The following is the late Charlie Kirk's essay for our book, Against the Corporate Media, published exactly one year before his assassination yesterday and reproduced here in its entirety.
What is the half-life of a lie?
Sixty years ago, a lie with enough backers could last a very, very long time. President Johnson said the troops in Vietnam were making excellent progress and the war would be won soon, while his generals knew the opposite to be true. President Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., presented themselves as loyal family men when they were anything but. The small gaggle of elite press with access in Washington, who reported for a handful of magazines, newspapers, and TV networks, nodded along, repeated the lies, and called it the “news.”
The truth about Vietnam took years to bubble up as the war dragged on. The full truth about JFK took decades. The truth of MLK’s dalliances is still not fully known, thanks to FBI files kept classified to this day.
How would Hunter Biden’s laptop story have worked half a century ago (besides the fact it all wouldn’t be on a laptop)? There wouldn’t need to be any “tech censorship” a half-century ago. All that would be needed is a few major newspapers and the major news networks to refuse to cover it. Besides those outlets, no publication would have the reach to make sure that the story reached the whole country, and few reporters would have the resources to chase down the story’s difficult and far-flung details. Just as in 2020, the press could have kept a lid on things long enough to help a flagrantly corrupt, near-senile candidate eke out a narrow election in.
But then, the con would have continued, for years. The press would dutifully avoid covering the story, and editors would dutifully avoid publishing any of the truth about Hunter Biden. They might entirely conceal the fact that the president’s son was addicted to drugs and prostitutes, offering instead the same completely fake “family man” image that the Biden clan itself wanted to project.
Sure, the truth might have gotten into some conservative magazine or local paper here and there, but what then? There would be no internet to make sure that the whole nation and the whole world could see it.
Sept. 10, 2024
Perhaps after ten years, or twenty, or fifty, some journalist would finally publish a book exposing the “real” Hunter Biden. It would be a topic of interest to history buffs and political die-hards, but nobody else. Its impact on history would be nil. For the average news consumer, it would be almost impossible to track. After years and years, how would he even remember which reporters were reliable, and which ones had lied repeatedly? Simply checking what the same writers were saying a couple of years ago would have required a labor-intensive trip to a library to read old newspapers on microfiche. And, even if you did notice a lie or deceptive narrative, what could you do about it? At most, you could complain to a friend, or write a letter to the editor of some magazine or newsletter, or get in contact with some national reporter, and beg him or her to actually report it.
It was an impossible task for any normal citizen. So instead, Americans mostly just trusted their national media—and since America was at its peak, trust was easy.
Why are so many Americans, including young Americans, so much more distrustful and outright disdainful of the mainstream, elite, corporate media? It’s not just that America itself is clearly not what it once was, and it’s not just that the press lies more often (though it does). It’s also that the half-life of its lies has collapsed.
Today, it’s still possible for the media to lie, distort, downplay, and deflect. But the lifespan of the lies is measured in days, hours, and minutes instead of in years and decades. The number of alternative outlets has exploded. A handful of national papers and magazines has turned into thousands and thousands of websites, and unlike in 1960, there is a credible, potent conservative alternative media with its own separate power to make a story go viral.
But it’s not just that more news outlets lead to more accountability. It’s that the Corporate Media has lost the readers’ trust, especially that of young people. The Corporate Media disdains the contemporary media because its members can intuit that they are in fact now the equals of the “professional journalists,” who feel entitled to boss them around.
Every high schooler has the tools he needs—Twitter/X access and a search engine are enough—to debunk institutional media narratives that change almost moment to moment. For any aspiring amateur journalist, there is no need to be tied to any kind of publication at all. There is no longer such a thing as a “professional” reporter class.
An upstart reporter can simply self-publish, and still have immediate access to the entire planet as an audience. A single intrepid or observant Twitter/X account can break a national news story. A lone blogger on Substack can outcompete the politics desk of The Washington Post or the national security reporting of The New York Times. A clever twenty-five-year-old with no degree of any kind can debunk the work of a double-Ivy grad pushing some sham like the Russiagate hoax. Today, any person with a smartphone and an internet connection has resources and access greater than even the world’s best-funded reporter did decades ago.
But there is another reason that young people have learned not to trust or be overawed by press elites who boss them around: Today, it is laughably simple to see their real (and unimpressive) nature.
Journalists of the past either lurked in the shadows, or towered above their audience, cloaked by the prestige of their outlets, and were otherwise distant and unknowable. “I have a prestigious byline,” they could say, in spirit if not in fact. “What do you have?”
As they say, never meet your heroes. And never read their tweets, either. Today, we can gaze behind the veil and see the media high priests for what they are—and the sight is ugly.
In 2019, a George Washington University media professor, David Karpf, made a mild joke by calling New York Times columnist Bret Stephens a “bedbug.” The tweet received almost zero views, and Stephens wasn’t tagged in it; pretty much the only way Stephens could have known about it was that he compulsively searched his own name on Twitter, just to see what people were saying about him. And when he did see it, Stephens went berserk, sending an angry email not just to Karpf but to his boss, GW’s provost, in an obvious bid to get him fired. Instead, Karpf was fine, while Stephens looked ridiculous. Forty years ago, it’s hard to imagine such an incident. Today, it’s possible for anyone with an internet connection to pick a fight with a member of the journalist class—and win easily. This sort of thing happens all the time.
When the elite University of Chicago–educated voices on The New York Times opinion page so publicly act like bratty children, why is it any surprise that young people don’t view them with awe? Why trust people who routinely act like the dumbest and most repugnant people in your high school; do you trust them? Of course not. The curtain has been rent asunder. And for the journalist class, there is no going back.
We know who you are.
Article tags: Charlie Kirk
