I come from the United States, from New York, where we are building an anti-imperialist news platform called Breakthrough News. I want to set a foundation for my talk today by reminding everyone that, although this history is often buried, the fate of the U.S. left and the U.S. independent media has always been, in a way, intertwined with that of China. In 1950, the U.S. political establishment and its media apparatus were convulsed by what was called McCarthyism—a massive attack on civil liberties, on intellectuals, on artists, on labor leaders, and on all those people of conscience who wanted a world of peace and who questioned the foreign policy of the United States. A crusade was waged to crush their dissent, to silence them, and to end their careers. The animating question of that moment was “Who lost China?” This premise was, of course, a colonial premise—the idea that China could ever belong to anyone. But in Washington, Joe McCarthy and other politicians pointed the finger at anyone who had ever called for an independent foreign policy, anyone who had ever called for respecting self-determination, and said, “You are the reason we have lost China—and lost China to communism, no less.” Anti-communist hysteria was then utilized to drive out dissent and to prepare for war in what was the Korean War for larger control over the Pacific and the whole region of Asia.
I start here because we are now entering a new period of McCarthyite-type attacks inside the United States—once again suppressing free speech and dissent, and once again labeling anyone who speaks out as an agent of Russia or China. This is a period where both parties, Republicans and Democrats, accuse each other of being agents of a foreign power. This is then utilized to block movements for social change, to arrest those who are fighting for racial equality and for higher wages, and to say to them, “You, too, are agents of a foreign power.” And once again, the question, in a way, is “Who lost China?”—but it is “Who lost China, Part 2,” because the imperialists, having mistakenly believed that they had recaptured China, are now waking up to the reality that China was never theirs to begin with and that China has always been striking its independent path. In a way, they are also asking “Who lost Russia?” because they thought they had recaptured Russia after the defeat of the Soviet Union. And when India and Pakistan do not join in with the sanctions against Russia, they say “Who lost India?” and “Who lost Pakistan?”—and, in fact, “Who lost the whole Global South?” This is the question that is now animating Washington as the unipolar world very rapidly becomes a new world.
We know from inside the United States that this changing world environment poses particular challenges to our work as independent media and journalists. We know that we are now operating in essentially a period of information war. This is not hyperbole or rhetoric, as information war is a declared domain of warfare by the U.S. Pentagon. In their minds, war is no longer a matter of land, sea, air—not even just space or cyberspace; there is a sixth domain of war, and it is the information domain. They have learned from their defeat in Iraq, in particular, that unless you win over the hearts and minds of the people, no amount of force can secure a victory for the imperialists. And so they are turning their energies more and more to the question of winning over hearts and minds, and for them, media and information are the chief battlefield in this particular domain.
We at Breakthrough News are operating just five blocks away from the headquarters of the New York Times, and only a couple of subway stops away from Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal. So we are quite literally behind enemy lines in this information war. What can we observe? What can we share from what we have experienced in New York City? One is that the U.S. journalistic profession—which prides itself on being a so-called Fourth Estate, an independent, politically detached, and neutral instrument following the facts alone and in pursuit of the truth—is a lie. While individual journalists, of course, may follow this ethos in their own work at some of these major publications, the last year, in particular in the coverage of the Ukraine war, has revealed that the Fourth Estate is really nothing but a fourth branch of government. We have three branches of government officially, but this media apparatus has functioned entirely as the stenographers of power. The role of media, of course, is supposed to be to provide historical context, to ask the fundamental questions, and to challenge the powerful. Inside the United States, we find journalists who are merely repeating the lies and the narratives of the government apparatus. There is no questioning whatsoever. In fact, to even raise the question—How did this war come about? What are its historical roots? Who predicted it was going to come? How could it have been avoided?—all of these are questions of so-called Russian misinformation. To even ask the questions, or to ask the question “How could the war be brought to an end?”—which, of course, has a very simple answer—is itself deemed Russian disinformation according to the new logic of Washington.
Many people have spoken already about how information is entirely monopolized inside the United States. I want to give just a few figures, which some of you, of course, are already familiar with: six giant megacorporations control 90% of what we read, watch, and listen to in the United States. This is down from maybe 50 corporations that dominated 90% only 40 years ago. But even to talk about the question in terms of ownership is somewhat limiting, because it is not just about who owns the media; it is about their political function—the fact that the editorial boards for all of these major media conglomerates are themselves deeply enmeshed with the political elites, deeply enmeshed with the intelligence services of the West, and with buddy-buddy relationships with those who are driving foreign policy. So even if they were spun off into independently owned corporations, what good would it do if the editorial boards have all been raised in the same foreign policy establishment? They have gone to school together and they eat dinner together. This is the real function of a ruling-class media, as we call it; it is not just about who owns it but also about how they operate.
