Reportage: Adventures in the New Media

by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
December 17, 2023

Could it be? Is it really true? Let me check . . .

. . . Yes, there are the decorations in all of the stores. There are the trinkets and doodads festooning the local mecca of commerce, inviting credulous consumers to spend their hard-earned yen on cheap, slave-made plastic goods from China. There's Wham!'s "Last Christmas" (and all of its many, many cover versions) blaring out of every radio and echoing through every cafe.

Yes, I suppose it is true. Christmas is here already, and New Year's not far behind it.

Now, you all know the drill. It's that time of year when the "content creators" in the "information space" churn out their "year in review" articles, full of hot takes about the important news stories of the past 12 months and/or predictions about what will take place in the coming 12 months.

But, since your newsfeed is probably already full of those types of articles, I thought I'd do something different this year. So, in lieu of the Corbett Report's "2023 in Review" article, here's a more philosophical piece about the work I do and how I came to do it. Enjoy! . . .

"As an ook cometh from a little spyr."

Given that it was written in Middle English over 600 years ago, you'd be forgiven for not recognizing that particular analogy from Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. But you probably do recognize its modern English variant: "Mighty oaks from little acorns grow." And I, for one, can attest to the truth of this mighty metaphor.

In my case, the acorn took the unlikely form of a studio apartment in a ratty, rundown, roach-infested two-storey building in the outer reaches of a sleepy town nestled in Japan's equivalent of "flyover country." An acorn that became my home sweet home in the fall of 2006.

You see, being a 26-year-old teacher at an English conversation school in western Japan at the time, I knew two things. Firstly, I knew that—given my entry-level salary and given the monthly payment I was forced to send home to Canada each month to retire the debt on my fun but economically ill-advised master's degree in Anglo-Irish Literature from Trinity College Dublin—I didn't have oodles of money to be shelling out on a swank penthouse apartment in the heart of trendy Omotesando. And secondly, I knew that it was time for me to bite the bullet and move into my own place, sans roommates, for the first time ever.

And so it was that I found myself moving into my, shall we say, "spartan" abode in September 2006, ready for whatever adventures single living would bring. . . Or so I thought.

Indeed, as I soon discovered, I was mentally prepared for living on instant ramen. And for waking up at two in the morning when my upstairs neighbour inevitably sprang to life and began clomping back and forth across his creaky floorboards. And for the sight of a cockroach scurrying away when I came home at the end of the day and flipped the light on.

But, as it turns out, I was not prepared for the most unexpected lifestyle change of all: the internet. The apartment I moved into was cheap in every respect, but, amazingly, it came with a free internet connection. So, not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I plugged the LAN cable sticking out of my apartment wall into my beat-up old laptop and hopped online.

And, unbeknownst to me, that little acorn began to sprout.

Now, don't get me wrong. This was 2006. Of course I'd been online before. In fact, I'd been online for a decade at that point, a veteran of the days of yore when you plugged your 14.4 kbps modem into the phone jack and braced yourself for the ungodly racket of electronic screeching that heralded your arrival in that then-uncharted territory known as "cyberspace." But in 2006, it had been years since I'd had an internet connection in my apartment. Four years, to be precise. And I soon discovered that a lot had happened on the world wide web in my absence.

Podcasts had happened, for one thing. With the internet at my fingertips, I finally had the time to explore the nascent world of podcasting, subscribing to news and current events podcasts, Japanese learning podcasts, jazz podcasts, literary podcasts and whatever else tickled my fancy. (Anyone else remember the original Planet Japan podcast with Amy and Doug?)

Streaming video had happened, for another. The long-promised vision of online, on-demand access to video content was finally becoming a reality, enabled by brand new streaming video platforms like Google Video and some upstart website called "YouTube."

