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This is an excerpt from my book They Knew, published in 2022. I’m posting it due to the tremendous response to my article Gutting the Fourth Estate, published last week. They Knew provides more context — and maps out the disastrous changes in tech and media for which we now pay the price.
This is from chapter six of They Knew, Memory-Holing a Coup:
In March 2016, shortly before Trump became the Republican presidential nominee, CBS president Les Moonves gloated about how profitable his run was for cable news. “Bring it on, Donald. Keep going. It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
There is a common misconception that the reason the media covered Trump relentlessly in 2015 and 2016, letting his rallies air unimpeded and saturating the airwaves with his every utterance, was to make money. While news networks certainly found him profitable, this does not tell the full story.
A Trump crime sells as well as Trump sycophancy or Trump scandal. But the most serious allegations about Trump — his decades-long involvement with organized crime figures, in particular the Russian mafia; his illicit ties to the Kremlin; the multiple felons and foreign operatives in his campaign and inner circle; and the rape allegation from a Jeffrey Epstein trafficking victim — were rarely discussed before the election. Some of these topics remain largely absent from public discourse, though still preserved in books — hiding in plain sight, one might say.
The mainstream media caters to power and power rests on networks of criminal elites. This is a synergistic relationship, but one side wields more influence than the other. To interrupt Trump’s rise was not only to threaten media profit margins, but to incur threats of blackmail and violence from Trump’s lawyer goon squad. It was to challenge organized crime rather than streamline it into obsolescence.
Because Trump had been a public figure for over forty years by 2016, many of his criminal connections were documented in the public domain. For a brief period in the late 1980s and early 1990s — the aforementioned anomalous age of American accountability — his offenses and his finances were covered in a straightforward way by the press. All it took to understand the mafia and oligarch network backing Trump were back issues of SPY, Vanity Fair, or any of the New York-based publications from that era. Trump’s propensity for confession also provided a wealth of insight.
The surfeit of documentation made it very suspicious when law enforcement and intelligence failed to stop an established transnational criminal operative from leading the military and overseeing the national security of the United State of America. There was no way they did not know, since this was information one could put together with Google and a library card. The only question remains why they knew and refused to act: complacency or complicity, careerism or corruption.
As the kleptocratic goals of the Trump administration became harder to deny, and as his circle increasingly fell under criminal investigation, the media, which was also fully aware of Trump’s backstory, resorted to a tactic I came to call “deja news”. Deja news is the repeated reporting on a well-documented phenomenon as if it were brand-new information. It is the presentation of a well-established yet damning fact as a shocking revelation, which thereby relieves the reporter of the blame they would otherwise receive for not investigating it before.
The “shocking revelations” often arrived through coverage of plodding investigations, like the Mueller probe, that confirmed obvious threats and prior illegal acts while doing nothing meaningful in practice to hold the perpetrators accountable. Officials also embraced the deja news tactic of treating old news as fresh information, because doing otherwise — admitting that they knew the danger the whole time — would mean admitting they had failed to protect the public.
Instead, they feigned shock to avoid accountability.
* * *
I have a reputation for bringing hidden truths to light, but the most damning truth about the Trump crime world is that very little of its illicit activity was hidden. It was out there, decontextualized and obscured, but reported in real time for decades on end. I stood out as an anomaly not for what I claimed but that I thought it was important, particularly when it came to predicting how he would act as president.
From 2015 until 2021, my response to inquiries about how I was able to predict Trump’s behavior was: “It was in the public domain.” I lost track of the number of times I told a dubious reporter deeming my allegations of Trump and his associates’ past behavior “a conspiracy theory” to simply consult their old archives for proof.
But it was the availability of archival materials that allowed me, and other journalists and social scientists, to put the pieces together. For nearly the entirety of Trump’s campaign and tenure in office, most media outlets remained free. Many offered archives that provided a window into decades of dirty deeds. But in the beginning of 2021, after democracy had been defenestrated, that window abruptly closed.
He who controls the past controls the future, said Orwell, and now they who control the past decided people needed to pony up to see what had happened. By spring 2021, nearly every major news outlet had erected a paywall, often prohibitively expensive, that blocked content from general view. Journalists, both frustrated with the paywalls or facing layoffs after financial restructuring, quit and started their own newsletters or podcasts — many of which also required a subscription to access.
