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The corporate media on Saturday threw itself a gaudy, glitzy celebration of itself at the White House as it does every year. Employees of large media corporations who bear the title ‘journalist’ made a pilgrimage to the White House to gush over their own importance, desperately trying to secure selfies with mid-level Hollywood celebrities and toast to their own courage, all as they swoon over President Biden, the person they pretend to hold accountable. It is both easy and entertaining to spend time mocking this monument to its debauchery, and we will certainly spend some time doing exactly that, but how these journalists are just so giddy and eager to spend just a night of glitter and glamor behind the walls of Versailles, admitted to the Royal Court for one night for good behavior, is more than just repellent to watch: it is deeply revealing of their true function. And – while I will not feign being above delighting in the mockery this provides – it is also a vivid window into the specific ways that our corporate press corps is so deeply rotted and corrupted. 

Then we're trying this show to report on developments in Brazil only when there are important implications beyond that country. And that is definitely the case with the extraordinary events taking place right now and all week long in that country, the government of Lula da Silva is on the verge of implementing one of the most repressive and dangerous Internet censorship laws yet seen in the democratic world, one that we've reported on multiple times because it is being eyed by the EU, Canada and eventually the U.S. as the model for ending a free Internet as a means of expressing and organizing meaningful dissent. While the law is technically being sponsored by Lula's government, its most aggressive opponents, as is true in the U.S., are Brazil's highly powerful media corporations, which know that their ability to maintain their hegemony over the flow of information depends upon ending social media as a venue for legitimate dissent. And that is why they are such ardent supporters of this bill. This law in Brazil does nothing less than empower the government to silence and criminalize dissent and the means that are being used by all but outlaw opposition to this law as it's being debated, including by legally banning Google, Facebook and Spotify from criticizing the law and then ordering their executives forward to appear for interrogation at the Brazilian equivalent of the FBI. All things that happened just today are deeply alarming, but also very aligned with the spirit of the bill itself, one that has already begun to wind its way through the legislatures of other democratic countries. If you care about Internet freedom, it is imperative that you care about these developments. 

As a programming note, we were off the last few days of last week as well as yesterday, largely due to my need to attend to family matters, which I've discussed on this show before, and for that reason, as well, we won't have our live aftershow on Locals tonight, but we'll be back with it on Thursday night. To gain access to that live aftershow every Tuesday and Thursday night, simply join our Locals community by clicking the join button right below the Rumble screen. 

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast form. It appears 12 hours after we broadcast this show, live, here on Rumble. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple and other major podcasting platforms. If you rate and review the show, it helps spread its visibility.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now. 

As repulsive as it is to watch corporate journalists make this pilgrimage to the White House that they make every year under the guise of the White House Correspondents Dinner, where they pretend to celebrate their commitment to press freedom and the important role they play in safeguarding our democracy, it actually is important to look at because it is one night where they let the mask drop and reveal who and what they really are.  It's become kind of like the Oscars, in the sense that – in many senses, actually, but one important one is that it is not just one night, but many days leading up to it, where they have all kinds of parties that are the buzziest of the ones that they get to attend. But they also spend a lot of time before the event trying to justify to the American people why it is that these people who claim to be our watchdogs, the people who are safeguarding our basic rights, who are holding our government accountable, are instead dressing up like it's the Oscars, in gowns and tuxedos, and appearing with celebrities and the politicians they supposedly hold accountable at the gaudiest and sleaziest event you can possibly imagine held at the White House hosted by Joe Biden, the person whom they're supposed to be adversarially covering. 

And so, in the days leading up to the event, they spend a lot of time trying to justify what it is that they're doing and within those justifications reside a great deal of insight into how they actually think. As I said, it's a mask-dropping event. They know what it makes them look like, but they do it anyway because they're so desperate for the self-importance that it provides. It's really why they do their job – to be around power or to be accepted by power, to feel as though they're part of the Royal Court – and so, it's way too valuable to their sense of purpose and self-identity to relinquish it, even though they know that it's one of the most revealing lights that ever get shined on them. 

So, let's take a look at a couple of the pre-event discussions that took place as they tried to explain to the public and prepare the public for the nauseating sight to which they were about to be exposed. And we're going to begin with a program that is on MSNBC. It is hosted by a former adviser to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, Symone Sanders. She has our own MSNBC show on Saturday and here she is speaking to Joe Biden's former White House press secretary, who now also has her own show on MSNBC. So, you can see, these roles are completely interchangeable. You can go and work at the White House. You can go and work for NBC News. And you don't have to change a single thing. No one notices anything that you do differently because you don't do anything different. It's the same exact role. You're propagandizing the public on behalf of a Democratic president. And so, on this show with Symone Sanders, they had Jen Psaki, who, as I said, has her own show. And Jen Psaki was interviewed about her relationship with the press and how she saw both it and the importance of this event and listen to what it is that she said. 

(Video. MSNBC. April 23, 2023)

 

Symone Sanders: […] With the White House Correspondents Association. 

