Knowledge seeks to be free.

While oligarchic suppression of unauthorized messages can be very thorough, it can never be complete. There will always be people who have a strong urge to know the truth and disseminate it and they will find ways to do so. We have seen in the past that even under tightly-controlled state media systems, an underground press and radio and other low-cost news systems such as pamphlets and wall posters emerge to provide an outlet for those who challenge the system.

In relatively open societies in the US, the challenge for non-oligarchic alternative voices is both harder and easier. It is easier because there is (usually) no overt suppression of other voices by direct censorship. Instead the focus is on marginalizing them, by making them seem extreme so that these voices do not reach a mass audience.

It is harder because the seeming openness of the system makes it harder for ordinary people to see the control of the oligarchy and thus less likely to see the need for alternative views. I am sure that many people in the US think that we are exposed to the full range of news and opinions on TV, in newspapers, and in magazines because we have Fox News and MSNBC, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the National Review and The Nation.

People tend to be not aware of what they are missing. It takes a great deal of media and political sophistication to be aware of what you are not hearing. A good example is Noam Chomsky. He is well known worldwide as an important political analyst and public intellectual and yet you will never see him anymore in the US mainstream media. To read his work or hear him, you will have to actively seek him out or read alternative media on a regular basis. The same is true for a whole host of people. If you do not appear in the major media venues, you and your views may as well not exist. The non-stop cacophony of voices that surround us in the media serves the purpose of creating that non-awareness. In fact, a good way to become better informed is to not watch TV or read the mainstream press but read only the headlines and the bare bones facts of a story and start just thinking for yourself about what it means.

This is why the internet has been so unsettling for the oligarchy. It lowered the cost of admission to the media club to almost zero and so one has had an explosion of voices, most of whom are free to say what they want. The government does not have to worry about the New York Times or CNN ‘going rogue’ because their dependence on advertisers and stockholders is sufficient to keep them in check and to even support government efforts to suppress dissenting voices.

The internet’s openness was tolerable as long as those new voices were scattered and diffuse and uncoordinated, each commanding just a small audience. But the emergence of outfits like WikiLeaks that are able to command widespread attention has really thrown a wrench into the media propaganda model which is why we should expect to see attempts to ‘regulate’ the internet to prevent ‘irresponsible’ (translation: anti-oligarchic) voices form gaining a foothold or by making the cost of business higher by governments using their vast resources to take legal action against smaller entities, thus driving up their costs and putting them out of business.

The WikiLeaks episode has opened a window on the oligarchic structure in the US. The US media likes to portray itself as independent of, and even adversarial to, the government. But when a true challenge to the government emerged, they quickly reverted to their true role of government ally. For example, see how the US media has disowned WikiLeaks and refused to fight or even speak out on their free speech rights, leaving it up to international media to call upon them to protect the First Amendment. It is the US media that fights the idea that WikiLeaks is a journalistic enterprise just like them and thus deserving of all First Amendment protections.

It is important to understand that this abandonment of WikiLeaks is not due to normal business competition. They are not doing this because of business reasons, because they fear that their subscribers and advertisers will shift away from them to WIkiLeaks because the latter is not that kind of operation and does not present that kind of danger. After all, they are giving away their information free to the mainstream media. Those mainstream media organizations that are distancing themselves from WikiLeaks are clearly doing this for ideological reasons, because they are opposed to what WikiLeaks represents which is a source of information that is outside oligarchic control. They act this way because the US media is part of the oligarchy and thus unconsciously picks up the cues that tell it what to do. The US government does not need to do anything. What better propaganda system is there?

WikiLeaks poses a challenge to the oligarchy because even those journalists that have passed through the filters and risen within the system realize that at some basic level, attempts to shut down WikiLeaks is wrong and this is creating cracks in the system. We need to widen those cracks by driving home the message that this is an important First Amendment issue and that what WikiLeaks does is no different from what Bob Woodward does except that he serves the interests of the oligarchy and WikiLeaks does not.

Next: Who makes up the oligarchy and what can we do about it?