To put yourself in that 2006 state of mind, imagine cycling down to the prefectural library for your weekly browse of the scant English book section and coming across the mirror-covered Christmas edition of TIME magazine announcing that You ("Yes, You!") were TIME's 2006 Person of the Year. Imagine reading TIME lead technology writer Lev Grossman's decidedly purple prose lauding "Web 2.0" platforms like YouTube and MySpace "for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game." And then imagine cycling back to your cramped studio apartment for an evening of instant ramen and noisy neighbours and watching history documentaries on YouTube.

Well, I don't have to imagine it. I lived it.

But then, a funny thing happened. The YouTube algorithm, evidently recognizing that I liked to peruse politically charged content, started recommending videos about 9/11 Truth.

In retrospect, it's easy enough to understand what was happening: the fifth anniversary of 9/11 had just transpired, prompting record numbers of activists to descend on New York. They made their voices heard not just on the streets of the Big Apple, but even on C-SPAN. Unthinkably in today's political climate, America's public affairs channel actually broadcast the proceedings of the American Scholars Symposium on "9/11 + the Neo-con Agenda," an event held in Los Angeles in June of 2006 that featured talks by some of the leading 9/11 Truth advocates in academia at the time.

Back in 2006, however, I knew nothing about the rising tide of 9/11 Truth, much less how such a growing movement, energized by the Web 2.0 revolution being hailed by TIME magazine, was about to kickstart a revolution in public consciousness that we're still living through today. Sure, I knew that conspiracies exist, but 9/11? That was a bridge too far. It was absurd. It was disrespectful.

Still, I would click on some inane video about the "flying orbs" destroying the Twin Towers or whatever nonsense was trending on YouTube that day just for a quick, derisive laugh. "What fools believe in this nonsense?" I'd wonder.

At some point, however, one of the videos wasn't as eye-rollingly ridiculous as I was expecting. Even though it made some outlandish claim—perhaps something about the CIA meeting with Bin Laden in Dubai in the summer of 2001 or some equally off-the-wall story—it contained just enough verifiable information to compel me to look it up for myself. And, sure enough, there was a report in Le Monde on October 31, 2001, citing a "professional partner of the administrative director of the hospital" in a story about how Bin Laden traveled to Dubai for kidney dialysis in July of 2001 and met with the local CIA station chief, along with "several Saudi and Emirati officials"—a report immediately denied by the hospital itself, naturally.

Or perhaps it was a video about a clandestine US military plan in the 1960s to commit terror attacks in the US and blame them on Fidel Castro as a justification for launching an invasion of Cuba. A claim that, once again, seemed utterly outrageous . . . until I followed it back to its source. This time, I ended up in the digital database of the National Security Archive, where I found a PDF file containing a scan of the original Operation Northwoods documents. Far from allaying my fears, those documents instead confirmed that the preposterous plan for a US military "false flag" terror campaign in the US was not only true, but that just such a plan was actually signed off on by Lyman Lemnitzer, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and forwarded to the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, for review in March of 1962.

I wish I could remember precisely what video or what series of videos got me chasing these wild rumours down the internet rabbit hole. I would happily give that video credit if I could remember what it was, and I would happily explain what particular piece of surprising information got the snowball rolling down the hill. All I know is that I spent much of the fall of 2006 learning more about the world than I had learned in the previous 26 years combined.

So, what did I discover down those YouTube rabbit holes?

I discovered the documentaries of Alex Jones from 9/11: The Road to Tyranny to Terrorstorm to Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove, encountering for the first time the news reports documenting the multiple bombs that were removed from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on the day of the OKC bombing and the evidence that the Black Bloc anarchists at the "Battle of Seattle" in 1999 were in fact undercover police agents and the footage of the creepy mock human sacrifice "Cremation of Care" ritual performed at Bohemian Grove in the heart of the California redwoods each year.

I discovered the work of Adam Curtis from The Century of the Self to The Power of Nightmares to Pandora's Box, absorbing information on everything from Edward Bernays—the American nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of modern-day public relations—to the creation of what we know as "Al Qaeda" to the failed Soviet experiment in technocratic utopianism at Magnitogorsk.