 

Jen Psaki: You know, I will say the majority of the time they were really incredible partners because when we were navigating COVID, even that was some of the hardest times. It was also some of the most collaborative times. […]

 

 

Okay, so just let's stop right there because that is an extraordinary statement. Here is a person who worked for the Biden White House. Her job was to spin and deceive and disseminate propaganda on behalf of the Biden White House. And how she saw journalists were not as her adversaries, not as the people around whom she had to work or against whom she had to work, but instead her very good partners, which of course, is exactly what the media is. They are partners to the government and to the State. Obviously, there's nobody in the Trump White House who would ever call this part of the media or any part of the media – other than very small segments of it – partners, because they played a very different role when the Trump administration was in power. She's talking here about her role in the Biden administration and the way in which she sees the media writ large, the corporate media, and the first words she uses for them are partners, not just partners, but very good partners. Listen to her explanation about why she sees it that way. 

(Video. MSNBC. April 23, 2023)

 

Symone Sanders: What was your best day with the White House Correspondents Association? 

 

Jen Psaki: You know, I will say the majority of the time they were really incredible partners, because when we were navigating COVID, even that it was some of the hardest times, it was also some of the most collaborative times. When I was the press secretary, Zeke Miller from the Associated Press at the time was the president, Long may he reign, I used to say, even after he was no longer the president […] 

 

That part is amazing, too. So, Zeke Miller is a White House reporter for the Associated Press, and he was long the president of the White House Correspondents Association, the group that sponsors this glitzy, nauseating affair at the White House. And she is so enamored of Zeke Miller, the person who's the head of the press organization, and she's talking to her not as a member of the press, but as a member of the state. But again, you're seeing there's really no difference. And she said she was so enamored of him; he was such a dedicated partner to what she was doing. They were collaborative, she said – the opposite of adversarial – that her phrase used to be ‘long may he reign’, ‘long may Zeke Miller reign.’ 

You may have seen the footage of a couple of weeks ago where a reporter from Africa, who is not part of this clique, tried to question the White House and the White House press secretary before he was called on, and all of the journalists there were extremely agitated, angry with him because it was the day that they got to see the cast of Ted Lasso. And they were incredibly excited. And this journalist wasn't interested in the cast of Ted Lasso because he's actually a journalist. He wanted to ask the Biden administration about their Africa policy, and his colleagues in the media were incredibly hostile to him telling him to shut up, lecturing him, or treating him like, as he said, like just some kind of a black interloper – is how he described it. He definitely thought there was a racist dynamic to it, but either way, they were very hostile to him. And the reason was that they were not there to ask questions about policy. They wanted to see the stars of Ted Lasso, and it was Zeke Miller – long may he reign – who, on behalf of the entire press corps, apologized for this journalist to the White House press secretary, this very sycophantic apology that he made to her on behalf of all journalists, because there was one journalist there wanting to do his job. So, this is how Jen Psaki sees the press and the person who is the leader or has long been the leader of this organization who reports supposedly on the White House for the Associated Press, a collaborator, a partner, someone about whom she says “long may he reign.” 

(Video. MSNBC. April 23, 2023)

 

Jen Psaki: We had to navigate through a very difficult time in history, a time where we wanted to return access to the press, show value and respect for the media, but also do it in a way that was keeping people safe. They're also very important and valuable partners when there are foreign trips. I mean, you know this – when you're going to a war zone, you do go to the Correspondents Association and you say, “Hey, we're going to go to Afghanistan or Iraq or somewhere that is a challenging security place to be. I need to work with you on how we create a press pool for them.” 

 

I mean, have you seen anything less adversarial in your life than Jen Psaki's view of the White House press corps? She regards them as what they are – her partners. It's just bizarre that she's forgetting that that's not supposed to be how it works. That's not supposed to actually be what their function is. That's not what they pretend it is. But for some reason, I think probably because she was speaking with her current colleague and her prior colleague at the White House, they forgot that there are cameras on and that there's a fraud that's supposed to be maintained about the relationship between the White House and the media. They're not supposed to be described publicly as partners, collaborators, friends, or people with whom you work towards the same aim. But that is the reality. And that's why this clip was so revealing. 

Equally revealing was a reporter, I believe, from the Wall Street Journal. We don't see her name here. We are about to see her. She is a guest as well talking to Sanders, on the same show, about the role of the media. Let's listen to what she says. 

(Video. MSNBC. April 28, 2023)

 

Symone Sanders: Let's just be honest, okay? Know, I was going to get a straight answer from the podium in the briefing room. If you were traveling with the president or the vice president, you do not always get a straight answer for the president or vice president. I used to be one of the people helping people craft maybe some not-so-straight answers. So […]

 

All right. Well, so there, first of all, is Symone Sanders saying that her job at the White House was to craft answers that weren't direct, honest, informative, or straight for journalists. She was supposed to deceive journalists. Jen Psaki evidently thought they were very happy with that. They were great partners as she did that. So that's the admission. So, we're going to get her name in a second. She's currently the White House reporter for The Wall Street Journal. She used to be at The Guardian. I want you to listen to her as she describes how she sees her role and her relationship with the current White House.