Succession is Glorious Fun, but the Oligarchical Media Empire it Dramatizes is a Harsh Reality

HBO’s ‘Succession’ is a glorious guilty pleasure but the oligarchical family run media empire it dramatizes is actually a horrifying and harsh reality.

Four families control the majority of American media, and the Roy family of ‘Succession’ is an entertaining and clever amalgam of the dysfunction of them all.

Succession, HBO’s deliriously addictive and seductive soap opera that follows the travails of the Roy family dynasty and their media and business empire, is back in full swing for its highly anticipated third season.

The show is obviously a work of fiction, but the blueprint of the story is frighteningly familiar to anyone paying attention to our ever-consolidating media landscape lorded over by an oligarchy of just four families.

If you’ve not seen it, Succession is a sort of Shakespearean stew of palace intrigue set in the uber-wealthy and powerful world of monopolized media’s master class. It’s kind of what you’d get if you tossed King Lear, Richard III, Macbeth and Hamlet into a witch’s brew with the Murdoch, Redstone, Cox and Roberts families that control most of America’s media market.

The Roy family of Succession, with patriarch Logan and sons Kendall, Roman and Connor and daughter Siobhan, is most often likened to the media mogul Murdoch family.

The 80-year-old Logan, played with scowling ferocity by the inimitable Bryan Cox, is reminiscent of Rupert Murdoch’s combative and domineering leadership of NewsCorp. Logan’s sprawling media conglomerate Waystar RoyCo and its conservative cable news channels certainly bear a resemblance to the star-spangled simp-fest of Fox News.

Logan’s dueling sons Kendall, exquisitely portrayed by Jeremy Strong, and Roman, a fantastic Kieran Culkin, also bear some similarities to Murdoch’s sons, James and Lachlan, as does their internecine warfare to find favor with, or advantage over, their powerful father.

The scandal that befalls Waystar RoyCo, with accusations of sexual misconduct and the like, is also eerily familiar to the tawdry accusations that knee-capped Fox News and its leader Roger Ailes and star Bill O’Reilly.

But the Murdochs aren’t the only family dynasty running a media empire for Succession to emulate. Another is the Redstone family, long led by Sumner Redstone, who died in 2020.

Sumner’s media empire of Viacom/CBS/Paramount certainly resembled Waystar, and his personal life is akin to Logan Roy’s too, as it’s littered with adultery, charges of cruelty and failed relationships with women.

The most striking resemblance though between Logan Roy and Sumner Redstone is that they both have/had ambitious daughters. Logan’s daughter, Siobhan, gloriously portrayed by the beguiling Sarah Snook, is making a calculated bid for the family throne, similar to Sumner’s daughter Shari, who battled with her father over control of the family business and ultimately took over his vast empire after his death.

Sumner’s son, Brent, who in Roy-esque fashion sued his father and sister Shari, and was eventually bought out after he was removed from the board of Viacom’s parent company National Amusements.

Besides the Murdochs and the Redstones, the Cox and Roberts families are also Succession-like dynasties whose family business is media empire.

Cox Enterprises, with its major subsidiaries Cox Communications and Cox Media Group, is run by James Cox Kennedy, grandson of the company’s founder, James M. Cox, a two-time Governor of Ohio.

Kennedy’s earthy mother, Barbara Cox Anthony, and his cosmopolitan aunt, Anna Cox Chambers, long had controlling intertest of the family empire in spite of their love/hate, very distant relationship, which seems eerily similar to Logan Roy’s relationship with his estranged brother Ewan Roy.

Kennedy eventually took over the massive company from his aunt at the age of 41, and while the aristocratic Cox family isn’t as prone to paparazzi or media prying as the Redstones and Murdochs, they’re just as powerful.

The same is true of the Roberts family, which founded and runs mammoth telecommunications conglomerate Comcast. Billionaire Brian L. Roberts took over Comcast at the tender young age of 31 from his father Ralph and now runs the media monster that includes NBC/Universal.

Brian’s ascent to corporate power was swift, but despite siblings having no interest in the family business, he still solidified his powerful position as CEO and Chairman by pulling up the drawbridge and literally having his leadership written into Comcast’s articles of incorporation. There will be no sibling coup d’etat at Comcast.

The same is certainly not true on Succession which is why it’s such a fun show to watch. But despite being an eminently compelling and entertaining piece of capitalism porn, the reality it dramatizes is both horrifying and dispiriting.

