way deserves.
Another good post. Thanks for writing it.
One thing did strike me oddly, though. When you spoke of "the two great propaganda operations of our era " - the campaign to demonize Russia, in preparation for the U.S. proxy war against it, stands out as a glaring omission .
As a more than 5-decades long dissident, anti-war / peace activist (and also small-d democrat, critic of the corporatocracy's imperialism), I've been watching U.S. propaganda campaigns for a very long time. I thought the run-up to the Iraq invasion was as bad as it could get, as all the mainstream media parroted claims, of non-existent threats, that even I had already known had been proven false.
Yet I've never seen anything as sweeping, in its breadth, scale, intensity or obvious success as the campaign by U.S. neocons (in both sides of the duopoly) to demonize Russia, thus ensuring broad public acceptance for the U.S. - provoked proxy war against it in Ukraine. There are of course two aspects of most such propaganda. One is the active planting of false claims and simplistic fables (e.g., "The evil Putin gave us Donald Trump and is on a quest to build an empire by swallowing up one nation after another"); and the other is in the censorship - the suppression of any factual reporting that doesn't line up with that narrative. Both aspects are in full force. The reason that most people now, apparently, even the ones considering themselves the most 'liberal' or 'progressive' in values, now gladly cheerlead for war, is that they have had a steady dose of anti-Russia propaganda without any antidote that might come in the writings and broadcast of people like former U.S. officials Ray McGovern, Ambassador Jack Matlock, ex-military guys like Col. Doug. Macgregor, Scott Ritter, former NATO adviser Jacques Baud, scholars like Mearscheimer, Cohen, et al, and the relatively small number of independent journalists and writers who haven't sold their souls to the corporatocracy - such as Aaron Mate, Abby Martin, Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges, Caitlin Johnstone, Matt Taibbi, et al.... all of whom are forced eventually to small, often 'invisible' platforms which themselves often seem to be 'disappeared'. This kind of information suppression is managed by forcing such journalists from the 'respectable' outlets where they may have once published, to these more-easily marginalized platforms, and by demonetizing them, deranking them within search engines, flagging their new platforms as 'questionable' on social media posts or outright banishment.
Such narrative control has reached a stage I certainly haven't ever witnessed despite my having been alert to its previous manifestations. It has succeeded beyond any level I could have imagined in the most dystopian of visions. It is not only my own observation, but also that of the (few) among my circles of friends and acquaintances. To even try to point any one else to the long historical context, the documented events and recorded words of the players themselves- will be met with accusations of being a 'Putin propagandist'. The absurdity and irony of such reactions never seems to be given a second thought. It is truly an Orwellian time.
Useful context for the bizarre fixation of corporate media on Santos.