The good news is, of course, that people no longer trust this media. American distrust of the media is at a record high. According to recent polls, only 7% of American adults have a great deal of trust in newspapers, TV, and radio news, while 27% have only a fair amount. This means that two-thirds of adults in the United States have little to no trust in the traditional media. This is down from nearly 70% 50 years ago. It, of course, corresponds to a greater distrust in all the main institutions in U.S. society. Social media plays a big role in this, as the forms of communication and the ways of consuming information have changed so rapidly. But it does not mean that the imperialist media is somehow just going to wither away or give up their project. We have noticed that they have three main ways they are trying to recapture the legitimacy they are already losing through this establishment media.
First, as we have mentioned already, are the McCarthyite attacks: the censorship, the muzzling, and the banning of channels. Second, there is the shadow-banning and the private control of algorithms, which really control the means of distribution. They give the illusion of democracy—everyone can create whatever you want and anyone can post—but then they control who gets to see it. So they have made up for the lack of control over publication by now controlling distribution. Third is the rebranding of themselves and their narratives as independent media. I want to flag this as a particular challenge and threat: knowing how mainstream media is already distrusted, they have created a multitude of brands that function on social media that are really just a rebranding of the traditional media. They are consuming all the same talking points, packaging them with a modern, hip, young aesthetic, but are essentially the same media. Part of these new media brands are funded by this or that billionaire within the Republican or Democratic Party, but all of them still operate within the same imperialist consensus. In a way, this can become even more dangerous, because if you have 500 YouTube channels with ostensibly different politics all saying, in different ways, that Russia is the enemy or that China is the enemy, this can actually have a more profound psychological effect than just listening to ABC or CBS or NBC, because you start to feel like you are the only one.
These are complex problems that require very sophisticated responses. I want to speak a little bit about what Breakthrough News is trying to do. We have two main angles at Breakthrough News, and we are a small team. We were only founded three years ago; the first year and a half we were really working remotely, so we have only had about a year and a half to two years of functioning uninterrupted. Our two main angles are these: we want in-depth content and education about the perspectives of the Global South and those countries that are targeted by imperialist sanctions. We want to hear directly from those who are being demonized and get their counterpoint. Second, we want to cover the struggles of resistance inside the United States against the U.S.’s own human rights violations. Lest we forget, half of the U.S. population is already in or near poverty; tens of millions of people cannot pay their rent; last year, 900 people were killed by police inside the United States; we have a vast apparatus of detention centers where refugees and migrants are tortured on a regular basis; and we have people who are going hungry, living on the street in the United States. These are human rights violations, and unless we can document these human rights violations ourselves and transmit them to the world, we would not be actually challenging the American exceptionalism that they like to project about themselves.
We believe there is a great audience for this inside the United States and, in fact, around the world. In the last two years, we have amassed around 700,000 subscribers to our channels. We are averaging around 28 million views per month with this kind of content, combining short videos that document the abuses and the resistance struggles in the United States and then longer-form interviews with experts from around the world who counter the foreign policy establishment. We think there is a big audience because we know there are now millions of people, especially young people, in the United States who have some positive feelings about socialism and anti-capitalism. Despite the whole history of McCarthyism, that fog of anti-communism is beginning to lift. There are 25 million people who protested racist police violence after the killing of George Floyd; they have to be reached with a different media. There are millions who are outraged by the anti-Asian violence and racism that is so common now in the United States and which people are connecting with the foreign scapegoating of China in particular; they have to have a media that reaches them. There are millions in or near poverty; they have to have a media where they can see themselves, not just the lifestyles of the rich and famous. There are many struggles that are taking place inside the United States that people around the world are simply not aware of—even people in the United States are simply not aware of—and to the extent we start to disrupt this narrative that the United States is the land of milk and honey where the American Dream can easily be fulfilled, we believe we will be helping change the narrative on a global scale.
I want to close by recalling how McCarthyism actually fell in the 1950s. It did not fall because there was a big revolt within the elite sectors of the United States. McCarthyism fell because of the civil rights movement, because of the anti-war movement, and because of the movement of women—who were challenging Washington and challenging injustice, and therefore changed the correlation of forces inside the United States. This, in turn, opened the political space for the young people who went to college in the 1960s to start to identify more with the Global South—with the struggles in Vietnam, with the struggle in China, and the struggle in Cuba—than with their own government. That is not just my claim. There is a poll from 1968 which said that college students in the United States had greater approval ratings for Che Guevara than for any of the presidential candidates who were running that year. That is how McCarthyism actually fell: through grassroots movements in the United States that identified with the Global South. And the United States is a country with a large Black community, a large Latino community, a large Asian community, and lots of white workers who are also hurting, and we believe that is how we are going to defeat McCarthyism once again—with grassroots movements and media that speak to them.
(Transcribed from recording and edited.)