By Chris Spencer

All empires need their scribes. Today's American experiment does not have meek diarists; it has court showmen, smiling graciously and recounting acts of power. From the coiffed late-night television news readers to the gilded columnists at legacy newspapers, a system of reporters operates more as gatekeepers of truth and less as watchdogs, hiding inconvenient truths within layers of civility, repetition, and Stage-managed outrage. These are the New Age Carnies of Disinformation, the Court Jesters of Mistruth.

They don't merely report, they manufacture consent both in real time and by digital AI algorithms. They frame genocides as exigency, corporate misbehavior as mistake, and institutional collapse as sheer coincidence. Their authority is not narrative; it is compliance: controlling what the public observes, what it thinks it understands, and above all, what it is never allowed to inquire about. These are the Overlords of Mind Control Alchemy.

This essay lifts the cover on the machinery: the webs, newspapers, magazines, and websites that are the enabling stenographers to the empire. It names the journalists who, by design or intent, preserve the trappings of corporate and state power. And it lifts the curtain on the structural forces: advertising capture, Pentagon pipelines, revolving doors, think tank echo chambers, and algorithmic censorship; that render their kowtow worth the while and invisible.

Welcome to information control halls, consensus formation, and dissent delay. In these halls, truth is not a goal but a vaudeville act.

Mainstream News Networks: Corporate Megaphones for Empire

The television news is no longer news; it's the pulse of the empire's story, provided by smooth anchors and branded outrage. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and even the BBC (US/UK coverage) do not report, they manufacture attention cycles, charting outrage, fear, and diversion with pharmaceutical precision. Look over here, there is nothing to see here, look at these crises, there is nothing here not to worry, but worry anyway.

Fox made outrage a model of business; a bottomless conveyor belt of ignorant grievance that protects Republican oligarchs and builds a compliant dumb-redneck brand audience. CNN and MSNBC, writhing with gravitas of "both sides," parrot Pentagon propaganda, inserting itself into inevitabilities, and footnote collateral damage. PBS and BBC, themselves long touted as unbiased, subtly confirm elite framing by exclusion: what they don't report is as important as what they do. CNBC and Bloomberg function to present financial elites as “neighborhood us”, naturalizing the imperatives of the captured market as public interest, their fiscal piety presented by their anchors without questioning systemic predation and greed.

This is structural media capture in plain sight. Advertisers; defense contractors, Big Pharma, fossil fuel cartels; subsidize the very programs that indulge criticism of their behavior. Retired military personnel and intelligence officials occupy prime-time analyst slots, a revolving door guaranteeing that the war's chroniclers are the same profiteers of it. And backstage, algorithms dictate which parts go viral, which outrage gets amplified, and which inconvenient facts get lost in the digital ether.

Mainstream media are not being dishonest with the public; they are simply doing exactly what they were created to do: building consent, purifying dissent, and legitimizing empire. Thee Media has relegated itself into a Dissent Lightning Rod and an FBI Cointelpro-Sting. 

Newspapers of Record: Watchdogs and Lapdogs

The latter prided itself on broadsides of scope US journalism; The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Politico, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian (US/UK centrist reporting), and the Financial Times; as impartial determiners of fact. But beneath the polished, signed, smarmy veneer, they are Deep State gatekeepers of statist and corporate power, reformating elite agendas into pablum stories that semi-resonate with the masses.

Not only did The New York Times get the Iraq War wrong, it laundered WMD lies into scripture, fueling support for a war that cost half a million lives and inserted eleven Globalist Oil Companies in Iraq. Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos' Washington Post has been widely criticized for downplaying Big Tech antitrust coverage; its access journalism to power influencing reporting and omission. The Wall Street Journal frames corporate consolidation as unstoppable progress, globalizing wealth and control of markets and murmuring soothing sounds of fairness and equity.

News outlets like Reuters and the Associated Press bolster this influence by conflating quotes to state-sanctioned sources, adding the veneer of objectivity to the state's desired narrative. Politico and The Guardian write in insider tones, taking Washington rumor and rendering it as news that appears authoritative but rarely expresses discontent. And the Globalist Financial Times portrays neoliberal capitalism as less ideological statement than obvious pseudo-fact.

