Gathering and telling stories of modern-day American peasants, from the resigned to the rebellious.

Mar 22, 2021

March 17, 2021 - Comment on Matt Taibbi, 'With Ratings Down, the Networks Hunt for a Trump Replacement'

KW: I appreciate what you and Glenn Greenwald do to shed light on the mess that is cable (MSNBC, Fox, CNN) and other mainstream news media: WaPo, NYT and so on.
But sometimes I wonder when you will take the next step and not watch, read, follow along with or report on what they’re doing, because they don’t matter and are so uninteresting to so many people who already don’t watch or read them.
If the cable news outlets reach 3 million people on prime time at peak, out of a US population of some 330 million, they could easily be construed as a negligible sideshow. Same with Twitter and Facebook. Somewhere I read that a small fraction of Americans actually post on Twitter, and something like 80% of the content comes from 10% of the users — the most dedicated media and politics types.
Whenever it happens, I’m looking forward to the day when MSNBC, Fox, CNN, WaPo, NYT, Twitter, Facebook and the other evidence-free, lie-mongering cage-match media institutions are gone just because no one cares what they say or do. We’re already almost there.
I also think investing more attention in the lowly alternatives springing up, and ignoring the dying behemoths, will help speed up the deaths of the American Pravdas and WWF-News channels

March 17, 2021 - Comment on Glenn Greenwald, 'Journalists, Illustrating How They Operate, Yesterday Spread a Significant Lie All Over Twitter'

KW: I posted a similar comment at Taibbi’s piece today, but will repeat the point here. I think it’s near or maybe past time honest journalists like Greenwald, Taibbi and the handful of others (across the political spectrum) who still do look for evidence and cite to it in their reporting, to stop paying attention to and analyzing the lies of the liars in the mainstream media and on Twitter and Facebook.
In a perverse way, highlighting their lies and how they cover for each other seems to be feeding the beast, when starving it might well be more effective at building the spaces and audiences for the truth tellers. There is a massive audience that completely tunes out the liars, and (as part of that audience) I’d like to hear less about the liars, and more about the substantive things that coverage of the liars is stealing attention from.
I guess I just think the people who want to believe the lies will continue to believe them no matter how many times the lies are pointed out to them, and the rest of us already know the liars lie, ignore them as much as we can, seek out truth-tellers, and want to move past the liars and let them rot in their own disgusting juices in their echo chambers of irrelevancy together.
Plus I think it would be super-funny if Taibbi, Greenwald, and the handful of others more or less simultaneously announced that they’re done with media-liar-coverage and actually stopped following the liars antics on social media and in the pages of the WaPo and New York Times and HuffPost and the Atlantic and so on.
Maybe I’m totally wrong, but I think the people who care about the inbred liberal media types and their circle-jerks of lies are a tiny minority, and a very large majority is hungry for whatever is not that.

'Steve' replied:

The vast majority of the political and corporate class in this country has not yet been woken up to the falsehoods perpetrated by the mainstream media. Thus, while I often feel the same as you, I think it's vital that people like Greenwald and Taibbi continue documenting the evidence upholding traditional journalistic standards. That kind of reporting won't be outright dismissed quite as easily by those still hypnotized by mainstream media, and may occasionally break through. There should be more people documenting this clearly and carefully...

KW reply to 'Steve':

My point is that the vast majority of that insider class will not change their minds, because they are in on the long con and benefitting from it.
Course correction will not come from that cohort. It will be up to the outsiders who currently ignore the propaganda machines and are ignored by the MSM but have very limited good alternative sources (Greenwald, Taibbi, etc.) with which to learn about each other and ideas that might have potential to make useful change.
Adding to the growing pile of evidence that the outsiders are correct in their contempt for the overlords is less helpful at moving things along, in my view, than putting the time now spent documenting the insiders’ MSM corruption into documenting other things, about what the outsiders are doing to fight back or create alternatives, for example, that’s ignored by MSM.
Maybe the outsiders aren’t doing anything so there’s nothing to report and MSM ignorance of the lowly peasants is justifiable.
Or maybe the lowly peasants are more interested in secrecy for their resistance movements than growing by attracting new recruits, so they avoid talking to any media, alternative or MSM.
I don’t know. I just know more attention slathered on MSM assholes by really good reporters seems like a tragic waste of the reporters’ time and their readers’ time.
Maybe I just need to skip reading those pieces. But sometimes it seems like it takes up 25-30% of their time and energy, and it’s sad to think about what else that time and energy could be put into, and how those other things could be more effective toward changing things for the better.

I want to walk my talk, and put time into collecting and telling the stories of America’s peasants: farmers, mechanics, shopkeepers and restauranteurs, truckers, clerks, waiters and waitresses, carpenters, housepainters, musicians and writers, and the many other members of the non-elite classes.

I’m interested in understanding and writing about how other peasants — living anywhere in the United States — think about their individual human lives, their work, and their positions in the hierarchies of power and control, all along the spectrum between resignation and rebellion.

Where were you born and raised? How many places have you lived and how have you made a living?

Are you content with your lot?

Have governments, institutions and large corporations thrown things in your path to drag you backwards or shove you down? How do you deal with those forces? Do you numb yourself? Do you find refuge in faith in God or another higher power?

Do you fight back? If so, how?

I think maybe there’s an audience of readers also interested in hearing those stories, but I don’t know for sure, so it’s an experiment driven by my own curiousity and desire for human connection.

If you or someone you know might be interested in being interviewed for this project, contact me online at kgwatt@protonmail.com or offline at PO Box 621, Centre Hall PA, 16828-0621.

If things work out, you’ll get a 500-1,500 word story about yourself and your life, I’ll get to publish it, and Bailiwick News readers will get to read it.

If nobody wants to be interviewed, so be it.