The Fourth Estate is Dead, Long Live The Machine

Morgan Mason is a recurring fictional character in a few of my stories and a current book-length work in progress. His bio is that “he’s a journalist, a washed out magazine exile, and a part-time arsonist of institutional reputations. He writes about the parts of America that creak when the lights are off. Once a respected magazine editor, now a proud Substack exile, he documents the country’s descent in real time. Truth is his vice of choice, and like all good vices, it’s slowly killing him. He writes with a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other, and a camera roll full of stories someone definitely didn’t want recorded. If a story doesn’t burn going down, he doesn’t publish it.”

Here’s his latest Substack post:

Morgan Mason | Substack | November 2025

I'm writing this from the deck of a cabin on Orcas Island, watching morning fog roll toward the water through Douglas Firs like America's conscience trying to find its way home. It won't. The coffee's good, the wifi is much improved over when I built the cabin, and somewhere across the water, The Machine keeps grinding.

I keep getting requests in Substack comments to explain how it all works. And by “all,” I mean the media/political/Hollywood industrial complex. The Machine. Taibbi called Goldman Sachs a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” when he should have extended the squid club membership to the entire shitshow that makes up The Machine. Or I may just be envious that I didn’t think of the vampire squid description first. I’ll leave that for you.

The answer to the question is simple but not easy: the American national media isn't a check on power anymore. It's a vital, load-bearing component of a corrupt, self-protecting ecosystem. This isn't about political bias—left versus right, red versus blue. That's just stagecraft designed to keep you distracted. This is about the fundamental architecture of the system, which prioritizes access to power, creation of profit, and stability over the messy, inconvenient, often unprofitable work of telling the truth.

I'm not guessing. I've seen the gears work up close, from military intelligence to Hollywood backrooms. And I have the receipts.

Manufacturing Consent, Not Controversy

OK, our national media has two basic functions. The media's primary function—the one it won't admit—is managing scandals, not exposing them. It's a sophisticated filtration system that processes raw, disruptive truth into pasteurized product that protects the powerful and preserves the delicate "arrangements" holding everything together. The second-most important function is to deny the first function.

Fifteen years ago, I was a writer for Frequency Magazine when I watched Michael Cove, Hollywood's most powerful producer, hand a packet of heroin to Dylan Chase, a twenty-two-year-old movie star. I didn't just watch—I filmed it on a shaky iPhone 4. Recorded him coaching the kid, voice calm as a meditation instructor's. Within an hour, Dylan was convulsing on stage, foam tinged pink with blood bubbling from his mouth.

When I brought the video and my written-overnight exposé of the Michael Cove/Dylan Chase incident to my editor the next morning, his first words weren't about the dead kid or the documented crime. His first words were: "We have arrangements."

He explained—with the patronizing calm of a man choosing profit over principle—that the magazine was in the business of business, and business required relationships. Publishing that story would burn bridges, disrupt the ecosystem. Dylan Chase was dead, but in my editor’s calculus, the system's health mattered more.

I eventually posted the videos to YouTube and although it was widely covered in the entertainment press, not one of them printed Michael Cove's name. He was "an unnamed Hollywood producer," a "powerful industry figure," a "veteran hitmaker." His face was clear in my footage. I named him repeatedly. But the industry's gatekeepers collectively refused to identify him.

This wasn't coincidence or failure of nerve. It was the system protecting its own—an industry-wide quarantine, isolating toxic truth to keep the organism healthy and the arrangements intact.

Cove just recently signed another three-picture deal with Paramount. The Machine didn't break. It absorbed the scandal, processed it, and kept grinding.

Turning Corruption into Content

The modern media has evolved beyond covering up corruption. It now actively participates in and profits from it, integrating corrupt systems directly into revenue streams. Nowhere is this clearer than in sports betting.

I’ve broken this down in detail elsewhere, but the short version is: professional sports leagues, media broadcasters, and online gambling companies form an unholy trinity that institutionalizes corruption. Every pre-game and halftime show discusses point spreads. College and professional athletes are just the (highly) paid dancing bears in the circus. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when some engage in a bit of insider trading.

When corruption surfaces—players manipulating games, leaking injury information—media doesn't treat it as systemic failure. It re-processes the scandal into profitable content. Show trials. Multi-part documentaries. Long-form investigative reports. Every scandal creates new material to feed the 24/7/365 maw of the great sandworm that’s the MSNBC/CNN/Fox/etc. news complex. The scandal isn't a problem to be solved; nothing’s wrong. It’s a product to be sold, generating ratings and revenue that feed the machine that produced the corruption. And on and on.

But it's not just sports. Look at Jake Tapper's book about Biden's cognitive decline—The Reckoning: How We Missed the Signs. Tapper and most of the White House press corps knew about Biden's deteriorating condition for years. They saw it. They covered for it. They maintained the arrangement because access mattered more than truth.

Then, after the election, after it was safe, Tapper wrote his bestseller about how "we" missed the signs. Made the talk show circuit. Cashed the checks. The same pattern: participate in the cover-up, then profit from exposing it once the damage is done and the powerful have moved on.