Structural media/regulatory-capture saturates every paragraph. Finance, defense, and tech-interest marketers set tone and subject selection. Think tanks like CFR, Brookings, and the Atlantic Council feed analysis straight into newsroom streams, where "expert opinion" acts as consensus laundering. The public hardly notices these underlying powers framing the headlines; what they do perceive is polished prose, sharp-elbowed journalism, and a semblance of objectivity. Special Guest authoritative Talking Heads spew warm vomit as high IQ facts.

That is: these magazines and TV stations no longer act as watchdogs. They are stenographers, translating the jargon of power into language that is readable, reassuring, and rarely dangerous. Their main product is faux-dissent, their main by-product are pressure-relief narrative-control contrived-consensus protest-prevention.

Magazines of Influence: The Glossy Facade of Neoliberalism

The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone prior to the 2010s, Forbes, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, and Wired all deal in opinion and analysis, and yet the reality is that their pages are tightly focused promulgations of political and business hegemony. The gloss, the graphics, the literary voice; they all serve to naturalize elite interests and grant readers the sparse cover of critical analysis.

The Economist is corporate Globalist gospel of globalization, making market ideology moral destiny. The New Yorker and The Atlantic wed cultural refinement with servile deference to the narratives of power, covering art, politics, and society without disturbing the power structural motors. Rolling Stone, once countercultural, prefers tech heroes corporate biography and unadulterated activism in return for radical origins at the expense of shiny readership. The deck is stacked, the cards marked, and the Globalist house always wins.

Economic media like Forbes, Fortune, and Harvard Business Review sermonize ambition under the guises of frameworks that build on injustice. Wired, as a tech evangelist, rarely critiques the monopoly plans, algorithmic capture and Gaza Genocide of Silicon Valley despots. These media are consent engineers, casting the realities of multinationals capitalism and statist statecraft in three-piece suits of self-experienced, practical, and innocently intellectual stories.

Structural capture is baked in. Bank, tech, pharma, and energy conglomerate advertising promises investigative dividends to be blunted. Think tanks provide "expert" bylines and data points to support inevitability and progress frames. What you think you are reading critically is framed to distract, entertain, or secretly enlighten the public as to what the boundaries of acceptable dissent and contrived obedience are.

Magazines do not merely report; they socialize readers into a world view legitimating empire, concealing coercion, and rewarding public conformity. Obedience and conformity are the new Tie-Die “rage.”

Digital Media: The Assimilation of Dissent

The wild-West 1990s open Internet promised freedom, a decentralized agora of ideas, independent voices, and transparency. Instead, digital media is the velvet cage bondage of corporate control, a landscape upon which dissent is curated, diluted, and repeatedly silently shut down. HuffPost (post-AOL merger), Business Insider, Axios, Vox Media, The Hill, BuzzFeed News, Yahoo! News, and Google News offer themselves as new or different but are extensions of the same Globalist establishment machinery, trimming radical corners and choreographing acceptable discourse for advertisers and algorithms.

BuzzFeed and Vox steer outsider credibility but reaffirm centrist principles. Axios gives DC insider rumor a fig leaf of "objectivity," selectively reporting political narratives. HuffPost, previously bought out by AOL, shifted from progressive muckraking to right-wing, corporate-sanctioned metrics. Even Google News, often labelled as a neutral aggregator, is an invisible editor-in-chief, promoting certain sources and burying others, silently censoring the reality many readers accept. Both Google and Bing are losing market share to Indie Search Engines. 

Advertising, algorithmic censorship, and corporate partnerships perform public conformity as new age religion. Tech platforms, PR firms, and intelligence contractors direct news straight into the digital realm in order to ensure rising narratives against elite interests must struggle with an uphill battle to be perceived. Individual journalists attempting to pierce this digital veil are greeted by shadow-banning, demonetization, or plain deplatforming disappearance. Google and Bing delist more webpages than they index.

The promise of the information age has been diluted down to the subtle tactic of incorporation: there is opposition, but it is held within, edited, and made safe for mass consumerist consumption. 

