I don’t read the New York Times at home. I read it at the library. It can take three or four to ten to fifteen minutes each issue. If something is particularly interesting or egregious, I’ll drop a dime or two into the copier to read it elsewhere or share. Am I cheap? Well, yes, but more important — beyond not wanting to clutter the house with reading material I won’t read, and saving trees — is that the Times is an arm of the state, in this case a vital propaganda mechanism for war and Wall Street, and I can’t justify further encouragement of its existence.

I don’t have an online subscription to the Times. I already spend too much time looking at and reading from screens. No sense adding to this burden.

I read Establishment news media to find out some of what’s going on (they screen out a lot), but also to see what they’re saying and how they say what they say.

We live in a propaganda system, as Edward Curtin patiently illustrates, having studied and taught about it, not to mention Mark Crispin Miller of News From Underground fame.

It’s political science.

And the system is by no means restricted to the United States. To one degree or another most countries have homegrown varieties.*

At the federal and state levels we have three formal branches of government in the executive, legislative and judicial. More powerful in our guided democracy is an unofficial fourth branch determining how the three formal branches operate. The overlapping news, entertainment, sports, and general-communications media control most behavior.

This afternoon the wind whistled outside. It rained this morning. It’s dark out. All of this is real.

The radio news this morning relayed gripping accounts of the record-breaking tornados in Tennessee and its region. These were real, as are the consequent suffering and efforts under way to ameliorate it and neutralize the economic damage. Tomorrow’s and Monday’s papers and TV news will put it all in forms that fit dominant paradigms. All real — physical and social factors at work.

What got me ruminating was a New York Times story picked up by several aggregators (themselves vital components on the propaganda system) headlined “Birds Aren’t Real, or Are They? Inside a Gen Z Conspiracy Theory.” Garbage news and analysis. Apparently billboards are involved in getting the ball rolling, and a savvy operator pictured somewhat rakishly in a neat hat filled the bill. Click on the link to get the flavor. I’ll read it at the library.

Funny thing is, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth — which like the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry doesn’t exist for the Times except for the Spike Lee flareup in late August — has a billboard up at Times Square trying to alert pedestrians below to the Times’s dereliction of duty in omitting a host of important facts about the September 2001 attacks which its readers might be expected to be entrusted with.

There was a movie about something like that.

Birds are real, thank God.

— Mark Channing Miller

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*Some censorship and manipulation abroad is not so homegrown as the Central Intelligence Agency and other minders are active worldwide shaping what Laurence I. Burns called “guided democracies.”