Who Decides What's True

I keep coming back, all over this site, to the idea that what we call history is really his story — written by whoever holds the pen and the power. Nowhere is that more true, or more checkable, than in how the news gets made. You’re right to be suspicious that you’re not getting the plain, neutral truth. The good news is you don’t need a secret cabal to explain why — the real machinery is documented, and it’s more useful to understand than any puppet-master fantasy.

The part that’s flat-out documented

Start with the bit people assume is a “theory”: that intelligence agencies have manipulated the press. They have. The Church Committee, the same Senate investigation that exposed MKUltra, confirmed in 1975–76 that the CIA had cultivated relationships with journalists and maintained a network of media assets it used for covert propaganda. In 1977, the journalist Carl Bernstein — half of the pair who broke Watergate — reported that more than 400 American journalists had secretly done work for the CIA. That’s not a meme. That’s the public record.

So when your gut says the people who bring you the news don’t always have clean hands, your gut has receipts.

The boring machinery that does most of the work

But here’s the thing — you don’t even need the spies to explain the slant. Two duller facts do most of the lifting.

First, ownership. In 1983, around fifty companies owned the bulk of American media. After deregulation in the 1990s loosened the rules, that collapsed down to a handful of giant corporations owning much of what tens of millions of people watch and read. (The landscape’s shifted again with streaming, but the concentration is real and well-documented.) When a few owners with the same broad class interests control most of the megaphones, the coverage converges — and you don’t need anyone issuing orders for that to happen. It just does.

Second, the framework that explains how, without a central command: the propaganda model from Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 book Manufacturing Consent. Their argument is that mainstream media filter the news through a handful of structural pressures — who owns the outlet, the fact that advertisers, not you, are the real customer, the reliance on official government and corporate sources for access, the “flak” that punishes stories that go too far, and the background ideology of the day. The bias isn’t barked down a phone line. It emerges from the incentives, like water finding the slope.

The discipline

This is where being a sharp sceptic actually pays off — and where it can go wrong.

The honest version isn’t “it’s all a scripted lie run by one secret group.” That’s the lazy version, and it’s usually wrong. The honest version is structural: follow the ownership, follow the money, follow who gets access and who gets frozen out, and the slant explains itself — no cabal required. And the beauty of the structural read is that it’s checkable. You can find out who owns an outlet. You can see who its advertisers are. You can watch which sources it always quotes and which it never does.

So no, you will never get the clean, unfiltered truth from any single outlet — that thing doesn’t exist, on any side. The defence was never to hunt for the “one honest source.” It’s to read across sources that genuinely hate each other, know who owns each of them, follow the incentives, and assemble the truth yourself from the gaps between their versions.

History is his story. So is the evening news. Once you can see whose story, and why it’s shaped the way it is, you stop being read by the narrative — and start reading it.