Don't believe your lying eyes, morons! Everything is just fine! You better not be complaining about gas prices. You do know that CO2 will destroy the earth in 12 years, don't you? Does your side hustle involve murdering polar bear cubs?
Oh, you're sad cuz a transgender boy just beat your daughter in the NCAA Finals? Bigot! How dare you shower hate on any member of the LGBTQIA+ community! Maybe you should've transitioned when you had the chance?
Wait a second: Am I seeing this correctly? Are you reading this without a mask?! The WHO clearly recommended that we all mask up because of... monkeypox! Vaccines are in short supply, so what are you doing? Don't you care about the most vulnerable?
Yes, men can birth babies! Haven't you seen the Apple pregnant man emoji?
Okay, okay, I'll stop. Those are maddening admonishments, aren't they? Astonishingly, they are par for the course, deeply emblematic of the bizarro big media world we've entered these days. It's not just you. And those are only a few salient examples of just how crazy things have gotten.
Ukraine? Well, Russian President Vladimir Putin says that his "special military operation" is designed to "de-Nazify" their Western neighbors. You're not a Nazi, are you? Or a Nazi sympathizer? Or a Neo-Nazi? Good grief! I sure hope not.
Of course, as reality has set in, many of Putin's soldiers seem to have figured out otherwise, as they rolled tanks over the Medieval destruction of Mariupol. That once-beautiful city was named after the Virgin Mary, Herself, celebrated Mother of Jesus Christ, Himself. But...
Putin got the go-ahead for his big crusade from a High Priest of the Russian Orthodox Church! Do you see the irony? I remember watching a Russian Howitzer in direct fire mode on a tenement building in Mariupol: just blasting it and every soul inside to the depths of Satan's hell.
Welcome to the Post-Truth World.
Russia, Russia, Russia!
I have ties to the Kremlin. Don't worry, comrade! It's nothing scary. They are *severed* ties. In fact, they're severed ties, severed. Let me explain, and in doing so, provide context for the Survival Guide, which focuses on dissolving Big Media's divisive influence on our lives.
Way back in 1999, yours truly stumbled upon a curious startup called KMGI.com. The proprietors were Russians: Alexandre Konanykhine, Nikolai Mentchoukov and Elena Gratcheva (Alex's ex-wife, now dead). Their tech was amazing, and I gladly agreed to promote them.
Alex told me a remarkable "adventure story" that brought him hither. The KGB had kidnapped him and Elena. They were in Vienna when the lovebirds escaped through a side exit from an expensive hotel, into a hustled taxi. The All Russia Exchange Bank had just been stolen.
Konanykhine was a whiz kid who'd studied to be a rocket scientist in the '80s, but quickly pivoted to running an enterprise: construction. While in school, and under the radar of Soviet authorities, he built a veritable empire, first with standard contracting, and then?
He found the earliest days of the InterWebs. He quickly appreciated the power of this new technology, and leveraged it. Lumber is one ruble per unit in this oblast, but 3 in that? Well: buy, sell! He did this lots and lots of times, he told me, and in short order, was sitting on millions.
Some of that money went into politics, as Konanykhine financed the political career of an outsider, a brash young drinker named Boris Yeltsin. Amazing things then happened. Yeltsin went up and up, and then? He rose to the highest office in the land: the Presidency.
As you might imagine, Yeltin's financier benefited for all his assistance! "I got a security detail of 300 former KGB, including KGB Colonels; Gorbachev's personal residence; and one of three licenses to run an International bank," he told me. That was right after the USSR collapsed.
Sounds like a media-worthy character, right? That's what I thought, and as his new PR rep, I set about getting them good publicity. And then? The United States military bombed the Chinese Embassy in Kosovo. Alex had a theory: A double-agent had fingered that building!
A plausible theory, no doubt. Why else would our country enflame the Chinese government by bombing their embassy? My brother then worked for the State Department, and was stationed in Shen Yang. Many protestors made their feelings known, breaking windows at our Embassy.
Well, I had recently learned that my college buddy got a job at CNN, and remember being so happy for him. He'd spent the previous year in my apartment, where I had invited him to come and learn about copywriting for media relations and marketing. His career hadn't yet launched.