I discovered The Money Masters and The Creature from Jekyll Island, filling in the gaps in my knowledge of the money creation process and learning for the first time the history of the Federal Reserve, America's central bank.

Given the sheer amount of information I was taking in during that disorienting autumn of 2006, is it any wonder I failed to notice that the little acorn sprout in the corner of my room was busy growing into a sapling?

Yes, all of this information, downloaded (quite literally) in the hours between my work days and my nights out with friends, served to turn my world on its head within the span of a few short months. In the fall of 2006, I was James Corbett, English teacher and aspiring author. But, by the spring of 2007, I was James Corbett, English teacher and aspiring podcaster. That may not sound like much, but—as someone who had not only never considered becoming any sort of "journalist" (let alone a podcaster) but had actively foresworn that possibility when asked what I was going to do with my English degree—let me assure you, it was a profound shift.

Subsequently, I spent the spring of 2007 looking into designing and hosting a website, buying recording equipment, practicing my "radio" voice (or is that "podcaster" voice?) and trying to think of the most neutral-sounding name I could find for a news and politics podcast. And, on June 1, 2007, I treated the world to the first episode of my brand new podcast, The Corbett Report.

This is where I'd write that "the rest is history," except that, as I write these words, the rest is very much still the present. Sixteen years, tens of millions of views and downloads and a 600,000-subscriber deleted YouTube channel later, a lot has changed with regard to the work I'm doing and the way I'm doing it. But, at base, it's the same thing it always was: the record of one man's attempt to relate suppressed truths via a new media paradigm.

Perhaps the best way to chart the tenor of those sixteen years is to cite Richard Stengel, the Managing Editor of TIME from 2006 to 2013. In the now-infamous issue declaring "You" the TIME Person of the Year in 2006, Stengel justified that decision by touting the radical democratization of information that the online media revolution would no doubt bring about.

There are lots of people in my line of work who believe that this phenomenon is dangerous because it undermines the traditional authority of media institutions like TIME. Some have called it an "amateur hour." And it often is. But America was founded by amateurs. The framers were professional lawyers and military men and bankers, but they were amateur politicians, and that's the way they thought it should be. Thomas Paine was in effect the first blogger, and Ben Franklin was essentially loading his persona into the MySpace of the 18th century, Poor Richard's Almanack. The new media age of Web 2.0 is threatening only if you believe that an excess of democracy is the road to anarchy. I don't.

And here's what Stengel—who, after leaving TIME, went on to serve in the Obama State Department and eventually author Information Wars: How we Lost the Battle Against Disinformation and What to Do About It—had to say about that same subject in 2023:

Instead of the few creating for the many, the many now create for one another. The idea was and still is a radical one. If I got anything wrong, it was in not anticipating the downside of this new information calculus, the rise of hate speech and disinformation, and how a democratized system could be used against the very idea of democracy. I still think that the benefits outweigh the costs—and that the future of the media still depends on, well, You.

And you know what? He's not wrong.

I mean, he's not wrong about the "the future of the media still depends on you" part, not the "hate speech and disinformation threatening democracy" part. Indeed, Stengel is a case study in the phenomenon of once-upon-a-time gatekeepers of the old media establishment beginning to realize that they can't tell people what to believe and how to think with as much ease as they once did. Their desperate attempt to invent a whole new vocabulary to justify online censorship—misinformation, disinformation, "malinformation"—only underscores the point: they have lost control over the hearts and minds of the public.

Yes, the new media revolution has already happened. Like it or not, the toothpaste is out of the tube now and there's no putting it back. One person with a microphone and a genuine desire to spread knowledge—even a lowly English teacher in a roach-infested apartment in western Japan—can make a difference in this world.

Take it from me. I should know.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to tend to my oak tree.

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