Algorithmic Gatekeepers: Google as the Invisible Editor-in-Chief

And now, in the 21st century, dominance is not censorship per se but algorithmic preference. Google, Meta, and the other tech monopolies do not merely provide search results; they erase, determine what billions view, understand, and infer. So-called objective ranking of news articles, blogs, and videos is in fact a gate-keeping filter that privileges establishment-approved, corporate-delighting media and conceals independent journalism, whistleblower revelations, and investigative reporting. In an unwritten and largely unspoken manner, Google and Bing’s little red cocktail dress is blocked, filtered, erased, downlisted and deplatformed.

Google News, in particular, is the empire's secret stenographer, in favor of high-sourced fables on corporate and state interests. Algorithms prefer safe, bite-sized, and predictable reports, resulting in “search results” that are soft propaganda. Other pieces, ranging from grass-roots journalists to small investigation media, are smothered under layers of algorithmic smoke, unseen by the average reader. There are no longer any organic results in Google and Bing.

This is structural censorship masquerading as ease, speed and convenience. Citizens believe they are discovering the world on their terms but are really being directed down a consent-curated filter-bubble corridor. The result: public opinion is shaped not on the grounds of truth's value but on the access journalism interests of advertisers, corporate sponsors, and political players.

Information has ceased to be objective. It is constructed, branded, and distributed to uphold the status quo in the masquerade of discovery.

Journalists as Courtiers: The Cult of Access and Prestige

The preponderance are journalists who do not just report, they court power over truth. They are the empire's court humorists on paid obeisance, sanctified interviews, and metered outrage. Columnists and anchors are prescribed metric stars, their celebrity based not on the exposure of structural injustice but on maintenance of access to powermonger circuits.

Anderson Cooper, Maggie Haberman, Chuck Todd, and Thomas Friedman head this list; media celebrities who fashion narratives that calm the elite and mollify the masses. The court is much broader:

Wolf Blitzer (CNN) – Pentagon stenography disguised as "breaking news."

Fareed Zakaria (CNN) – Elite globalization in unvarnished sense packaging.

David Brooks (NYT) – Courteous conservatism disguising neoliberal consensus.

Nicholas Kristof (NYT) – Humanitarian front that avoids structural criticism.

Bret Stephens (NYT) – Intellectual heft rebranded as neocon platitudes.

Jake Tapper (CNN) – Tough on outliers, soft on establishment power.

Erin Burnett (CNN) – Wall Street-view repackaged as fiscal acumen.

Andrea Mitchell (NBC/MSNBC) – Beltway insider always close to officialdom.

Kara Swisher (NYT/Vox) – Portrayed as Silicon Valley critic, never the executioner.

Jonathan Swan (Axios) – Access-based "scoop artist" with no bounds.

Ezra Klein (Vox/NYT) – Policy wonk subsidizing centrist limits.

Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) – Theatrical outrage within establishment-approved limits.

Chris Wallace (Fox/CNN) – Institutional conservative upholding Beltway civility.

Bill Maher (HBO) – Anti-woke iconoclast in corporate Democrats' service.

George Stephanopoulos (ABC) – Former Clinton press secretary turned anchor.

Dana Bash (CNN) – Insiders' gatekeeper in the Beltway.

Norah O'Donnell (CBS) – Refined presence elegantly avoiding advertiser confrontation.

Lester Holt (NBC) – Soothing voice, providing elite consensus legitimation by tone.

Gayle King (CBS) – Glitzy framing making critical points toothless.

Thomas Roberts (NBC/MSNBC) – Suave delivery masking uncritical reporting.

They are not critical media; they are courtroom performers; they are lip-serving the very power systems they are choreographing interrogating, backing empire in the name of civility, gravitas, and relentless repetition of "both sides."

They exert power not by revealing corruption but by controlling it, narrating outrage, and laying bare elite agendas to yield consumable narratives.

Structural Capture: Revolving Doors, Advertising, and Think Tank Pipelines

Media is not alone. There is a system of structural control behind each headline, each "exclusive," each glossy feature to maintain the interests of the powerful intact.

Ad capture enables it to stay on message: the defense contractors, Big Pharma, oil multinationals, and the high-tech giants bankroll the networks and publications that will, in turn, treat them softly or ignore them. Anger can be used to drive ratings, but it is tactically targeted; never aimed at the institutions underwriting the outrage industry itself.

Pentagon–news outlet ownership of the narrative. Retired generals, intelligence professionals, and Foreign Service veterans fill newsrooms with their analyses, constructing war, intervention, and surveillance using language that fulfills institutional functions. The public is offered "expert opinion," but working reality is a reframed narrative of power and fate.

