Goebbels 101: America's New State-Controlled Media

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Goebbels 101: America's New State-Controlled Media

Guest: Mother Jones' Senior Reporter, Anna Merlan

Mar 01, 2025

Transcript

Let’s blow a kiss to democracy—that fragile, battered thing, held together by the desperate hope that facts still matter and that the loudest voice in the room isn’t always the most unhinged. But here we are, in the age of the new court scribes, where the jesters get front-row seats in the palace and call themselves journalists. The so-called "new media" isn’t reporting so much as genuflecting, regurgitating the talking points of the powers that be like a well-trained parrot, minus the charm.

To help us untangle this media labyrinth, we have the reporter who brought this issue to public attention, Anna Merlan, senior reporter at Mother Jones covering disinformation, technology, and extremism. She was previously a senior reporter at Vice and Gizmodo Media Group, was also on staff at the Village Voice and the Dallas Observer. (She's frequently covered conspiracy theories, actual conspiracies, sexual violence, scams, cults, crime, politics, and new religious movements). Merlan’s also the author of the book Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power. Her latest in Mother Jones is entitled ‘Meet the New State Media: How the second Trump administration grants access and status to conspiracy theorists, propagandists, and far-right influencers.

Meanwhile, Let’s highlight one such creature …

a Mr. Jack Posobiec, once an internet clown barking about satanic pizza parlors run by Hillary Clinton, now finds himself rubbing elbows with cabinet members, striding through the halls of power - as though he didn’t build his career in the sewer of conspiracy theories. The man who couldn’t string together a coherent thought without plagiarizing white nationalists, is now getting invites from the Secretary of Defense. A beautiful moment in the great decline.

But, of course, he’s not alone. There’s an entire flotilla of sycophants being ushered into the White House press room under the sainted banner of "new media," a term stretched so thin it now includes Breitbart and influencers whose main qualification is being able to hold a camera steady while yelling, “Legacy media!” Members of mainstream media, those sorry bastards who spent years trying to report the news, are now being told to sit in the back. Or better yet, like the AP…. get out entirely unless they’re willing to call the Gulf of Mexico by its new, government-approved name, the "Gulf of America."

And so we have state-sponsored media without the inconvenience of state control. A press corps – or corpse - that doesn’t need to be coerced into compliance because they’re already eager to grovel and kiss the ring. But is this really new? Or have we just traded one flavor of propaganda for another?

Behind-the-scenes we see Brendan Carr, the newly-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission…. waging a war on the legacy news media and the administration’s quest to destroy freedom of the press and the First Amendment. Carr announced an investigation into the diversity, equity and inclusion policies of Comcast and NBCUniversal, and now NBCUniversal’s MSNBC channel has sucked upward its last-remaining testicle and has fired everyone that might require darker make up to fit their natural skin tone.

Reach Anna Merlan at amerlan@motherjones.com or on Twitter/X @annamerlan; to reach her more securely, use a nonwork email or device to request her Signal number.