When Alex popped his theory, I thought: "Wow! This is great! I'll share this with Groucho (aka Philip Traynor), and we might get a good hit!" Silly me. What a moron I was! I forgot all about the age-old adage: "No one has a friend in the media!"
I emailed Traynor with Konanykhine's thoughts; and mind you, 60 Minutes had already done a segment on him. After all, he was the first Russian to ever get political asylum in the United States, he said. Here's the email I got back:
"Sounds interesting, but tell us something we don't know!"
Oooh, snap!
So much for that idea. In retrospect, that's when I concluded: So much for that line of work! Playing supplicant to the gods of Big Media is no fun at all. It's akin to playing serf to a king. But the royal family of these ostensible truth tellers likely deserves a moniker all its own.
The Arrogantsia
You've likely heard of the Intelligentsia. They're the smart people, the ones who know really important things, like when it's appropriate to give 5-year-olds puberty blockers, or maybe just some Adderall to deal with their ADHD. (Remember the good old days of Adderall saving kids?)
Big Media companies are magnets for these folks, but they're actually not that large in terms of headcount. Take the New York Times: LinkedIn pegs them at 14,240, but Macrotrends says it's 4,700. (If ADP were to partner with LinkedIn, they could solve that discrepancy in real time.)
What that means from a cultural perspective, is that any given person who works for such a group over a period of years can provide a valuable lens into the nature of the operation. "Culture eats technology for breakfast," some wise IT person once noted.
My personal experience with large media companies is that the cultures are tense at best, toxic at worst. That's likely because it's difficult to create or maintain any truly collegial environment within a large media company. Top-down hierarchies tend to prevail; infighting is standard issue.
This is similar to the business doctrine I witnessed with Konanykhine: He seemed to like having a dog-eat-dog scenario in which multiple directors would do whatever it took to get ahead, including sabotaging the efforts of other team members. That's Big Media!
In Traynor's case, I've seen countless examples of this dynamic at work. To wit: We have a mutual college buddy who worked for a US military contractor, and a big one. Matthew Warren (aka the Warden), wrote the book on the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD).
Warren is an intelligent, hard working consultant who frankly went over the edge. I'm no psychiatrist, but the man has clearly gone mad. Over the past ~7 years, he's sent hundreds of emails to a group he calls "The Readership," a collection of classmates from Spring Hill College.
Traynor largely co-opted The Readership as a venue for ridiculing Warren, and to a degree, me. Warren invited such attacks by sending blistering emails filled with epithets about the Jews and the blacks and the gays. It went on and on. But amidst all that noise was serious signal.
The Warden predicted Boeing's failures, and said the new AI-enhanced flight systems could be hacked, as a possible explanation for the Malaysian airlines crash. He also warned about something very serious for the US and all of Western civilization.
Dating back to at least March 3, 2020, Matt Warren warned us that Russia and China had surpassed the United States in hypersonic missile technology. I realized the magnitude of that story, but Traynor refused to pass it along to his colleagues at his new place of employment, The New York Times!
This was not just one email, either, but a series of clamoring requests to get the story out. I leaned on him to prove that he had sent the info, at one point even providing step-by-step instructions for how to search in his email sent folder to locate, and then forward, the email.
Never happened.
Let's put that story in context: Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened the Western World that if they interfered with his invasion of Ukraine, they would experience weapons never seen before in combat. He was clearly talking about the hypersonic missiles.
Traynor was beseeched to pass along the story, shared by a known colleague (old friend) who had deep experience in military weapons contractors and systems. Why on earth would any journalist not recognize the significance of such a story?
We're talking about a tectonic shift in the balance of power, globally. Russia and China for the last few years have touted their cooperation. Surely, Putin bowed to Chinese Premier Xi Jinping on the timing of his Ukraine invasion, allowing the China-hosted Olympics to first conclude.
Point being, had the story gone public in March of 2020, instead of late in 2021, there would have been sufficient pressure on our military industrial complex to catch up to our Russian and Chinese counterparts. And when the story finally broke, the US military said they were shocked.
Shocked? Really? How is it that I knew all about this in early March of 2020? The short answer is because those military spokespeople lied to cover their butts. And what's especially creepy? The story only came out as Russia was mounting forces in preparation of the Ukraine invasion.
