A train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio on the evening of February 3rd. Around the same time, Seymour Hersh would publish a major story making claims against major narratives supporting the imperial interests of the US Government and other elite interests in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. Additionally, we have an errant Balloon alleged to be means of spying on behalf of the Chinese. This is shot down just a day after the derailment in Ohio.
The media was noisy on the balloon topic this time, as opposed to in recent history. It isn’t unreasonable to assume that balloons are more common than reported, given their cheap cost and utility. Balloons are commonly deployed to study the weather and make excellent hobbyist projects, apparently. Now that a choice was made to suddenly raise the profile of what is an otherwise common event, NORAD has apparently decided to recalibrate their tooling to look closer at smaller objects, and the media balloon obsession continued for a little longer. This narrative dominating the news cycle lends convenient justification toward further hostilities toward China and increased defense spending, all the while drowning out matters that most would characterize as a real emergency, such as decaying infrastructure.
Examining News Media
To illustrate, we could examine the total number of articles propagated about these balloons some have alleged to be spy balloons. I accessed the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) database. This database aggregates news articles from around the world and attempts to extract the tone of the article (negative to positive) and identify the principal actors.
Analysis like that purported to be done by GDELT is fraught with risky assumptions, but it does provide a great overview of the total production of headlines by national and local media within the United States. I queried this database from February onward (the 14th, at the time) for articles relating to balloons, China, aliens, etc. on the one hand, and derailment, Ohio, trains, etc. on the other hand, to generate a table of articles that might be relevant. I then reduced this table to unique source URLs and manually inspected them, ultimately removing articles related to balloon catheters and other irrelevant pieces. What remains was counted and plotted below.
The chart begins on February 4th, as the derailment took place on the evening of February 3rd. In the beginning we see derailment stories almost exclusively from local news media in and around East Palestine, Ohio. As time goes on other smaller outlets and some foreign news media pick it up. It isn’t until February 13 that we see major government figures like Pete Buttigieg, the Transport Secretary, respond. By the 14th – over a week later – the story circulates widely. In the meantime, Norfolk Southern has saturated the incident with their own influence – providing bottled water and screening to residents, for example.
The comparison above is simple but illustrates how distractible and distracting the media is. The intent isn’t to say explicitly that the balloon stories are fabricated to suppress any particular event, but rather meaningful events in general. Some history of media outlets being explicitly restricted from certain topics is easy to find. Michael Parenti outlines many of these in Inventing Reality, Noam Chomsky performs similar work in Manufacturing Consent, and a smattering of admissions can be found where key figures admit to strange relationships with politicians, such as asking permission to criticize. Through this sort of subtraction-by-suppression process the media ecosystem is left producing nonsense, and the public left to consume it.
Who Benefits from Muddy Waters?
This news didn’t break just because whichever news outlet has some sort of political bias for or against, say, Republicans or Democratic presidents, but rather because the media class broadly serves as a disciplining mechanism for discourse overall. This ultimately shapes the discourse in a manner that, in this instance, crowds out an already noisy attention-space and inhibits self-advocacy in populations with smaller platforms. In this concrete case, we have a small town that is left almost entirely alone to handle a monopolistic railroad company. In short, a tight-knit ruling class consisting of corporate interests and politicians benefit from a polluted discourse.
The citizenry of East Palestine, Ohio will be more or less isolated and defenseless against the machinations of monopolistic railroad companies (e.g., Norfolk Southern) that have developed routine programs of lobbying for political influence, and colluding with government to reduce tarnish to their image. This sort of pattern will repeat throughout the United States as hedge-fund developed profit-maximizing plans with no foresight, continue to be implemented. This is a classic case of the pressure to yield additional profit advancing at the expense of life and land — squeezing blood from the stone, in other words, rather than investing in more sound approaches at increasing industrial efficacy, like infrastructure enhancements.
The Railroad Workers Union has released a statement on this derailing, pointing out the technical issues that likely led to this incident. They also point out that the fruit of these profit-maximizing efforts — precision railroading — is likely the change in business responsible for the risky situation that led to this accident. This is on top of the recent saga over railroad workers being blocked from striking over better working conditions. The issue here is that worker’s decreased quality of life, the increased propensity of industrial accidents, the well-being of communities, and government support for all of this are all drowned out in favor of non-stories about Balloons.
Inspection times have been cut resulting in the defective car remaining in the consist.
Train was excessively long and heavy… 151 cars, 9300 feet, 18,000 tons.
Train was not blocked properly because PSR calls for limited car dwell times in terminals. Blocking a train for proper train handling (placing the majority of weight on the head end and ahead of cushioned draw bars) takes longer so this practice has been mostly eliminated by the rail carriers.
From The Railroad Workers Union, regarding the East Palestine, OH derailment
Reporting on geopolitical intrigue satisfies the need for profit, as it makes for stories that contribute to a grand narrative of international conflict in a media ecosystem that has evidently forsaken the notion of reporting on behalf of the interests of the regular people. Moreover this intrigue ticks the box for manufacturing consent for whatever next ambitions the ruling class have — namely, a pivot toward more aggressive posturing against China. These stories represent a sort of social engineering via mass media to create legitimacy for whatever the next phase may be.
In any case, it is difficult to take seriously a media ecosystem that claims concern for public health and wellbeing in the instance of, say, COVID-19, but delays serious reporting on conditions leading to events such as this. The environmental and health impacts may well be limited to a local region, and much of the volatility of these compounds may be prevent disaster from spreading— if the substances are highly reactive, they’ll effectively neutralize themselves.
The broader story here is an ongoing struggle between rail workers and management, where the continuous squeeze for profit makes critical infrastructure risky to use. As monopolistic corporations and government colludes to extract more profit from a decaying system, we can expect these stories to replicate more frequently over the years.
End of Cycle
The figure above stops at February 14th, and this is an event whose drama is proving, naturally, to evolve over time. In recent hours some have admitted that the balloons were benign, commercial objects. Given the expense of these munitions and likely justification for more defense spending, it is evident that the clear and immediate winner of all this are the defense companies. No surprise there, really.
The ultimate result is that a population is then guided through a funnel. The bulk of would-be informed citizenry never hear about any given story of real importance and instead post on social media about aliens and balloons. Those that remain are to be labeled conspiracy theorists, or some variant of ‘traitor’, left to engage with defenders of the status quo in increasingly boring and irrelevant ‘discourse’, while the powers that be march onward, the media sieve having arrested any concern on the part of the masses.