The brainwashing you don’t see

A while back, I spotted the follow cross-post Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks by Azra Raza (3 Quarks Daily). The screenshot below shows what this article looked like. This is an article that the main editor of 3QuarksDaily felt a burning interest to share. Before him, though, Maureen Dowd of the vaunted gray lady, The New York Times, felt a burning desire to shared with the world just how hard it is to be George Clooney.

Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks

This is, of course, mind-boggling if you’re not part of this world.

• Did this article appear above or below the one about Palestinian children running into stray bullets and rockets?
• Or of Columbia University cooperating with the U.S. government persecuting its legal-resident students for being “antisemitic”?
• Or do we just not report on that stuff now?
• Or wait … do we report on it now, now that it’s Donald Trump doing it but not before, when Biden was doing it?

It’s all so confusing.

What’s a newspaper to do?

It wants to pretend that it’s doing journalism, but wants to lose neither access nor prestige nor subscribers nor advertisers.

It know which side its bread is buttered on.

So, it writes instead about how George likes to smoke but shouldn’t.