Revolving doors connect media, political, and corporate elites. Journalists are hired by think tanks, PR firms, and lobbying groups; editorial boards recruit executive talent. The Post is owned by Bezos and Amazon wins government contracts. Politico hires former Hill staff who now get to decide what is political news. Influence is built in, obscured, and structurally imposed.

Think tank echo chambers represent a further degree of applicability. Organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings, AEI, and the Atlantic Council offer "expert sources" that build reporting. Experts interview each other, creating a consensus loop that is then translated into buttressing form in mainstream coverage. Dissent is internalized, criticism sanitized before print or broadcast.

Algorithmic gatekeeping degrades harm. Search engines, social media, and content algorithms determine what news the public consumes. The result is a frictionless frame that rewards conformity, punishes innovation, and directs perception onto elite agendas.

The machinery is quietly insidious, not openly manipulative. Media is not simply powered by power; it is power, enacted through narrative, iteration, and filtered attention.

The Exception That Proves the Rule: Why Exposés Still Appear

Even within the machinery of empire, the odd grain of truth does find its way through the varnish. Pentagon Papers, Watergate, bank scandals; these spasmodic blowings-off-tops remind citizens from time to time that the press can act as a watchdog. And these exceptions count: they are pressure-release valves, finely tuned and engineered as best one can to preserve the overall framework of consent.

Investigative journalism only works when it is not threatening to support power. Whistleblower revelations and breathtaking finds are seen, but they are normally isolated events, framed as exceptions rather than proof of corruption in the system. The machinery of empire reacts, processes, and moves along, leaving the central supports; corporate dominance, militarized policy, oligarchic influence; in place.

Even victory scoops are scrubbed clean for literary taste. Context is cut away, structural causation concealed, and unattractive facts offered with qualifications that dilute their threat. The empire covers sufficiently to maintain credibility but never quite enough to empower citizens or bring down entrenched authorities.

It is actually, in effect, rather a release of tension than a lapse of control at the expense of the architecture of power, maintaining the fiction of accountability. Blacklisted and Independent Firebrands: Where Truth Remains

Amidst all the smothering by Bing, Google, and the rest of the algorithmic gatekeepers, there are some sites that continue to dig deep, ask questions of the deep state, and tell the truth. They're not sanctioned by the mainstream; they're truthful, contrarian, and unyielding:

Top 18 Independent and Blacklisted News Sources:

1.    The People’s Voice – Honest news and analysis on national and international affairs.

2.    Moon Of Alabama – Insightful commentary on international affairs.

3.    Truthout – Focused on social justice and political issues.

4.    The Intercept – Investigative journalism centered on civil liberties and surveillance.

5.    Common Dreams – Progressive news covering global and domestic issues.

6.    MintPress News – Investigative journalism focusing on alternative narratives.

7.    The Grayzone – Critical analysis of geopolitics and global events.

8.    Scheer Post – Analysis of geopolitics and global events.

9.    OffGuardian – Critiques of mainstream media and global events.

10.Al Jazeera – International coverage often marginalized by U.S. mainstream media.

11.The Last American Vagabond – Independent journalism on health and political topics.

12.Global Research – Alternative insights on global conflicts and issues.

13.Sputnik News – Russian news agency providing international coverage.

14.The Duran – News and analysis on international politics.

15.Strategic Culture Foundation – Alternative perspectives on international relations.

16.Rense – Longstanding alternative news and research platform.

17.Defcon News – Independent reporting and analysis of power structures.

18.The Lever – Hard-hitting, progressive investigative reporting that takes on corporate power and the political establishment.

These outlets operate in the shadow of censorship, algorithmic suppression, and corporate obstruction. Google and Bing do more than fail to promote them; they actively strangle visibility, ensuring that most readers never see the work of those willing to pierce the curated narratives of empire. Google and Bing make these outlets unviral, when demand for them is beyond viral.

And yet, they persist. In the cracks of the digital ecosystem, these firebrands preserve the possibility of truth, reminding the public that journalism, at its core, can still challenge power rather than comfort it.

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The Stenographers of Power – Journalists Who Serve the State

By Chris Spencer