What remained free of charge? Misinformation, propaganda and lies. Memes, fact-deprived political websites, and social media gossip continued to circulate as the hard news hid away. Isolated bits of articles — headlines, quotations, paragraphs — floated around the internet, decontextualized and stripped of authorship or date of publication.
People relied on each other to find out what a paywalled article was about, including articles about public health crises like covid, and the summaries traveled like a bad game of telephone, with the result that a lot of people spent late 2021 scarfing down horse paste. Local newspapers, severely downsized since the 2008 recession, paywalled their websites to stay afloat, leaving panicked citizens relying on NextDoor posts to navigate a dystopia. It is hard to imagine more fertile terrain for a propaganda war, one that the paywalled side is destined to lose.
There is no longer a public sphere, but there is a public flat earth.
Even television, the last gasp of the American monoculture, became fragmented. The pandemic boosted streaming services and made network heads realize they could reap profits by slicing and dicing the networks that had long united American viewers.
Within two decades, Americans went from watching the same shows at the same time, to watching the same shows at different times thanks to DVRs, to not even knowing what shows existed and when they found out, not being able to afford to watch them. The partitioning of television mirrored the prior dissolution of the music industry and foreshadowed the film industry’s direct-to-streaming downfall. Cheap entertainment, one of the last unifying American pastimes, was now a labyrinth of toll roads to gated communities.
Prior to 2020, Americans had voluntarily sequestered themselves in information silos: consuming different news outlets and therefore different facts, urged by algorithms to limit their horizons. This was considered dangerous, a reason for our bitter debates over facts and factions. Now the silos contained not only political information but the distractions and relief from it: the shared entertainment we had taken for granted. Now we could not choose to leave the silos even if we wanted to: they are being constructed around us, demanding ever-steeper admission fees to ever-shrinking cultural conversations.
This restructuring of mass media in 2021 was not a conspiracy against democracy, but it was exploited by those who sought to create one. The end of the Trump administration led to dramatically decreased consumption of mainstream news outlets and massive profit loss. People who hated the news had come to rely on it in order to manage the inescapable peril that had entered their lives — the autocracy, the plague — and now that both seemed on the wane, they turned away in relief.
But the restructuring arrived at the absolute worst possible time for a country struggling for a sense of shared reality. Investigative reporting on the demise of democracy continued, paywalled from a public which instead gossiped about the latest “Karen” gone viral. Comprehensive analyses of policy plans hid behind prohibitive fees while short memes lying about what was in the plans circulated freely. We shared fantasy, we shared enmity, we shared fantasies about enemies who were in reality just figments and fragments, blips on a malfunctioning radar, human trading cards.
There is no longer a public domain.
* * *
Journalism has come to resemble the insular world of academia, where research had long been sequestered from the masses. Unless you have an institutional affiliation, individual academic articles can cost twenty or thirty dollars, sometimes more — a price no one pays, but that was constructed to keep the general public away and maintain an elite grip on publicly funded knowledge.
The article fee is a symbolic amount: the price of entry, the cost of exclusion.
I left academia a decade ago in part because of my frustration with this system, which not only does not serve the public but considers doing so to be a distasteful enterprise. I wanted my research to be read, and in order for it to be read, it needed to be accessible. The free, open internet was a welcoming alternative. Though some journalistic publications had always been paywalled, it had never been the majority of sites. In 2021, this no longer was the case.
While researching my previous books, my biggest problem was managing the incredible amount of information I found. My new problem is getting the facts without going broke. If it’s a problem for me as a full-time journalist obsessed with hunting down information, imagine what it’s like for the average American without time, resources, or professional obligation.
The end result of all of this — the deja news, the paywalled facts, the free-floating lies, the absence of official accountability — is the erosion of history. It is the loss of collective memory, including the digital collective memory that had come to augment and even supplant citizen consensus since the advent of the internet.
In 2021, the US became the first country in world history to memory-hole a coup. It is unprecedented for a democracy to face a physical attack organized by wealthy seditionists and foreign operatives intended to nullify a legitimate election and then decide to do nothing to prevent it from happening again.
A failed coup is a dress rehearsal. Government officials know that. The public should know that too, but if they do not, there are obvious culprits to blame for their lack of awareness. This is a perfect storm of forced forgetting, and American democracy is drowning inside.
* * *
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Barricaded “discovery entrance” to the Mark Twain Cave in Hannibal, Missouri. I took this photo in 2016. I wrote about the cave and Twain in my book The Last American Road Trip.
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Some thoughts I was having in 2021 as I wrote They Knew….
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