Having just four families be the movers, shakers and opinion makers controlling so much of America’s media, controlling discourse, manufacturing consent and silencing dissent, is detrimental to democracy if not terminal to the republic.

These aristocrats and oligarchs, despite their pretentious and vacuous displays of philanthropy, are populated by spoiled and sadistic monsters who only care about preserving the status quo in order to secure and ensure their egregious wealth and power.

These monopolist corporate tyrants use their wealth and propaganda power to influence politicians tasked with regulating them to get further expansion of their family businesses, so that they can then use their expanded wealth and propaganda power to further pressure politicians to allow further expansion of their wealth and propaganda power. This endless cycle of corruption is corroding the core foundations of American democracy as it allows these family run media misinformation manufacturers to keep the public perpetually disinformed and deceived.

Ultimately, we can turn off Succession and walk away from its spectacle of egregious privilege and dramatic display of family intrigue, but unfortunately reality is just a less entertaining but more depressing version of the same insidious disease.

I love Succession, I just wish it was total fantasy and not a terrifyingly real glimpse of the four oligarchical families manipulating our minds through their mendacious media machines.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Oliver Stone, JFK: Revisited and the Establishment Media

Oliver Stone’s JFK assassination documentary is being entirely ignored by the establishment media, which is a sign he might be on to something.

It’s telling that the MSM is celebrating strange, sexually charged movies at Cannes instead of even acknowledging Stone’s foray back into the troubling case of JFK’s murder.

Last week, Oliver Stone premiered his new documentary about the JFK assassination titled JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, at the Cannes Film Festival.

You’d think that Oliver Stone, the polarizing, two-time Best Director Academy Award winner, whose film JFK created such a furor it led to the US government passing the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, premiering a controversial JFK assassination documentary at Cannes would be very big news. You’d be wrong.

When JFK: Revisited premiered on Monday, July 12th, the mainstream media didn’t praise it or pan it, they pretended it didn’t exist.

The New York Times vast coverage of Cannes consisted of eleven articles, most focusing on the more salacious content, such as Benedetta, a steamy story about lesbian nuns, Annette, a musical where Adam Driver sings while performing oral sex on Marion Cotillard, and Titane, where a woman has sex with a car and lactates oil, but not once has JFK Revisited ever been mentioned in the supposed “paper of record”.

The same is true of The Washington Post, Boston Globe, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and every mainstream outlet I searched, as none of them acknowledge JFK Revisited exists at all.

The only media mention of JFK Revisited I found was in trade papers like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, and in the British press in The Times and Daily Telegraph. Their reaction to the film was split, with Variety and The Times giving negative reviews and THR and the Daily Telegraph praising it.

Considering that Cuba, intelligence agency nefariousness, and conspiracy theories are making headlines, and that the small critical assessment of the documentary is split, it’s curious that the media is maintaining the status quo by endorsing sexual depravity at Cannes instead of pursuing truth by debating JFK Revisited.

I’m kidding, it’s no surprise that the American myth making media who bequeath to us the official narrative from which “respectable” people will never deviate, are tossing JFK Revisited down the memory hole and lavishing praise on horny nuns and coital Cadillacs.

You see the establishment love to distract the masses and hate conspiracies…except for the ones they love.

JFK assassination conspiracies are rejected outright as unserious despite a plethora of damning evidence because they indict the establishment itself. Half of the talking heads on cable news are former (wink-wink) intelligence community members, and the vast majority of journalists are lapdogs for the intel agencies, so they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them in service to the truth about the JFK assassination.

This same anti-conspiratorial press spent four years breathlessly belching up every half-assed Russia conspiracy story they could conjure, including Russiagate, claims of Russia using microwave weapons or hacking into power grids and voting machines, and shouted them from the rooftops 24/7 until they become presumed true despite a complete lack of evidence.

As Noam Chomsky would say, this is how deceptive propaganda is effectively disseminated and consent is manufactured, through “controlled market forces, internalized assumptions and self-censorship”. “Serious” people prove their seriousness by believing those absurd officially sanctioned anti-Russia conspiracies because they are deemed “serious” and are propagated by other “serious” people, while “unserious” conspiracies like JFK, 9-11 and the lab leak theory, are ridiculed, and those believing them demeaned as “conspiracy theorists”.

This is why the establishment loathes Stone so much, because he flipped the script in ’91 by using his considerable cachet in the wake of his massive Hollywood success, to make a movie about the JFK assassination that obliterated the official myth of the Warren Commission and presented a compelling counter-myth.

