12 The true fourth estate

The press has been known as the fourth estate, supposedly charged with holding truth to power, but which we now know is a delusion. However, there is a true fourth estate and that is fact-checkers.

The printing press opened up the ability of some to spread a narrative that ran counter to the propaganda of monarchs and governments. It was an opportunity to hold truth to power by publicising where governments had failed to fulfil their obligations and promises, or at least point out where they were failing to protect citizens.

Of course, the printing press let governments, and others who wanted to push their own agendas, spread their ideas far and wide – ideas that undermined the fulfilling of the needs of people, while promoting the desires of those who held power. We have seen this war of truth verses disinformation reach its culmination in the Murdoch media, where they knowingly spread outright lies to undermine democracy. This has shown that our trust in news media as the fourth estate is a delusion promoted by those holding wealth and power to obscure their malign influence upon our societies.

So instead of revealing abuses of power, major media outlets have been trying to distract from them or suppress knowledge of them. The rise of the Murdoch media juggernaut has had many major outlets trying to distance themselves from its web of lies by trying to position themselves as what the fourth estate is supposed to be, but they are betrayed by their lack of bringing their own owners into the same spotlight. They are largely compromised because they are owned by those wealthy people who are desperate to keep their wealth and privileged positions in society. The free press is a myth!

The Israeli genocide in Gaza has shown us just how adverse media is to actually holding truth to power, but instead kowtow to what their governments and lobby groups want. It is only the voluminous social media posts of what is actually happening that is forcing them to reluctantly acknowledge that Israel is being more than excessive, but stopping well short of calling it what it is. For many world media, failing to call out Trump lowered trust in them, but seeing how they will readily side with psychopaths, and even vilify those who speak of the genocide, is reducing that trust substantially.

Fact-checkers

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If the news media are not doing what many claim them to be there for, who is holding truth to power?

We have seen a rise in recent years of the numbers of organisations dedicated to fact-checking the utterances of politicians and media outlets. This is a good thing, but they are often so grossly underfunded that they are not really capable of challenging the onslaught of propaganda put out by mainstream media, let alone the myriad social media channels, fed by state-sponsored bots or influencers paid by shadowy political organisations, that are dedicated to hiding the truth and spreading lies and propaganda.

We cannot trust organisations run by wealthy people nor governments left to run themselves. Fact-checking takes time and huge resources to be able to unearth the many significant abuses of power, which means they need to be publicly-funded. That would need to be part of a significant overhaul of how bureaucracies are run so that they are truly independent of those in power and the government of the day.

Bureaucracies are a necessary part of government, and their independence is required to prevent abuses of power by elected officials. However, we have seen a growing subversion of that independence by those following an ideology that wants to preserve the wealth of a few by undermining all levels of democracy. Bureaucracies are overburdened and subject to too much political interference if too many positions are publicly elected.

It may appear contradictory, but too much democracy in bureaucratic appointments undermines public democracy. That is because elections sap a lot of their funding, but also opens them up to short-term considerations rather than the long-term stability of their society. A bureaucracy cannot function properly if it is subject to the whims of popular opinion.

Presuming an independent bureaucracy can be established, an independent fact-checking entity can be set up with clear guidelines to pursue the major subversions of truth that are undermining the ability of citizens to have more control over their own destinies. Part of that is anti-corruption agencies that investigate direct abuses of power by elected and appointed officials, but also arms that are dedicated to publicising the truth about current propaganda and disinformation so that the public is directly aware of them as they are occurring.

Individual citizens do not have the resources to counter mass propaganda, but fact-checkers have to have adequate long-term funding that allows them to hold truth to power regardless of who that is. The complex obfuscation that is used to hide the nefarious goings on often requires months of investigation, and while the press touts having investigative journalists, they are not going to investigate anything that challenges their hold on power. No, it is dogged forensic detective work that will do that, and they have to be truly independent. Just allocating it to police is not enough.

It is the system

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Fact checkers are not enough because they are concerned with points of facts, rather than the structures that benefit from the minimisation of facts.

It is important that investigations are not only about individual failings but about systemic abuses that are perpetrated by cartels of shadowy business interests. With some enterprises having more value and economic reach than many nations, it is clear that just fact-checking government is not enough. It must also fact-check the vast output of business propaganda designed to maintain the wealth of their owners and senior executives.

It is ironic that print media like the Murdoch press is trying to wrest control back from social media companies who are just doing what Murdoch et al did to get the the top, albeit using the tools available in their new medium. Of course, Murdoch wants the money that the social media companies have now monopolised, and the way they are doing that is through their long-standing relationships with political parties. Even if the hold the Murdoch press had over many is waning, they are substantially increasing their hold over its politicians.

While persuading citizens to view them favourably, the press, fossil fuel and gambling industries know that it is politicians that really are the gatekeepers between popular sentiment and these bad actors being held accountable. Politicians, in return for relatively low donations, will run their propaganda, protect them with legislation, and subsidise their industries. Voters can be fickle, but corporations like the deep bonds they have with political parties, mainly because at their top levels, they mix in the same circles.

Breaking the link between these conglomerates and politicians is not easy, but the only real threat to that is the new media companies, who have managed to break the link between the old media and the general population, mainly by being the channels by which many could show how the old media was letting them down by not telling them the truth. That the new media then went on to abuse that new trust by taking over the old media's advertising revenue is why the latter is using the politicians in many countries to attack and break up the new media.

The real difference between the old and new media is just the medium through which they operate, as they are just as ruthless as each other. There is a reason Google stopped having an issue with acting evil. It pays! The real advantage the new media has over the old is that their delivery technology can target particular demographics. This opened up new opportunities for advertisers. Many, who were not big enough to afford advertising on old media, could now target smaller audiences economically.

However the groups that really benefitted from the new technologies were propagandist, including governments, who could target down to the individual, depending upon how much personal information the social media's advertiser tools could access. They can send different propaganda to different demographics, fostering enclaves of distorted reality to each to feed peoples' biases in a way favourable to the advertiser's agenda. None of this is available with the mass scatter-gun approach of old media.

Releasing the hold

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So, how do we break apart the cosy relationships that are working to manipulate us and control our lives?

Some things that we can do are:

a.Trust that personal choices can make a difference.
b.Changing our ways of thinking.
c.Stop standing with psychopaths.
d.Push that spending to benefit humanity is the best use of public monies.
e.Promoting degrowth – the only alternative that currently gives us a chance to keep the planet and us safe.
f.Demonetising society.
g.Taking back our control.
h.Reversing climate change.

The more that we can shift ours and others thinking away from believing that we need things to be the way they are, the better we can undermine the hold the greedy have over us, and thus allow ourselves and our societies to be under our own control. There are many ways in which we have bought into whole ways of exploitation that are really only pyramid belief schemes that will collapse if enough of us withdraw our belief in them. Then we can decide what takes their place.

Enough of such disruptions will force our societies to adapt to the new realities of our changed view of what we expect from them. We are allowed to expect from them, as they only exist because of our belief in them. They are a construct that is able to be controlled by whomever is willing to do that, and that can be the excessively greedy or us. The choice is still ours, if we stand together and refuse to be manipulated into competing with each other.