CNN newscasters are falling all over themselves to fellate one another on Twitter in response to America’s WWE president calling them fake news for the hundredth time. They’re all soothing and reassuring each other about what courageous, wonderful journalists they are over there on CNN. It’s hilarious.

I’ve got a couple of things I’d like to say about this silliness right now. The first is a reminder of that time in April when CNN’s Alisyn Camerota knowingly participated in a fake, scripted interview with a seven year-old girl in order to manufacture support for Syrian interventionism:

And how CNN staff continued to use the footage from this undeniably fake interview in order to silence people who opposed Syrian escalations:

Would you ever do something like this? Would you ever knowingly participate in a psyop exploiting a small child to deceive your countrymen into supporting a war on false pretenses? Bana Alabed was sounding out syllables from a script because she was unable to speak English, which means that Alisyn Camerota necessarily had the other half of the script for that fake interview. Would you ever do such a thing?

If not, that takes us to the second thing I wanted to say: you are infinitely more qualified to report the news than these assholes on CNN.

This is important for us denizens of the internet to be aware of. CNN reacts so strongly to having its reliability called into question because it’s becoming embarrassingly apparent that people don’t want or need their services anymore.

There was a time when being a journalist in a large organization like CNN meant you had access to information before the greater public. When communication was more hierarchical, technology was expensive and access to public figures was something only a press pass could give you, then working for a publication was essential. The internet has crushed all those advantages. Who needs a press pass when you have public figures narrating their thoughts on Twitter? Who needs a Telex machine wiring you news when you can watch it in real time on Periscope? Anyone can put in a FOIA request, anyone can read WikiLeaks, anyone can put in an interview request for anyone they like. There is no advantage to being in a big media organization anymore.

There are plenty of freedoms in not being in one. As audiences dwindle and circulation dies off for all the legacy media giants, money to keep the lights on has to come from somewhere, and unfortunately for humanity it’s coming in the form of advertising spends from plutocratic clients in big oil and the defense industry. These clients aren’t buying up ad space because they actually want to sell CNN’s audience a personal oil rig or an Apache helicopter, they just want to give money to CNN. Money buys you power and influence, and as CNN’s numbers slide the way of the dinosaurs, those dollars buy them more and more influence.

As an indie journo, you don’t need to worry about any of that. You’ll never get a tap on the shoulder from your ed indicating you should rein it in or spin it a certain way. There are no no-go topics or scripts you have to learn in order to play-act thinly veiled propaganda with small Syrian children. You can just find out what’s going on and write about it.

You can even hop on a plane and go find out for yourself like Vanessa Beeley and other indie journos have done.

It’s important for the public to begin taking CNN’s job away from them right now, before corporate censorship can close the door on that possibility. No matter who you are, you are infinitely more qualified to do that job than a bunch of lying war propagandists and corporate sycophants.

Just start. Start making videos, writing blogs, tweeting, making memes, whatever your thing is, and begin pointing at what you’re seeing. It might not be perfect, and it might only reach an audience of a few people, but it will still be infinitely better than CNN.

Speak out, and speak with confidence. There’s a man sitting in the White House right now who was able to get there using a shitload of confidence and a Twitter account, despite having no redeeming personal characteristics whatsoever. The talking heads on TV made themselves the voices of authority by speaking as though they are the voices of authority, by speaking in confident, authoritative voices and telling their audiences what’s what. If you speak your own truth with the same confident authority, you’re throwing a monkey wrench in that social engineering hack the propagandists have perfected, and people will listen to you.

I’m going to share an important life secret with you: everyone’s making it up as they go along, and nobody knows what the fuck is happening. We can read some books and add some knowledge about economics and geopolitics or whatever, but when it comes to life’s big questions about what’s really going on we’re all as clueless as the day we were born. Everyone’s just guessing their way through the bizarre, inexplicable explosion of miracles which appears each morning in our field of consciousness for a few decades, and then we die with maybe a few memories and ideas rattling around in our skulls surrounded by a big black sea of “what the actual fuck?”

We’re all a bunch of babies in suits and dresses trying to act like we know best. The only thing that separates the leader babies from the follower babies is the leader babies are better at feigning confidence that they know what they’re doing.

So take command, because if you don’t the assholes on CNN will. Steal their authority, because at the rate our species is going literally anyone would be better at the steering wheel. Seize control of the narrative, ignore the authoritative-sounding babies who scoff and try to tell you you don’t know what you’re talking about, and speak your truth from wherever you’re standing. The more of us remain silent, the more influence Alisyn fucking Camerota has. Speak your truth, and speak it with confidence. If they can do it, so can you.

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