Why You Should Never Go To Journalism School or Work in Corporate Media. They lie and enable a criminal group of billionaires to steal your future.

“Why Corporate Media is Dying and What Young Journalists Should Do Instead | Career Advice”

Why You Should Never Go To Journalism School or Work in Corporate Media. They lie and enable a criminal group of billionaires to steal your future.

Last week, I gave a speech at Huron College, University of Western Ontario in London, Canada. I was speaking about the mob wars ranging around the world over control of the sports gambling market .
Many of the students were kind enough to write afterwards that they had enjoyed the presentation. However, one student asked me to give them advice about becoming a journalist. Here is what I replied.

Dear S,

Thank you for your kind note about the presentation, it is very much appreciated.

You write that you are interested in possibly becoming a journalist and want some advice. Happy to give you my thoughts, but do know it is a case of bad news/good news.

Here is the bad news: Mainstream Media has failed. It is an utter dessert of platitudes, dying ratings and mass lay-offs. I should know I spend the best part of twenty years working for almost every major venue in the field from our CBC to the Sunday Telegraph, Guardian, BBC and the New York Times.

So if you are looking for a job as a hair-tossing anchor or smooth speaking reporter those jobs (always difficult to get and keep) are almost gone. Your generation is, as it often is, stuck outside in the cold peering in at the Gen-Xers and the last of the Boomers gradually killing it all off.

There are two reasons why mainstream corporate journalism is on death row. The first is the obvious one: technology – YouTube, mobile phones, Rumble or whatever have fundamentally changed the industry. Few young people even have televisions let alone watch the 57-channels with nothing on as Bruce Springsteen once described it.

Bruce Springsteen’s great – 57 Channels and Nothing On

However, there is a second, more insidious, reason why corporate media is in a death dive: few people trust it and they are right not to.

It Ain’t by Accident

“The corporations are the criminals, the mainstream media drives the getaway car.” (Cenk Uygur)

We live in the era of the grandest larceny ever committed on humanity.
Our age is dominated by deeply criminal 1%er billionaires. They are taking everything desirable – our lands, our jobs, our money, our parks, our air and our water. They rape any of our women they desire. They piss in the face of our children by denying them any opportunity or advancement.

To do this grand larceny they split us into social factions that argue over small, social things – who-has-sex-with-who-and-how-do-they-do-it, how we dress, which group in our community is more moral than another. They do anything they can to divide us and to allow them to continue to steal all that we have.

We have seen other eras like this one before. In the 1700s in the UK, millions of regular people were dispossessed of their ancestral lands. If they did not die of starvation, they were shipped off to the ‘New World’ where they were encouraged to do the same thing to other poor people.

It is the essential backdrop of The Outlander series. It is also the back story of Jane Austen novels like Pride and Prejudice, where in between the obsessive romantic gossip of the women, the men are running plantations, killing each other in duels, and invading Haiti to put down uppity-slaves.

The intellectual class of that time spent much of their energy ensuring that the rich and powerful had licence to steal anything they could from the poor. Their churches and universities were full of squirmy little men inventing squirmy little ideas and laws to justify this grand larceny. It is the backdrop of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – where he pokes a satyrical finger at the ideas of ‘surplus population,’ work houses and the Poor Laws.

Patrick Stewart in his finest acting role – as Ebenezer Scrooge

This, too is our time. Everything, everything in our societies is being stolen by the billionaire class and the corporate media is acting to hide this essential, existential story.

Because corporate journalism has become all about keeping the rich happy and comfortable all the wrong people are left in the building. The intellectually curious and objective journalists were driven out of the mainstream.

A Catalogue of Error

The result is a dreadful catalogue of major stories that the mainstream got completely wrong. The list is a long and ignoble one.

There was Y2K. The idea that all computers would fail on the night of December 31st, 1999 and planes would fall out of the sky, factories would shut down, and nuclear plants would combust. Corporations got billions in public taxpayers money selling that particular scam. The media of the late 1990s all agreed that it was a wonderful idea.

There was the invasion of Iraq. So wrong, so dreadful that millions of people have died because of the squalid mess of lies that justified it.

There was the “War” in Afghanistan that was multi-trillion-dollar exercise in supporting drug traffickers and child rapists. Did it get covered by the mainstream media? Nope.

There was Russiagate. Its essential idea was that the only reason for the 2016 US election results was, not that Hilary Clinton’s team had run a dreadful campaign, but that Russia must have influenced the stupid of America to vote for the wrong candidate. Never mind that tens-of-millions of Americans had been dispossessed of jobs, houses and livelihoods by the globalization that Hilary Clinton was the poster child for.

The mainstream media also got the origin of Covid wrong. In all probability the pathogen came from somewhere in the badly-run, research laboratory complex in Wuhan. But you would not have known that story for years as we cowered in our apartments and houses afraid to speak to our neighbours.

The mainstream media also helped suppress the story of the extensive censorship of the Covid story by the Communist Chinese.

They got the Ukraine War wrong. They even managed to miss the fact that there were peace negotiations launched between the Russians and Ukrainians days after the invasion. The negotiations went well until some of the negotiators were poisoned and one was gunned down in the streets of Kiev by the Ukrainian secret police.

These are the main stories of our times. Millions of people died because corporate media fed our societies a series of lies. The chief issue was the sheer lack of curiosity and questioning that mainstream media failed to do.

A Belief System

To help them continue their lack of inquiry, the media created a false system of belief.

In the class at Huron College I helped lead before the presentation that you saw, I spoke about my father’s old dictum, “Never trust anyone who boasts about their courage, ethics or intelligence.” Corporate media journalists are like the alcoholic who boasts about being sober speaking about what they lack not what they have. Thus corporate media, has spent years talking about abstract terms like ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’. They established “fact checkers” who for the most part were the equivalent of the Communist party loyalists who checked articles in Pravda or The People’s Daily to ensure loyalty to the system rather than accuracy.

The Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution in China – acting out a nonsense play to a group of oppressed workers.

The Good News

Here is the good news. If you want to become a journalist do NOT go to Journalism School – you do not need it to get a job in media and they will only train you to be stupid. Stay at the excellent Huron College and learn to think critically about the entire, real world. When you are finished do not try to find work in a mainstream media outlet. There you will simply be told what to say, write and think. Instead figure out your niche. A part of the world that only you can bring your original thinking and perspective to.

This is a brief time a chance to create your own media world. It may not last long. The billionaires who run Facebook, Google, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, and TikTok are all the same billionaires who all think in exactly the same way about exactly the same things. They want to ensure that you do not question too much and that you drift off to an earthly hell while checking the latest sports, Hollywood fashion news or porn.

BUT – there is an alternative and it is based, mostly, in Canada. The two sites that have revolutionized the transmission of free ideas are Substack and Rumble.

Thus my advice to you is take the trip down the 401. Visit their headquarters. Learn how to create your own media and, as importantly, make it popular. Bring your critical thinking and creativity to the endeavour. It is an important task. We need your generation to rescue us from the complicity with the criminals who are destroying our world