How the Media Really Work, by an Old Insider

Censorship in America has reached alarming proportions not seen since the McCarthy era of HUAC. This often isn’t obvious to the public because people don’t miss coverage of stories of whose existence they are unaware. Having spent my working life in the trade, I get information from old colleagues on the frequent stonewalling. For example, here is an AP story, clearly of national importance, that was pulled five minutes after appearing:
(AP) “Today President Joe Biden, in a press briefing in the White House, gave a puzzling estimate of relations with Russia, saying, “Vladimir Putin is a threat to the Free World, to the struggle of democracy against authoritarian shift F7 for font size, shift eight for scroll speed, press 1 for manual, 2 for auto eye-follow.” Those present later said privately that after this he stopped and stared “catatonically, like he was pole-axed” for several seconds before continuing, “and the brave people of Ukraine who share our democracy, our American values….”
According to a source who asked not to be name because of the sensitivity of the matter, someone in the teleprompter room was heard to say, “What the…? Oh God. We’re in admin, how did? Jesus, he’s reading it…cut, cut!”
If you search the web for this story, you will find not a trace. Yet it is well known in Washington. In the bar of the National Press Club, several reporters who were in the White House at the time,laughed at efforts by, Sheila Bratwurst, the White House spokesperson, to walk the story back. “It is false, utterly and categorically false and didn’t happen. It goes to show the lengths the Russians will go to plant fake news in our democratic American media that the President loves and respects….”
Stories are routinely buried if they run against the Washington narrative. For example.
For example, speaking informally to the White House press corps, Biden, who had talked that morning with AMLO, the President of Mexico, about the long-running dispute over transgenic corn pushed by Monsanto, apparently confused several stories. While he was said not to be entirely coherent, making it difficult to tell exactly what he was trying to say, , he seemed to assert that the Chinese were interbreeding with transgender UFOs in balloons, endangering national security.
According to a producer at UPI, Biden was persuaded to retract the story when it was explained that limitations of gestation time made this unlikely , that the wheat is transgenic, not transgender, and most of the balloons were two feet in diameter, which would require very small Chinese. Though the President does not have a technical background, he seemed to understand, and said he hoped the space aliens had democratic American values.
Not all suppressed stories are of national importance. It is known that President Vladimir Zelensky of Ukraine was a professional comedian before becoming President, reversing the order in America. One of his acts was playing the piano with his penis. While he was at the Press Club in Washington, asking for thermonuclear weapons, reporter Jan Kwiatowski asked how he handled chords. He said that he was a military President and didn’t understand music theory but he would have his staff look into it.
The story never saw light.
A standard practice in Washington journalism is to hide medical problems of prominent people. For example, Reagan’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s syndrome, on the grounds that the USSR might try to take advantage. Doctors are discourage from mentioning tests for what might be cancer until they prove negative. The chief reason is that uncertainty about the President’s health could affect the stock market.
Carefully kept secret by his staff was former President Donald Trump’s diagnosis of a rectocranial inversion, seldom a life-threatening condition but one that can affect the careers of politicians, among whom it seems to be either an occupational disease or job requirement.
RCI is surgically curable in most cases, though it often results in severe spinal deformation and the symptoms can linger. In Trump’s case, Dr. Leopold Zirinski at Walter Reed Army Hospital, in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, said the former President’s condition was inoperable but could be ameliorated with continued treatment. (Dr. Zirinski later denied that when asked what treatment, he replied, “A muzzle.” ) He referred reporters to the journal, Elements of Proctoneural Intervention, he said that in severe cases a glass plate can be implanted in the abdomen to allow the patient to see where he is going. Yet, though Trump has been widely suspected of the infirmity, it has never been confirmed by the city’s controlled press.
The foregoing incidents of censorship are well attested, at least within the Washington press corps. Another story, alarming in its implications, enjoys among elite reporters the status of probable but not proved. It is bizarre enough that no publication wants to run with it without confirmation. In broad outline, people high in the Democrat party feared that the President’s increasingly frequent incoherence was hurting the party’s hopes for 2024. Military officials, notably Mark Mille, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were growing concerned that his erratic aggressiveness might turn the Ukraine, a budget-enhancing device, into a real war. The consensus was that something had to be done about Biden. What?
Here, sources are not in perfect agreement on the timeline or details. What is agreed is that a junior enlisted man at DARPA, in that position because of genius, suggested that Biden could be replaced by software. He is said to have pointed out that video can now be made of, say, Humphrey Bogart that appears real, with Bogart’s voice and mannerisms. The video replica of Biden could be spliced into stock footage of the Oval Office to produce something similar to FDR’s Fireside Chats.
The DARPAcrats reportedly listened, not thinking the idea preposterous. Remember these are the people who proposed making mechanical mosquitos that could be programmed to bite Russian generals and infect them with Ebola.
The kid suggested that the software could have a slider for Sincerity, another varying from Empathy to Manliness (though this latter was squelched as insensitive to trans people), and a knob to control how often he said “democracy.”
Reportedly, though denied by her office, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that instead of sending Biden on trips abroad on Air Force One, which was expensive, he could be emailed as a binary file. Though it could not immediately be confirmed, Chuck Schumer (whose staff later denied that he was present) suggested that the Joe app (as it came to be known) could be linked with Chat GPT to answer questions. A random number generator and a confusion plugin might prevent unaccustomed rationality from giving the game away.
How seriously this was considered, and whether it has been put into effect, is not known. What is certain is that not a word of it has been allowed in the media.
So far have we diverged from what was the First Amendment.