overheard on the net:
when we talk about these conspiracies, say between certain media outlets being the tools of certain interests, some practical questions come to mind:
> how do these people coordinate their signals? do they check with their controllers? do they have a newsletter?
in a way, yes. that’s how elite journalists work. …much of it is done very simply, and not at all surreptitiously, say over tennis, golf, or drinks… whatever.
> what do you mean, ‘elite journalists’?
there’s more to it than just a matter of always sourcing the political/economic establishment (by which we mean masquerading the establishment position as “independent news”).
the elite journalists also share a common culture with the political/economic elite. for starters, in the top echelon, they’re very wealthy. either as a cause or an effect, they share similar points of view, life-styles;
they share similar concerns with the stock market, private schools for their children and the high price of nannies (and the servant problem more generally), etc.
but there’s both more and less to it than that. its as simple as a high school clique. there’s continual direct and indirect social interaction, at various parties and events, and of course, through the gossip mill.
> Chomsky argues that outlets like New York Times are tools of the ruling elite.
sort of. the few remaining leading papers out there are really anachronisms, and constitute a category in themselves. many more people get their ideas of world events from jay leno say, than papers like the post or the times…
these peculiar, public and untrusted channels serve primarily as vehicles through which members of the club send messages to each other in code.
but to your point, in many ways the top editors of these papers (and even more obviously the publishers of these papers, and the producers of tv news shows) aren’t so much tools of the elite, they are _part_ of that elite.
often people point to cases where there are apparent and sometimes real splits over policy issues between certain parts of the political establishment and certain parts of the media establishment, and say: “see. this proves that the government doesn’t control the media”
but what these represent are relatively rare splits _within_ the elite itself. some inside sources leak one side of the story, other inside sources leak another side. and there’s no reason to think that there’s only two factions. like the real world, there are at least as many sides in this game as there are people playing it.
(e.g. when the NYT split with Johnson over the Vietnam war (even about tactics and strategy) and when it split with Nixon over Watergate, that represented a pretty explicit split in the US ruling class.)