Why pervasive media propaganda is ultimately self-defeating and destructive to the political class that wields it

Thoughts inspired by the unfolding USAID scandal and German political dysfunction

As everybody knows, the United States Agency for International Development administers “civilian foreign aid and development assistance,” to the tune of 50 billion dollars a year. A lot of this money, it turns out, goes towards subsidising media operations around the globe, and generous USAID monies do not flow for nothing. It is hard to establish the extent of this singular agency’s influence on the media; while some reports are surely exaggerated, we will know more now that the taps have been closed. Since Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency flagged the agency as corrupt and even “criminal,” USAID are squarely in the targets of the Trump administration. The plan is to lay off nearly all agency staff and to cancel 800 of its awards and contracts. In the meantime, Trump has made his Secretary of State Marco Rubio the agency’s acting administrator. He will oversee its destruction.

We have met USAID before here at the plague chronicle. They are the agency that steers US State Department funds to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an NGO with journalist affiliates at many major newspapers, from Der Spiegel and the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany to the New York Times and the Washington Post in America. That is only one USAID project among many, and I suspect that even all USAID projects together will account only partially for our bizarrely coordinated and propagandised media system.

Here I want to restate a crazy theory that I’ve aired now and again. This is that our highly manipulative media environment enjoys some success in suppressing dissent, but at considerable costs that our rulers don’t fully understand. Trump’s success would be inconceivable were it not for the media manipulators, and their tiresome machinations are also responsible for the widening political disarray in Germany – a disarray that is only driving support away from the propagandists’ preferred parties and into the arms of the populist opposition. This is less because pervasive propaganda angers people and inspires backlash, and more because of the curious recursive effects it has on the political elite themselves.