The New Dark Age

A century after Upton Sinclair exposed journalism as a racket in The Brass Check, today’s media landscape has evolved into something even more dangerous: sanitized censorship disguised as fact-checking.

Fact-checkers were meant to bring accountability to a chaotic media landscape. Instead, they’ve become a priesthood of gatekeepers, funded by Big Tech, government cash, and powerful NGOs. Groups like PolitiFact, Snopes, and FactCheck.org pose as neutral referees—while quietly enforcing the party line.

 But who referees the referees?

PolitiFact called claims about Hunter Biden’s laptop “Russian disinformation.” Two years later, it admitted the laptop was real—but the damage was done. Sinclair: #

“The man who owns the press owns the mind of the public.”

NEO journalists routinely explore how Western media frames conflicts—especially in the Caucasus, Ukraine, and the Middle East—not to inform, but to manufacture consent, and the CNN Effect is alive and well.

It is clear that NATO, Western intelligence agencies, and corporate think tanks shape narratives long before facts emerge and make sure, in many instances, they never emerge at all. This mirrors Sinclair’s frustration that the public rarely receives the unfiltered truth—only narratives shaped to benefit the funders.

It becomes clear that mainstream journalists either don’t know—or are paid not to know—what’s really happening on the periphery of empire. Sinclair would nod grimly at the silence.

Facebook’s fact-checkers labeled early claims about COVID-19 lab origins as “false information.” Now, even the U.S. Department of Energy says a lab leak is plausible.
In Georgia, independent journalists who reported on U.S.-funded bio-labs for years—are only to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists, agents of Russian disinformation.

Sinclair’s Brass Checkers were journalists who refused the token, refused to sell their conscience. Today, the true “brass checkers” are those who write outside the algorithm, who publish without institutional protection, and who get labeled as “dangerous,” “foreign-influenced,” or “fringe” for doing their jobs.

Let’s be blunt: today’s fact-checkers are not interested in truth. They’re interested in total control and media manipulation. Their purpose is to create a buffer zone, firewall, around official narratives.

Anything that crosses the line—no matter how well-documented—is declared “misleading,” “lacking context,” or “debunked” based on a hyperlink to a partner agency funded by the same vested interests.

In Sinclair’s time, journalists were afraid to report the truth because their editors were bought. Today, platforms enforce conformity through demonetization, deplatforming, and algorithmic burial.

U.S. Agency for Global Media

Now they have professional liars working in the name of balanced journalism, as when Rep. Madeleine Dean grilled Kari Lake about her short, yet disastrous, tenure as the Senior Advisor for the U.S. Agency for Global Media and her effort to sideline and defund media organizations under fake pretenses.

We will tell more about her later, but for now, we might as well call her a lying scumbag bitch, as she said Voice of America*, Radio Liberty*, Radio Armenia, etc, should hire Americans only. The Armenian language service should not hire Armenians, for one example. Then her reasoning is: then; therefore, they should all be shut down.

Let them Eat Cake!

When disinformation was the standard in France a couple of centuries ago, the royalty didn’t care that much, except when the queen told her subjects to give the starving people some bread. That got mistranslated when the people heard it as “let them eat cake ”

Nowadays, our so-called fact-checkers are, in fact, the gatekeepers of lies—and hold the keys to who they will let in the gate.  And when it comes to who controls the narrative, especially in places like the U.S.-funded Voice of America (VOA*) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL*), the rot runs deep.

Kari Lake, High Priestesses of Narrative Purity

Let’s dive deeper into the personality of one of the new high priestesses of narrative purity: a so-called journalism expert who has somehow taken it upon herself to decide who’s fit to speak and who should stay silent—who gets to eat cake.

Her worldview?

American taxpayer-funded media like VOA’s Armenian language service shouldn’t hire Armenian-Americans. Let that sink in.

According to her warped logic, Americans (read: native-born, English-speaking, preferably elite-coastal types with no real ties to the region they’re reporting on) are the only legitimate voices for foreign-language content aimed at foreign audiences.

In other words: don’t let the locals talk about their own country in their own language. Don’t let diaspora communities report on the places their families fled or fought for. That kind of authenticity might interfere with the script.

What happens when these same “fact-checkers” and consultants decide that there are too many Armenians in the Armenian service, or too many Georgians in the Georgian desk, and claim that this makes the agency vulnerable to “bias”? They don’t diversify it. They shut it down!

That’s right. Her conclusion?

If you can’t staff these services with the “right” kind of American, then you might as well close them altogether. Wrap the flag around the transmitter and flip the switch off.

Let the echo chamber breathe a little easier.  This isn’t just ethnonationalist gatekeeping — it’s narrative fascism. And it’s killing journalism from the inside. Let’s call it what it is: The disinformation is coming from inside the newsroom.

Who She Is (And Why She Matters)

Kari Lake is one of those Beltway-branded “media reformers” who rose through the ranks not by breaking stories, but by breaking the backs of independent voices. Her expertise is in killing dissent. Her mission: making sure U.S. foreign media platforms never deviate from the “rules-based order” — even if that means silencing those with actual knowledge of the regions they report on.

She’s been involved in hiring reviews, training sessions, language service audits, and so-called “content integrity reforms” — all under the pretext of protecting journalism from “foreign influence.” But in practice, that often means purging reporters who ask the wrong questions or speak with too much local fluency.

And yet, this is the same logic that once said, “America needs to tell the truth overseas.” Only now it’s the kind of truth that fits the spreadsheet, the Pentagon, and the cultural orthodoxy of Washington think tanks.

It reminds me of the scene in the Movie, Charlie Wilson’s War when the argument gets heated at the Virginia farm over the need to have spies in the CIA who can speak the same fucking language as the people they are spying on!

It’s when Gust Avrakotos (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) loses it during a meeting at CIA HQ, fed up with the absurdity of having operatives assigned to countries whose languages and cultures they don’t understand. The line, paraphrased: “I don’t care how smart they are — if they can’t speak the goddamn language, they shouldn’t be there.”

He’s not just talking about basic communication — he’s talking about legitimacy, credibility, and actual effectiveness.

The same absurdity is alive today — but now it’s not just incompetence; it’s ideology. Bureaucrats are doubling down, pushing top-down narratives across regions they don’t understand, without listening to locals.

In pre-revolutionary France, royal propaganda masked reality until hunger boiled over. “Let them eat cake” — real or not — became a symbol of elite arrogance. Bread ran out; guillotines followed.

*- is recognized as a foreign agent in Russia, and its activity in the country is limited

Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs