A quick and dirty guide to propagandizing in America, in three steps:

Step 1: The Craven

Unlike a number of other countries, our news media is entirely composed of private for-profit enterprises, which is why historically the city with the most newspapers – New York – is the one that invented what we call “yellow journalism” in the name of business competition and was a strong example of “tabloid journalism:” Fact-neutral sensationalism crafted specifically to entice readers, not necessarily impart information, so as to maximize newspaper sales, subscriptions and ad revenue. The name of the game was profit margins, as evinced in the very terms themselves: ‘Yellow’ because the cheap paper the news was printed on was yellow and ‘tabloid’ because the newpapers themselves were smaller with condensed print; both cost-saving adjustments incidental to the pejorative definitions they picked up.

In the enterprises on this front – in which the New York market exemplified but other markets also followed – competition required and requires slavish adherence to two principles:

a) The need to scoop stories the fastest, which puts pressure on fact-checking.

b) Embellishment and hyperbole just a hair’s breath short of the legal definition of libel.

There is a third principle, not strictly necessary but can be helpful, which is that of partaking in an overt political stance, where a paper can generate a market niche by catering to a constituency that no other paper caters to. This is not to say that such a political stance is necessarily ideological on the part of the paper’s publisher – quite the opposite; it is often-times business decision, a mercenary undertaking that can and has been shifted as markets themselves have – but it also has a bearing on how the news can be colored if not compromised.

While journalistic standards have since been codified – after all, the publisher Joseph Pulitzer who owned the New York World, a scion of sensationalist pablum, also established an award for integrity in reporting – if not universally enforced, the profit motive has never gone away, and we see it in varying degrees in just about every paper still in print, which means journalistic integrity has, is, and will always take second priority to financial profit.

By comparison the market for national television news was somewhat less competitive, being more of a cabal between the Big Three – NBC, CBS and ABC and their local affiliates – but it was Ted Turner in Atlanta that revolutionized the market and the manner in which television news was shown through the creation of the CNN, whose innovation was that of the 24-hour News Cycle. That cycle, unlike morning and evening papers or the evening television news, didn’t change reporting – because fact-finding can only happen but so fast – but it did change how the information was disseminated. Emphasis was given to two sectors, which are quite similar to the original principles, and indeed similarly non-conducive to journalistic standards:

a) The excruciatingly short deadline to be the first to report on a piece of news.

b) The need to fill all 24 hours with stuff that will glue people to seats.

The former has obvious effects on fact-checking – there is no incentive at all to fact-check, as it doesn’t matter how wrong a story is if it is incredibly popular and thus promotes ad revenue; it can always be “corrected” later on – but the latter only magnified the need for sensationalism. The network created shows like Crossfire and the Situation Room, in which any and all issues are depicted as “controversial,” with two opposing viewpoints, with equal treatment of pundits on each side of the issues discussed. This can be gamed, which is exactly what CNN’s progeny and main competitors Fox News and MSNBC did, which brings us to the second step.

Step 2: The Stupid

In cases of issues in which natural controversy cannot adequately fill the time – because there is already an expert consensus for one stance that cannot be answered by the opposition – the controversy must then be manufactured. The easiest and cheapest solution is to undermine expert opinion by literally giving time to opposing arguments, no matter how banal or insipid, and thus “even the playing field” by presenting conclusive scientific, sociological, legal or political analysis as unproven, if but for the sake of continuing the debate and thus granting a reason to keep watching.

This is lucrative so long as the opposing view has a market; ie: an audience. They will tune in to see their worldview defended, as political stances can indeed be sold – though in this case the media enterprise attempts to butter its bread on both sides by presenting both sides.

This of course has the adverse effect of undermining facts themselves, as by definition in this format they cannot end a debate with a clear victor, for that would cause one half of the audience to stop watching (and, arguably, the other half as well for after the controversy is concluded there is no ‘news’ to watch). Indeed, nothing can end the debate, because the debate itself is profitable for the private media organization: In fact, the more extreme the stance, the more emotional the response, and the more likely people will watch it. Scholarship is debased by design.

Step 3: The Evil

With such a system in place, it becomes patently easy for interested parties and propagandists to game media sources that are amenable and suppress the few that attempt to resist. The best way to defend a lie is to attack the very idea of truth, which is child’s play in the format by which Americans receive their news.

Need an expert? Pay somebody to pose as one. Fox News has so many discredited “experts” that an entire cottage industry – Late Nite contemporaries of Jon Stewart – has risen to quantify and criticize them, but that industry has had absolutely no effect on Fox News’ popularity or viewership: It merely profits off of the opposing view, for the simple reason that the debate is never concluded. If no expert is willing to lie on television, launder source material by reporting on reporting of bloggers and lumpenpundits: Effectively, wallow in rumor and hearsay.

Need to muddle an issue? Run counter-articles and claim that the opposition is lying and/or compromised. Because the industry runs on confirmation bias, people will accept what is effectively an auto-immune disease for investigative journalism because it bolsters their preconceptions. Breitbart and the Drudge Report have taken extreme stances that even the New York Post and the Washington Times have failed to venture, knowing full well that their readership will never abandon them, to the point where they will regurgitate articles from RT – the modern Pravda – derived almost entirely of anecdotes, misrepresented statistics or straight lies. Alternatively, simply just out-shout the competition: Internet memes, as evinced by the racist Pepe the Frog character, have been weaponized and can be produced and disseminated faster than anything ever before.

