The idea that an organization, like a news media outlet or an NGO, can be ‘independent‘ is based on liberal ontology. ‘Self-created’ individuals come together to create an organization. The state only provides oversight. In reality, we are all products of our culture.
Unavoidably, every US media outlet and NGO is a product of American culture and therefore biased. But more than this, the mechanisms introduced by liberalism that are supposed to secure ‘independence’ are, in reality, systems of control that restrict these organizations.
Private ownership, for example, does not secure ‘independence’ but rather adds requirements to be self-funding (through either profit or donations), competition for funds, access, and attention, and a lack of both transparency and accountability.
Take a private NGO: It must support itself through donors. If its aim is to bring ‘awareness’ to issues, that usually means gaining the attention of politicians. It requires access to do its work. Through these avenues it is open to control by the state and other interests.
Moreover, the NGO will be in competition with other NGOs, which are under the same constraints, all competing for donors, access, and attention. The successful NGOs will the most compliant. The market for NGOs is a market for propaganda.
Of course, the market wants the good sort of propaganda, the kind that people don’t recognize as propaganda, so we should expect the best NGOs to be good at hiding their bias, by, for example, engaging in perfunctory criticism of the US.
The concept of ’independence’ itself serves two propaganda roles: 1. It acts as ‘pre-propaganda’ that makes people who have bought into it more accepting of subsequent propaganda. 2. It allows us to dismiss other sources as not ‘independent‘ and therefore untrustworthy.
The lack of transparency involved with supposedly ‘independent’ private news orgs and NGOs is another major problem. Their sources are quite frequently EACH OTHER and it’s trivially easy for outside interests to engineer circles of evidence where one just cites another.
The lack of accountability is easy to see. If there are problems at a public institution, it often leads to a formal inquiry, etc. Perhaps nothing is done, but it generally remains in the public consciousness. There are no such formal mechanisms for private institutions.
Public institutions have ‘whistleblowers’, private institutions have ‘disgruntled former employees’. Nobody remembers the latter. They might launch ‘internal inquiries’ but we never really know if anything changed. After a bad scandal, they can start operating under another name.
It’s perhaps better to look at the network of news organizations, NGOs, think tanks, etc, in the US as a single entity, a Ministry of Propaganda. But it’s unique in that it’s organized in such a way that its own members don’t know how it works, what’s true and what isn’t.
Added to this melange of insanity is the electoral system, itself a means of constraining political discourse through partisanship. This, too, has a network of opaque institutions that feed into the propaganda apparatus, creating disinformation about the sources of propaganda.
