By Eric Le Roy
Suppose you spend long enough consuming Western news. In that case, you start to feel a kind of informational tinnitus — a high, continuous whine behind everything, a reminder that the machine is always running even when you’re not paying attention. It’s not a sound you can locate. It’s simply there, like an aftertaste, evidence that someone has been vibrating the air around your head for so long that silence feels unnatural. That’s one of the big problems in the West: silence is anathema: any noise, even the hum of a dishwasher, the explosion of a fart, or the rapidfire pop-pop-pop of an assault rifle, is better than nothing at all.
Suppose it’s Russian media. Here, there is more of an industrial hum, a maddening sound of a clock ticking in an interrogation room, and a sense of inevitability about the soon-to-be-uttered confession. It is always a single script and a scripted result. It is also a repeated dose of amnesia. It never happened. It never happened. It never happened. There now….forgotten. In Russia, the all-controlling government relies on the capacity of the Russian people to endure anything. They turn this noble quality into a scurrilous subterfuge. And the media, for the most part, are frightened into submission.
First, the West.
This is the legacy of a media landscape that no longer waits for events but manufactures tempo in their absence. In the West, ‘news’ — especially ‘breaking’ news (which by now most of us instantly understand that a load of shit is about to be slung at us) — often amounts to fanciful invention instead of wary restraint or meticulous accuracy. The news becomes not an event duly reported on in an informative way, but overkill before there is anything to actually kill. Modern Western ‘journalism’ is frequently a case of a four-inch dick wishing it were a ten. It is a toxic transfusion pumped daily into the human bloodstream, whether the patient needs it or not.
There is a desperation in it. A newsroom cannot tolerate stillness. A journalist cannot face the possibility that nothing catastrophic is happening because catastrophe is the only remaining currency. A minor dispute becomes a cultural reckoning. A procedural vote becomes a constitutional emergency. A political opponent becomes an existential threat to all that is good and pure. The coverage sweats. It trembles. It invents velocity where none exists.
This is not incompetence. It is tradition. And, increasingly, there is a slavering malevolence inside the whole operation, eating its way out. The media has become a form of pollution: its fictions are to truth like smog is to fresh air.
The West has been cultivating hysterical journalism for more than a century. The “yellow press” of the late 1800s understood perfectly that emotion sells in ways facts never can. Entire wars have been nudged into existence by headlines written with more adrenaline than evidence. By the mid-20th century, the Cold War provided a reliable narrative engine: every policy debate, every scientific breakthrough, every schoolchild’s essay contest could be framed as a decisive moment in the struggle against totalitarianism.
By the time cable news arrived, the template was already carved into bedrock. The 24-hour cycle simply removed the last inhibitions — now everything could be covered instantly, exaggerated instantly, debated instantly, and forgotten instantly. The medium became a perpetual echo chamber for whatever fear, scandal, or moral drama floated to the surface that hour.
None of this would matter quite so much if the Western press had maintained even the pretense of ideological balance. But in recent decades, it has drifted — not subtly — toward a single, predictable posture. We do not need to call it a political program; it’s more primitive than that. It is an instinctive leaning, a reflexive suspicion of some figures and an equally reflexive indulgence of others.
One need not be sympathetic to Donald Trump to notice that the Western news establishment treats him with the steady, unwavering intensity of a predator that has confused obsession for vigilance. Every gesture becomes symbolic. Every phrase becomes damning. Every misstep becomes an omen of democratic collapse. There are governments around the world whose crimes receive less scrutiny than one of his press conferences.
The irony, of course, is that this bias does not conceal itself. It does not need to. The audience has been trained to expect it. Some even find comfort in it. The narrative is familiar, and familiarity is a kind of narcotic. And, just as there are no novels written about happy marriages, so there is no mass audience for winners of pie-baking contests. People worship uproar, scandal, and catastrophe – the more salacious or gory (or both) the better. The marketing wizards (it is always all about marketing) sharpen their teeth every morning as they hit the espresso button in the kitchen.
Look at how the Western media handles mass murder. In America, there is no occasion more tailor-made for media rejoicing than when an angry lunatic starts firing into a crowd. I offer you the protocol that repeats itself every time: (1) the breaking news; (2) the number of fatalities (usually inaccurate); (3) eye witness and survivor accounts: We heard these ‘click-click-click sounds and didn’t know it was an assault rifle; (4) the identity of the killer (at large, captured at the scene, or suicided; (5) the head cop makes a statement to the public; (6) politicians talk about this sort of mayhem being deeply disturbing or unacceptable in a ‘civilized’ society; (7) talking heads on the media jibber-jabber fruitlessly about gun control; (8) the inevitable candlelight vigil by the mourners; (8) THEN – some gold-digging skank accuses a whore-hopping film producer, pop star or CEO of sexual assault, and the mass murder disappears from the news; (9) the media wait for another public slaughter so they can start the whole process from scratch.
That’s Western media.
But before anyone begins fantasizing that salvation lies elsewhere, we turn to the other extreme — a place where news does not roar but stifles a yawn.
Authoritarian systems such as those operating in Russia and China do not need to exaggerate events. They simply decide which events exist. The silence is not peaceful; it is curated. It has borders. It has rules. Moreover, it feeds its bile to an audience that no longer has any taste buds, or, if it does — and knows the meat is rotten — has been pummelled into submission to the extent that it dares not complain. Why, this is really tasty!!