Why would any journalist quash such a story? Why did the New York Times quash the Hunter Biden laptop story? Because we live in a post-truth world.
Well, criminals always return to the scene of the crime. When the story finally broke, some 18 or so months later, Warren emailed The Readership with a link to the article in... the New York Times! What did Traynor have to say about that? Did he do a mea culpa? Nope. He wrote:
"You had nothing to do with publishing that article!"
Ooh, snap!! Did you catch the irony here? Don't piss on my shoe and tell me it's raining! Warren had "nothing to do" with publishing that article *because* Traynor chose to quash it! How's that for some Big Media spittle in your eye, peasant? Groucho quashed the story out of pure spite.
The Survival Guide
Well, fortune still favors the brave! Despite all this Big Media madness, I still believe in the power of humanity, and the ethics of good people. To that end, I offer my Survival Guide for the Post Truth World, to help all of us recognize, then distill the nonsense we get from Big Media:
1) Think for yourself! So much of the insanity we've endured over the past half-decade has been strategic. When have you ever heard that I have to take my vaccine for yours to work? Never before COVID; that's when. And have you ever really questioned what it means to be female?
2) Don't trust the media, but use it! There can't be that much smoke without some fire. Many media stories are representative of significant events; you just need to focus on the nouns and verbs, and watch out for weasel words, like "maybe," especially when there's no citation.
3) Watch out for what's "unclear" -- that's your clue that narrative nonsense is afoot! A journalist's job is to share useful information within appropriate context, always citing sources. Phrases like, "It's unclear whether blah-di-blah," should never appear in the news.
4) Turn off the algorithms! In Twitter, it's fairly easy to do this: Just click Most Recent, instead of the default view. In Facebook, this is harder to do (almost surely by design). Here's a great link where you can figure how to free yourself from the algorithms on those sites and Instagram:
5) Double check the fact-checkers! If there's one development that proves beyond any shadow of doubt that mainstream media has gone off the rails, it's the remarkable proliferation of fact checkers. This demonstrates that Big Media is all about the narrative. Why?
Reporters are responsible for checking their own sources. It's the reporter's job to find meaningful facts, and then share them, again citing sources whenever appropriate, which is basically all the time.
The appearance of these so-called "fact checkers" shows that, according to Big Media outlets, the authors of articles are really just storytellers. The job of "checking facts" has been offloaded to other departments, sometimes within the media companies, and sometimes not!
Remember how the Food and Drug Administration wanted more than 50 years to release that data? Hats off to Reuters for being on the ball here. The FDA claimed they were so short-staffed, that they couldn't get through all 450,000 pages of vaccine data to share with us!
Let's do some metaphorical math: If the FDA needs 50-75 years to review all the COVID19 vaccine data before they release it to the public, how the hell did they effectively consume, absorb and understand said data in such short order to approve those vaccines, even for kids? (And have you heard about Denmark’s take on this now?)
Media Matters
Back to our friend from the Times. I ultimately pinned him down in a bizarre string of text messages:
"Do you deny having intel on Russia/China surpassing the USA via Warren? Like a year before the story finally broke?"
He responded: "I admit the Russia connect was lacking. You happy?"
No, I'm not happy about that, at all. I'm not happy about the millions of Ukrainians murdered, abducted, injured and bereft. I'm not happy about Russian conscripts being used as cannon fodder all over the Ukrainian plains. I’m frankly mortified.
And you'll notice he used the passive voice, as if he had nothing to do with his own dereliction. He later went on to beg me (literally, if not genuinely) to get help for depression! "My final plea: Please go get help for your depression," he wrote. Right. That's called Concern Trolling, and it’s obviously a case of projection.
Remember that cliche about no one having a friend in the media? Well, the corollary is also true: People in the media apparently have no friends. Maybe that's why he's so depressed.
As for Konanykhine? Yes, he's the Russian oligarch who offered a million dollar bounty for anyone who "legally" kills Putin! But, pro tip to would-be assassins, he's notorious for not paying his bills, just one reason why my ties to him were severed, as were his to the Kremlin years ago.