To get a taste of how much the establishment despises Stone, go read Stone’s JFK: The Book of the Film, which features the movie’s 97 reactions and commentaries about the movie.

Unlike his adversaries, Stone prints those who disagree with him, as evidenced by articles featured in the book such as “Does JFK conspire against reason?”, “Hollywood Wonders if Warner Brothers Let JFK Go Too Far”, “Oliver’s Twist”, “The Paranoid Style” and “The Plot to Assassinate the Warren Commission”, to name but a few.

The hysteria that JFK triggered among the elites in ‘91 is perfectly encapsulated in a tale told by late film critic Roger Ebert, who claimed Walter Cronkite gave him a “tongue-lashing” and said he should be “ashamed” of himself for praising the movie.

Stone became more of an establishment pariah when he interviewed Fidel Castro in 2002 and Vladimir Putin in 2015-2017. Stone spoke with America’s enemies instead of just mouthing the mindless official mantra, an unforgivable sin in the eyes of the media who believe there’s only one narrative, and we can’t complicate it by listening instead of yelling.

Stone’s history of being a firebrand and his loyalty to truth above the official narrative, is why JFK Revisited is being intentionally ignored. Any press is good press, even a bad review spreads awareness of the product, so hitting the ignore button is the best way for the establishment to silence Stone and maintain the JFK status quo.

And thus far the media blackout is working as intended, as JFK Revisited has yet to secure a distributor here in the American market which is desperately hungry for content.

I haven’t seen JFK Revisited so I have no idea if it tells the truth regarding the JFK’s assassination, but I do know that the establishment media is addicted to lies and allergic to truth, which makes me think Oliver Stone might be on to something.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

The New Movie Mr. Jones is a Timely Reminder of the Cowardice of our Current Press

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes 27 seconds

In 1933, British journalist Gareth Jones risked life and limb in service to the truth, while in comparison, the journalists of today only care about access to power and towing the elite’s ideological line.

Mr. Jones, a new film by esteemed director Agnieszka Holland, tells the true story of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who travels to the Soviet Union in 1933 and uncovers the Holomodor, Stalin’s genocidal famine of Ukrainians.

Sadly, Mr. Jones, which boasts a fantastic cast of James Norton, Vanessa Kirby and Peter Sarsgaard, is a terrific story wrapped in a bad, dramatically unfocused and meandering film.

But thankfully, despite its cinematic unworthiness, the movie still contains important insights very relevant to our current time.

What makes Mr. Jones noteworthy is that the film’s noble protagonist is, unlike our current corrupt press corps, a dogged journalist more loyal to truth than to ideology, and more interested in maintaining his integrity than gaining access to power and wealth.

The film opens with Jones fresh off his 1933 interview with Hitler that leaves him convinced that war is ultimately inevitable. This belief gets him ridiculed for being naïve and hysterical by the stodgy and comfortable old guard of the British press.

Jones then sets his sights on the Soviet Union and tries to figure out how Stalin has been able to pull off his economic boom while the rest of the world is mired in depression, so he goes to Moscow in search of answers.

Upon arrival he finds not the worker’s paradise that fellow journalists, like the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize winning reporter in Moscow, Walter Duranty, have been deceptively portraying to the world, but instead discovers firsthand the repressive and totalitarian nature of Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Jones then follows a lead and risks his life by sneaking off a train and going to Ukraine, where he is thrust into the horrors of the Holomodor, which are brutally and effectively depicted in the film.

When Jones exposes this calamity to the western world, political expediency causes it to be met with either skepticism or indifference. Unlike other journalists of his, or our, age, Jones refuses to tell people in power what they want to hear, instead telling them the truth, and is essentially blackballed and exiled because of it.

No doubt the same would happen today to any reporter brave enough to go against the officially approved narrative.

Our current press corps is inhabited by truth-disdaining, sycophantic stenographers more akin to the villainous Walter Duranty, a propagandist for the cause who sold his journalistic soul in exchange for a decadent and depraved lifestyle, than the truth-seeking Gareth Jones.

It is ironic that journalists of yesteryear, like Duranty, were complicit in positive falsehoods about Stalin’s Soviet Union, while journalists of today are complicit in negative falsehoods about Russia.