The cycle is sustained by carefully maintained illusion. With each scandal—Black Sox to Watergate to whatever's breaking tomorrow—media frames it as shocking aberration. A few bad apples. The system has been violated, but integrity will be restored through new regulations and vigilant oversight.

This is deliberate misdirection. Stage magicians use verbal cues and throwaway lines to make audiences draw the wrong conclusions without realizing it. Media’s role is presenting the illusion of self-correction while its business model ensures incentives for corruption are permanent. The game isn't broken. It's fixed. And these days, the data generated by this fixed game has become the system's most valuable commodity.

From War Zones to Your DraftKings Account

Media's most insidious function is promoting technologies and platforms that help governments and giant businesses build a surveillance state under the guise of entertainment and convenience.

Twenty-one years ago when I was in military intelligence, a few of us knobturners noticed some anomalies in cell tower behavior in the Bay Area similar to what we’d seen our military use in the sandbox. Coverage patterns not matching normal carrier activity. We flagged it. The response was pretty simple: Stop digging.

That was the first time I saw The Machine's institutional reflex: secrecy and silencing inquiry. Cellular companies wouldn’t put up more cell towers than they needed to provide some optimized coverage in an area. Probably used focus groups to define “optimized coverage” satisfaction. It’s how fucking capitalism works. Not a bug. The feature.

Too much coverage on the other hand, tells you something: someone wants to make very sure they don't miss anything.

My mostly crazy friend Josh saw the whole thing well before I did. "It's all one system," he'd say, chain-smoking joints in his Sebastopol garage. He wasn't wrong. Now we know that the same companies processing military intel analyze your DraftKings picks. The same algorithms tracking insurgents in the Middle East track degenerate gamblers in Iowa.

I thought at the time Josh was paranoid. Then, a few years later I saw NSA contracts with private AI companies—"partnerships," they call them.

Turns out in America 2025, being right as well as crazy aren't mutually exclusive. Being right didn't save Josh. His wife’s efforts to save him meant her sanity became collateral damage in an information war nobody knew was being fought.

The sports betting apps relentlessly advertised during every game aren't just gambling platforms—they're voluntary surveillance apparatus. Every bet is a data point revealing your risk tolerance, impulse control, desperation level. Those algorithms sell that information to insurance companies, credit agencies, potential employers. Foreign governments. Your own government.

The American public has willingly become their own Truman Show. The media promotes this. Normalizes it. Makes it seem fun, convenient, harmless. Every technology that erodes privacy gets packaged as entertainment, and media cheerleads it into existence because media companies own pieces of the surveillance economy.

What the Founding Fathers Actually Asked of Us

The fog's getting thicker out here, and I’ve got to go inside and make another pot of coffee. I can barely see the water now, just hear it moving quietly against the rocks at the slack tide. Somewhere west across the Salish Sea, if there weren’t any fog, I’d be able to see the glow from the lights of Victoria, British Columbia. Ninety miles south, the cloud servers of Amazon are processing your data. And selling it. Microsoft Azure servers storing your searches. And selling it. The Machine humming along, 24/7.

Here's what nobody wants to hear: the national media isn't broken. It's functioning exactly as designed. It’s designed to protect power, monetize corruption, and facilitate surveillance. All while providing you enough pablum to shut you up. It presents a carefully curated reality while the real business model hums beneath the surface, grinding truth into profit.

I'm aware of the irony. I write this on Substack, part of the content economy I'm critiquing. I'm making money now—good money—from the media attention that came from exposing media corruption. The recent ForgeMind revelation at the British Museum put me on the journalism map again, and now I'm flush with cash instead of barely scraping by in Tommy's spare room above the bar in the Mission District.

The difference is I'm honest about it. I chose Option Three—burned the bridge with myself standing on it, accepted I'd lose my career and access and place in the tribe. But I'm still here, still in the system, still feeding the beast even as I document its feeding habits.

We're all complicit. Some of us are just more honest about the math.

The Founding Fathers demanded more than that. They demanded we be skeptical of power, question authority, refuse comfortable lies. Two hundred and fifty years later, we got a population that opts into surveillance for convenience, accepts corruption as inevitable, and consumes scandal as entertainment.

The Machine presents a false binary: play by the arrangements and prosper, or tell the truth and be silenced. Complicity or erasure. But there's always a third option.

It's choosing truth over access. It's admitting your own complicity while demanding we all do better. It's recognizing you're part of the problem while refusing to stop pointing at the problem.

I blew up my career in 2010 over a kid who died on stage in a Sunset Strip bar. It cost me nearly everything: my job, my marriage, my kid. Telling the truth in a system built on lies isn't a good career strategy. It's controlled demolition. But here’s why I think it’s a price still worth paying: it costs you everything except your self-respect.

But in a world of profitable arrangements and comfortable lies, self-respect might be the only thing left worth having.

It’s getting cold and I’m going inside now.

Selah.

Morgan Mason writes about systems, scandals, and civilizational collapse from Orcas Island, Washington. He still rides motorcycles.