The danger of this situation is that its solution is not fact-based high quality reporting, because by its very nature it is quicker on the draw, cheaper and thus far more prolific than the effort and expense required for quality. It drags truth down on equal footing to lies and then outproduces its competition. It is still, at heart, a business venture. This is also why counter-propaganda fails to work: Liberal venues such as Buzzfeed, Vox and the Huffington Post have established their business models on this phenomenon, but they are not nearly as large, rich or as numerous as those on the right: They simply can’t compete for volume, though they have proven that even self-described free-thinking liberals can fall victim to confirmation bias, as in their zeal they also play fast and loose with fact-checking.

In such a manner these enterprises not only profit off markets all too willing to hear what they want to hear, but they have the effect of maintaining and cultivating those markets, creating a self-supporting propaganda machine that puts our facile and blundering attempts in the Cold War and the Second World War to shame, and absolutely dwarfs our comparatively cute attempts in the last century.

Hell, cities have entire personas. Paris is a beautiful woman in her late 40s, once divorced and too smart and self-assured to enter another marriage, but is not against having relations with men on her own terms. New York is a barrel-chested Black transvestite in his early 40s, bombastic and highly theatrical, who doesn’t take shit from anybody. New York and Paris are friends, because of fucking course they are. Paris says some offensive shit sometimes, but New York is used to it and brushes it off as from a person who doesn’t change and can’t harm by it, and while New York openly steals Paris’ fashion choices, so too does Paris from New York, though she would never admit it.

London, eldest of the three and perhaps the most stodgy, yet often invites New York to inject life to his parties. They are business partners, after all, and while the witticisms of New York are almost ad verbatim borrowed by London in other settings, it is indeed London who set New York up in business in the first place. The relationship is far more mutual than that of, say, Chicago, who obsesses over all things New York minus, notably, the “Black” and “transvestite” part. London doesn’t care about such things, so long as the money flows, and indeed they have fruitful dealings and amicably compete over other London proteges, the brothers Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore.

It is an absolutely subjective observation to ascribe personalities to cities, but it shouldn’t and indeed can’t possibly be controversial to suggest that cities exude a form of cultural zeitgeist that defines and differentiates them – from the banal “standing in line” versus “standing on line” to far more deep-seated issues concerning acceptable norms and tolerances pertaining to them – and with that it’s less a form of accurate depiction as it is a narrative that penetrates to the core. How, after all, does a city where the gay rights movement was launched with a street fight between cops and minority transsexuals (a circumstance that Los Angeles attempted to whitewash, but Los Angeles always was a hater), that founded a musical genre and cultural movement named after submissive male prostitution and oozes gender and sexual fluidity (a distinction London completely missed when copying it, natch), whose most famous mayor’s sexual orientation was left intentionally vague, end up producing our current Commander in Chief, who is almost diametrically opposed to all of that: A crude, incurious, insecure, jealous womanizer?

It’s no surprise Trump hates New York – he seems hell-bent on destroying everything about it, in whole and in detail – but it is a surprise that people are surprised that New York hates Trump, a native son. That’s where the personality comes in: New York is well-adjusted and confident, but that doesn’t mean New York is secure in his position. New York is a savvy businessman, a ruthless pirate, a firebrand intellectual, sometimes broke and often lonely. New York is in love with himself because nobody else is, but New York also brokers straight deals with aplomb and has affairs everywhere. New York is always of two faces, between two realities, where even doctrinaire Marxists learn to hustle; where Know-Nothings share neighborhoods with new migrants who then become Know-Nothings; the only city in America where women have a harder time in the dating scene than men because men are intimidated by aggressive, professional women.

That duality pervades everywhere: Where a law and order mayor can show up in drag one day on a lark (and be promptly molested by Donald Trump), where hoodrat nightclubs that are responsible for fully half the murders in the area have at least one gay night a week, despite a self-reporting localized gay population of less than two percent, and it’s by far the most lucrative night. Where doctors working for the CDC have to ask very specific questions to macho, ultra-masculine alphas who don’t think they’re homosexual so long as they’re giving, not receiving. Where a meat market specializing in one gender by night lends its street frontage by day for butt-augmenting lingerie for the other gender, right on the main strip in a heavily-Catholic sleepy residential neighborhood. New York encompasses all types, and does it in full stride while heading to the office, laughing along with the stupid, misogynistic jokes just so the deal can be struck. New York needs to make that face in order to conduct his business with the world, has made peace with that understanding – London taught him well – but carries on without giving a fuck with the rest of his life.

Trump is at times that face, and that face is what some see New York as, but New York is not that face. New York has many faces for business: Among equals, New York had Morgan, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Bloomberg. New York invented Trump to fleece the rubes, the schmucks – after all, New York wants an empire, and you don’t get an empire by playing nice or fair – but Trump was never meant for New York. A city whose arguably best mayor was called Little Flower, who accepts all and embodies all, who is more than a little dirty and likes it that way, while still emanating class and rarified distinction: This city understands the use of masks because it has to, it always had to; even those of arrogant bullies, but that arrogance drawn inwards simply cannot be. It can be sloughed off and discarded when it has lost its use.