The cavalcade of journalistic failures and fiascos directly or tangentially related to Russia in recent years include, but are not limited to, the distortion of truth about the Maidan uprising, the supposed Syrian chemical weapons attacks, the ridiculous Cuba microwave weapons story, and of course, Russiagate, the biggest journalistic fraud perpetrated upon the American public since the Iraq War. And just this week we have added to this cornucopia of corporate media crap the ‘Russians pay bounty to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan’ nonsense. All of these stories are vapid, thin, propagandistic gruel, devoid of any depth, insight or actual reporting.

One glimpse at the ever-growing list of recurring journalistic farces involving Russia and it becomes glaringly obvious that Operation Mockingbird, the Cold War CIA program that planted stories and journalists in newsrooms across the media, is alive and well in practice, if not in name.

It is readily apparent that just as Walter Duranty was getting his marching orders from Moscow, reporters of today get their marching orders from Langely.

Of course, the truth-averse, ideologically driven journalism of the corporate media isn’t restricted to just Russia stories, as evidenced by the slavish and slanted coverage of Black Lives Matter and other woke endeavors.

The thing that I find most grating about the reliably deceptive establishment media is their incessant complaining about Trump’s alleged war on the press.

These same news outlets were conspicuously silent when Obama prosecuted whistleblowers nine times, which is three times more than all of his predecessors combined.

There was also nary a word of dissension from the intrepid souls in the media when Obama’s Department of Justice and FBI spied on reporters and tried to coerce them to expose their sources.

The most glaring example of the ideological cancer in journalism is the cheering by the establishment media of the prosecution and persecution of Julian Assange, who has done more to inform the public of the truth than any corporate-controlled reporter at any news outlet in the world, and may very well die in prison for it. 

The current crop of subservient sycophants play-acting as journalists in the corporate media are an utter disgrace to their profession, and they dishonor the staggering sacrifice that people like Gareth Jones made in service to truth.

Mr. Jones is not a great movie, but it does chronicle the great struggles of a noble man. If only we had many, many more like him today, maybe truth would be revered and the powerful held accountable. 

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2020

As Ringling Brothers Closes Its Doors, Cirque du Trump and the Media Clownshow Takes Center Stage

ESTIMATED READING TIME : 5 minutes 01 seconds.

This past Saturday, January 14th, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced they are ending their 146 year run as The Greatest Show on Earth. Concidentially, a new circus, The Cirque du trump and Media Clownshow, is poised to take its place.

The term "synchronicity", loosely defined as a "meaningful coincidence", came to my mind when I learned of the news that Ringling Brothers was shutting down this coming May. After the freak show that was the 2016 election, the carnival that has been the Turmp transition and the media circus that has covered them both, it strikes me as a "meaningful coincidence" that The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus has decided they can't hold the public's attention any longer. The circus market is officially saturated since the most astonishing media spectacle the world has ever known is coming to the public square for at least a four year engagement.

The Ringling Brothers Circus bought the Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1906, with the two shows officially combined to perform together for the first time in 1919. The new circus replacing it, the Cirque du trump and Media Clownshow, is a child of circus marriage too, between the Trump Circus, which has been operating for the last forty years or so with a P.T. Barnum-esque level of commitment to self-promotion, and the repugnant Media Circus, also known as The Clownshow, which has been lying, distorting  and self-aggrandizing, since at least the time of William Randolph Hearst.

THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH

Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus gave themselves the moniker "The Greatest Show on Earth", but Trump, with his improbable 2016 election victory, is undoubtedly the "Greatest Showmen on Earth", better than Barnum, Bailey and all of the Ringling Brothers combined. Naturally, Trump is the unquestioned ringleader of Cirque du Trump and Media Clownshow. He is part carnival barker, part high wire act, part clown, part acrobat and part lion-tamer. Like the carnival barker he will draw viewers to the show with his curiously flamboyant hair and bold declarations of remarkable abilities and accomplishments. Like the tightrope walker he will leave everyone on the edge of their seats with his death-defying (hopefully) foreign, military and economic policy. Like the clown he will amuse and offend millions with his defensive midnight tweet storms. Like the acrobat, he will astound and amaze with his ability to politically contort and contradict himself, sometimes even in the span of a single sentence. And finally, like the lion-tamer, Trump will manipulate the mindless media to do what he wants, when he wants, either by throwing them a distracting piece of read meat, or cracking the whip on their backsides.

