Jacob Ward's Warning | News Vs. Propaganda
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How is conventional news giving way to propaganda and why does it matter?
I think we're entering an age where conventional news is disappearing and we're seeing the rise of propaganda. This is, of course, probably not earth shattering in your world. You're here watching me on YouTube, presumably, and that shows, right? You understand that where people are getting their information has changed for all time. The old days where one of the big three networks was your daily 30 minutes of news and that was it, maybe a little time with a That's all over. But we're entering a world now in which this is really a question not just of how people consume information. It's becoming a question of power and of politics. And it has me very concerned. So recently, the White House debuted something called the White House Wire.
And this is a site hosted on whitehouse.gov on a taxpayer-funded site that basically just shows link after link after link to news reports, although they are not news reports, about the successes of the Trump administration. When you go to it, they ask you if you want to sign up for daily updates on that. So they're gathering a bunch of people's emails that way, which is one thing. And past presidents have done this as well. But clicking around this thing on any given day, you're taken to either somebody's opinion on X, formerly Twitter, a Fox News piece, something on the Daily Wire, one from this sort of constellation of... of conservative outlets that dress themselves up as objective news, but are of course not.
So let's get a little context here before I go any deeper in ranting about this. So we live in a nation that enjoys an extraordinary protection for freedom of speech, the First Amendment. That amendment gives people the opportunity to speak out in a free way that makes us the envy of the world. But it also creates a complication in our world such that anybody who claims to be a journalist under the First Amendment enjoys that amendment's protections. There's no accreditation process that makes it absolutely distinct that I'm a journalist, but you are not. It is truly just who decides to call themselves a journalist. That person enjoys the same First Amendment protections as a hundred-year-old news outlet.
And I have experienced this firsthand. I was once covering one of the Stop the Steal rallies outside of Las Vegas. And at that Clark County Board of Elections building, there were protesters everywhere. It's an open carry state. So it was protesters, in many cases, carrying semi-automatic assault style weapons. It was a really intense scene. And at one point, I remember looking over and seeing this person Who looked to all intents and purposes like she was doing the same job I was. She had lights on her. She's speaking into a microphone. She's got a camera crew with her. But I realized as I watch her that she is leading the crowd in a chant of thank you, President Trump, or we love you, President Trump, something like that.
And I remember thinking, oh, wow, she is, in fact, a YouTuber. I looked her up later, and she was. She was a YouTuber who was not just there sort of looking the part of being a reporter, but was leading the crowd in these chants, right? And to my mind, I remember looking at that and thinking, wow, the thing is, there's no difference between what she is doing and what I am doing when it comes to First Amendment protections. Of course, if I had been leading a crowd in any sort of chant, I would have been fired on the spot. But we weren't even really allowed to ask people to do anything different.
What is the White House Wire and how does it function as government-amplified media?
We had to just be witnesses. You couldn't interfere and you certainly couldn't whip up the crowd. So that feeling of there being no big difference, no legal difference between what she was doing and what I was doing, that's sort of how I'm thinking about this WhiteHouse.gov site. Because In theory, all of these outlets, Daily Wire, Fox News, the rest of them, are First Amendment protected journalism outlets. But they are, of course, as you well know, not unbiased news sources. They are specifically a product of the 1980s when...
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