History is full of moments when this silence swallowed entire tragedies. Consider the disaster at Chernobyl, where the initial impulse of the authorities was not to inform the public, not to mobilize a rapid evacuation, but to deny. To soften. To delay. The instinct for concealment was so strong that ordinary citizens attended parades beneath radioactive dust because no one had thought it appropriate to interrupt the national myth with an inconvenient plume of poison.
One might hope that this reflex belonged to a different era, but the habit persists. Plane crashes, industrial explosions, epidemic outbreaks — anything capable of staining the image of competence is handled with the same choreography: minimize, deflect, obscure. Then, once the worst is undeniable, release a sanitized version of events, gently padded with reassurances about stability and heroic government intervention. The narrative arrives neatly folded, smoothed at the edges, and utterly useless to the people who needed the truth when it mattered.
This is the quiet horror of censorship: it functions not by dramatic repression but by bureaucratic anesthesia. It slows everything down until urgency dies. It smothers the oxygen that allows outrage to ignite. One does not necessarily see the lie; one sees the absence where the truth should have been. Russian mentality has been trained, often with the threat or actual application of brutality carried out in an iron room lost to public view, to frame the whole abysmal picture into a tidy package of 1. Nobody knows 2. Well, everybody else does it 3. It’s fake news (this coming from the land of AI blogging trolls) 4. It’s the West trying to corrupt us. 5. It’s NATO Nazis.
There is also the chorus of loyal online patriots — funded or merely government-inspired — who swarm any discussion with an almost religious fervor, ensuring that the “right” interpretation becomes the only interpretation. In the West, chaos comes from the collision of too many narratives; under authoritarianism, the chaos comes from being trapped inside one.
It is tempting to imagine these systems as opposites, but they are, in essence, allies in the degradation of public understanding. Western media drowns reality in spectacle; authoritarian media amputates it. Both, in their own ways, ensure that the average citizen lives at a perpetual distance from the world they inhabit. Nevertheless, it must be stated that the audience is more than a little responsible for allowing itself to be hoodwinked all the time. It’s like the TV producers say, and I paraphrase: They want to eat shit, we give them shit to eat. Indeed, and maybe to many it is sacrilege to say so, but, of course, I will: a democracy that does not consist of EDUCATED people is worse than no democracy at all; it is a Ship of Fools. Of course, the media knows this, and, ever anxious for a ‘feeding frenzy’, keeps tossing fresh flesh to the public piranhas.
Consider the psychological effect.
The Western viewer becomes a creature of fatigue — overwhelmed, suspicious, unable to distinguish between genuine crisis and the noise that imitates it. After decades of being told that democracy is on the brink every Tuesday, they begin to shrug. The alarm has been rung too often; its pitch no longer carries meaning.
The citizen living under censorship, however, develops a different kind of exhaustion — the exhaustion of decoding. They learn to map the negative space around official statements, to detect the faint tremor of omission. They live with the persistent, corrosive awareness that the truth exists somewhere else, in some inaccessible dimension.
Both are tired. Both are misled. Both are unmoored.
And neither is served by the institutions designed — at least in theory — to inform them.
There is a particularly cruel symmetry here. The Western journalist, drunk on urgency, believes they are saving the public by keeping them perpetually alert. The authoritarian journalist (a euphemism, of course) believes they are protecting the public by keeping them perpetually calm. Each believes their distortion is a form of responsibility. Each sees themselves as a guardian rather than a warden.
And as these two models point at each other’s failures, they grow bolder in their own. Western networks congratulate themselves for not being state-controlled, even as they march in ideological lockstep on certain topics. Authoritarian broadcasters congratulate themselves for not descending into chaos, even as they provide less transparency during disasters than a fogged window.
The result is an information bedlam or basement that no longer functions as a window to the world but as a barrier, each side insisting that its distortions are the natural cost of civilization.
This is the point where sarcasm usually drains away, because the consequences are no longer amusing. A society cannot remain healthy when its sensory organs are corrupted. People need reality — not the hyperventilated version, not the sterilized version, but the unexciting, unprofitable, often uncomfortable truth. Without it, political judgment becomes superstition. Social trust dissolves. Collective memory fractures.
Journalism, at its best, is a mechanism for sanity. But sanity has no place in a marketplace governed by attention metrics, and even less in a system governed by fear of the ruling party. The West suffers from excess: too much commentary, too much panic, too much interpretation layered over too few facts. Authoritarian states suffer from deprivation: too little daylight, too little accountability, too little willingness to admit that the world does not bend neatly to official narratives.
It may be that we will never have a perfect model. But somewhere between the shrieking carnival and the suffocating silence, there remains a space — narrow, fragile, easily overlooked — where truth can exist without being turned into a harpoon greased up with sensationist feces. Or, as Hemingway says at the end of The Sun Also Rises: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
I have noticed that most writers on this subject, after slogging through muck with cries of lamentation, try to end on a note of cautious optimism. “We can do better, and perhaps we will. Eventually, everyone will come to their senses, and civilization will flourish.”
A call to action.
I would respond by saying that I am glad there are optimists, just as I am glad there are polar bears and paracetamol and popcorn. But I think it’s a load of bollocks to imagine people in general ever getting much better. The media, the profession of rabblerousers and cynical asses disguised as public caretakers, who joyously feed the mob with mob-candy every day of their lives, desperately hope that the public will stay just like it is: gullible, thick-headed, and needy of a regular fix as much as any junkie in Chicago.
Democracy.
In Russia and China, and North Korea (do they have a media there?), the real journalists will continue to live in fear, or be brave and get hammered, or just flee the country — where they can become Western Journalists and join the chronic tumult: Give us Bread and Circuses. In other words, brutalize us, but don’t dare bore us.
