What is the news?

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."

-Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, from The General Idea of the Revolution (1851):

Due to my aversion to exposing myself advertisements, I listen to an ad-free government funded public music radio station. Despite the lack of ads, the station (CBC Radio 2), always stops on the hour every hour to deliver the news, in exactly the same manner as a private radio station never fails to stop for a commercial break.

While listening to the news, I noticed an intriguing trend. I noticed that whenever something happens in a country, the action or comment by the head of state of that country is always given. For instance, if a plane crash ever happens is Russia, the CBC News never fails to report how Vladimir Putin expressed in condolences, and possibly how Putin himself personally ordered an investigation. It is likewise for other countries. If there is a terrorist attack, the CBC News always reports how the head of state of whatever country it happened in made a speech condemning the attack. It just about never occurs that the head-of-state-commentary-free factual event alone is reported.

So why must we always know what the heads of states have to say about everything? And what is the universal message of these heads of state? Whether the message is from your own head of state of another state, the message is the same, just as an advertisement for one particular brand of car is still an ad for the overall lifestyle of car driving and road paving. The message given time and time again is that these heads of state are paternally caring for us, as though we are endangered children, who are dependent on them. The head of state is the representation of the state and of the embodiment of the concept of the state. We must keep hearing this same message over and over again because it is how the states justify themselves. The states keeps us in a system of increasing wealth inequality, and ensures through their enforcement of capitalist relations (carried on with the unspoken threat of police action in case of any serious dissent) that the rentiers become richer and the workers poorer. We must hear about the state this, and the state that, so that we gradually cease to imagine a world without these capitalist states intervening in everything. 

When we allow ourselves to constantly be informed of frightening things such as daily mass shootings, and then be consoled by the state, we become like a patient who is covertly made sick by his doctor, and then always looking for his doctor to cure him. Avoiding the news altogether is the best way to avoid being sucked in to such a stultifying cycle.