‘See how this works?’: Trump drops cases against corporations that funded his inauguration

The thing to understand is that a journalist and an outlet have different motivations and goals. A journalist seeks to get the truth put int front of people. An outlet seeks to keep the wave forms going out. The outlet has a variety of motivations for this, and each outlet will have different balances of these motivations. The most common motivations are money, a desire to get the truth in front of the people, and personal political influence for the owner of the outlet. Given that the journalist and the outlet are not necessarily aligned, the journalist makes a deal with the devil every time they work with the outlet. They are ultimately making a choice between more reach and more integrity because the biggest outlets skew further and further away from getting truth in front of the people being their primary motivator.

So what does this all mean? It means you can actually learn a lot about how news media works by studying street art. The basic mechanism of street art is that you are co-opting a wave form to disseminate your message to people who didn't ask for it. A jounralist does the same thing when they make their deal with the devil at the outlet. They follow the rules of the outlet to get their message in front of people who would not have otherwise seen it. The good news is that this outlet, commondreams, has a strong track record of seemingly being motivated by getting the truth in front of people. However, they have a strong enough record and reach that they also have the attention of the FCC who could be wielded against them, so it seems the editors have requested the language be adjusted to keep the waveforms going out.

However, there's also another possibility. Journalism, just like street art, is a community. What one journalist takes up, so will another. If one journalist talks about "purchasing goodwill" suddenly that's the terms that this will be discussed under by multiple journalists. Some journalists for the less good outlets weaponize this and perform a process called "sane-washing" where they create new euphemisms (newspeak, effectively) to let other journalists pick up and use. In the street art community we call this a "meme." Yes. It's a meme. We're all netizens. We know what a meme is and how they work. How many memes have you disseminated without ever thinking about "Who created this? Why did they create it? What was their goal? When did they have the time to create this (if the meme is time relevant)? What is this meme saying to me, what is it saying when I share it, and is that something I want?"

If you're like most people, you probably didn't put that much thought into any of that when disseminating a meme. But a lot of meme creators do. You know. It's ironic. Alex Jones called his show "info wars" and then just broadcast a bunch of bullshit. But at the very core of his show was a truth. There is an information war going on. It's just that Alex Jones is not on the side he claims to be. His show's purpose was to disseminate right wing memes and influence culture at large to become more right wing. In this he succeeded.

Anyway. What the fuck was I talking about? Oh yeah. "Purchasing goodwill." So. There's several possibilities here.

1. The journalist originally wrote "bribe" and the editor changed it
2. The journalist originally wrote "purchasing goodwill" because it's a meme that started with another journalist
3. The journalist originally wrote "purchasing goodwill" because they're performing the sane-washing (I think this is the least likely scenario given the outlet)

If you want real actual news about the things going on, here are some outlets to keep an eye on:

• commondreams.org
• propublica.org
• itsgoingdown.org
• anarchistnews.org

(worth noting, I am biased towards anarchist news sources because of my world view. But! Because of my world view, I also think it is better to present your bias and say "Here's what I think and here's how it influences how I engage with the propaganda machines around us" than it is to say "I'm an unbiased sources writing from a position of authority" because the latter is inherently a lie. Everyone is biased. Everything is biased.)

Probably. That or Trump is happy to take the money and stiff them like he does contractors. Still though for an article claiming cases are being dropped writing multiple paragraphs about Google, who is not having they're cases dropped (again please correct me if I'm wrong), this seems wildly dishonest. I know Zuckerberg had to testify recently about Facebooks trial too but afaik that's not being dropped either?