"I'M FUNNY HOW, I MEAN FUNNY LIKE I'M A CLOWN, I AMUSE YOU?"  - TOMMY DEVITO, GOODFELLAS

What makes Cirque du Trump's accompanying Media Clownshow so entertaining is that they are unaware of their comedic brilliance. Examples of their gut-busting comedy abound, like when they rail against the scourge of fake news…while reporting a plethora of fake news. Or how they breathlessly declare that Intel reports are "definitive and devastating" proof of Russian interference in the U.S. election, but then also say the same dispatch is entirely evidence-free. Or how with stern-faced seriousness, they broadcast a story on a dossier that alleges that Donald Trump not only adorns his buildings with gold, but likes to watch people shower in it too. The ribald comedy of the "Golden Shower" story is two-fold. First, it is a story so vacuous and devoid of any substance or proof that even a feckless shill like Bob Woodward describe it as a "garbage dossier". Secondly, the unfolding of this story is similar to the Iraq War, where Bush officials would anonymously give a quote to the New York Times saying Saddam had WMD's, and then go on television and say, "hey, see what the New York Times is reporting?…Saddam has WMD's!!" 

These jesters of the Media Clownshow think they're cutting Trump down to size with these poorly sourced and paper thin Russian hacking and golden shower stories, but they are really inoculating him against more serious and substantial charges that may come his way in the future.  

"CLOWNS TO THE LEFT OF ME, JOKERS TO THE RIGHT, HERE I AM STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU" - STEALERS WHEELS

While the Media Clownshow may get second billing, without it the Cirque du Trump would not exist. The curious thing about Trump and the media, while they both venomously hate each other, they also desperately need each other. 

What is remarkable considering their disdain of him, is that the pancake-faced, tragic-comic buffoons on the mainstream media never failed to deliriously cover live, every single rally and speech (not to mention tweet) Trump delivered during the campaign. Their standard approach would be to show Trump's speech, with fingers crossed a fight breaks out or he says something outrageous, and then mournfully recount either the fight that broke out the outrageous thing he said, or how awful he was. Trump strategically used his free television time to engage in attacks upon those giving him free television time, thus sparking a narcissistic - vanity cycle where the mainstream media played upon his vanity by focusing on him so often, while he played upon their vanity by focusing on them so often, and thus both parties prospered.

VIDEO LINK

With the unwitting aid of the mainstream media, Trump, the billionaire plutocrat, was able to convince middle Americans that he was on their side simply because they shared the same arrogant antagonists. These middle Americans saw the establishment media belittling Trump and thought they looked down on him, just like they looked down on them. Like a scene out of Tod Browning's iconic 1931 film Freaks, these folks went to the polls saying the mantra, "one of us, one of us, one of us." The great lesson of he 2016 election is that having the proper enemies can get you pretty far, even all the way to the White House.

Donald Trump won the presidency by attacking an out of touch and despised mainstream media, and the media made millions and millions of dollars by covering his attacks on them. Like the joining of the Ringling Brothers Circus with the Barnum & Bailey Circus nearly a hundred years ago, the Cirque du Trump and Media Clownshow has been a wildly successful merger for everyone involved, except of course, for the people of the United States. 

"SEND IN THE CLOWNS, DON'T BOTHER, THEY'RE HERE" - STEPHEN SONDHEIM

And finally, while the Cirque du Trump and Media Clownshow will no doubt be entertaining, this next four or eight years will be a most perilous time for our country and the world. History shows us that a circus can end tragically. For example, The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey's Circus used to use a mixture of paraffin wax melted in gasoline to waterproof their Big Top tent. In 1944, during a performance in Hartford, Connecticut, either by accident or an act of arson, no one knows for sure, the Big Top went top in flames. The resulting inferno and ensuing stampede killed 167 people and injured 700, making it one of the worst fires in American history. 

Trump now takes power with a constitution that has been deeply weakened after continuous assaults by both Bush and Obama, who have, through their myopic governance, paved a way for a demagogue like Trump to freely follow his more imperial instincts. In addition to this constitutional decay, we've had a dramatic deterioration of civic institutions, coupled with a hapless, untrustworthy and unserious press, and our national Big Top has most definitely been soaked in gasoline. Maybe it will function properly and keep the rain off of our heads. Or maybe, with a combustible personality like Trump in charge, either through his recklessness, vindictiveness or inexperience, he will accidentally or intentionally, set off a spark and ignite a conflagration that will engulf us all. 

The Cirque du Trump and Media Clownshow is coming to town folks, enjoy the show, but make sure your seat is near an exit, as you sure as hell don't want to get caught in the stampede for the doors when the big tent goes up in flames.

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 21, 2017 AT RT.

©2017