Chapter 8: Media Tooth and Claw: Ecologies of Post-truth Suasion in Total (Culture) War

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‘Russian meddling’ in the 2016 US election continues to churn the US news cycle as I write this, and new revelations of connections between the White House and ‘Russian oligarchs’ seem to arise weekly. But the shared interests of Russian oligarchs and American oligarchs should not be all that surprising. What is apparently surprising to some about these stories, along with the ‘Paradise Papers’ and ‘Panama Papers’ leaks (Garside, 2017), is what they reveal about the interconnectedness of global capital and the contemporary relation between global capital and the state.

There are certainly important differences between the United States and Russia. The Russian state is centred on a strongman whose primary goal is the protection of oligarchic interests, which are intimately entwined with his own. To support those interests, centralized state bureaucracy, military and media systems are mobilized for purposes of domestic and international mass influence. In the United States, a small cadre of hyperwealthy individuals and families have had to purchase an entire media system and build a complex of intricately funded, ideological networks that include a zoo of nonprofit organizations, family foundations, ‘business leagues’, supposedly ‘grassroots’ organizations, think tanks and endowed academic programmes that generate and justify both policy ideas and electoral candidates to sell and implement those policies (Johnson, 2017; Mayer, 2016). This effort has been almost entirely tax-deductible and has even been characterized as ‘job creation’ benefiting the media industry and the nonprofit sector.