Corporate State Media
Shaping the world as we know it
I remember when USA Today was brand new, back in 1982. It promised to be the Nation’s Newspaper. Founded, and still owned by Gannett Publishing, it has the fourth-largest print subscription circulation in the US, estimated at 103,600 (December, 2025).
Benedict Anderson (1983) discusses the relationship between newspapers and nation-formation, in the century after the Gutenberg press had flooded the Protestant Bible markets.
Critical Geographies
We arrange ourselves by social geographies, the ways in which we arrange—and are arranged in—space are physical manifestations of power. Political borders, be they between nations or voter precincts, are obvious ones. Wholly imaginary, made real only by social agreements, “formalized” on paper because we have always mistaken our written words for the Wo…
Bibles (and literacy) became necessary for demonstrating the good character that would lead to salvation. A pious and conscientious life, rewarded here on Earth was the harbinger of eternity in God’s Kingdom. The Talking Heads observed that this version of “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” God is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent—and our existence in the material world is a temporary condition. We are eternal beings, too.
For centuries, European social orders were material expressions of ethereal, “permanent truths.” The Protestant Reformation toppled the Catholic church monopoly and established the Divine Right of Kings; it did not disqualify the King from having been Chosen. That would take the Enlightenment and the rise of science, empiricism, and secularism.
With this new body of knowledge about the world, we began to look at ourselves as central figures in a material history. Paintings began to shift from religious figures and Bible stories to portraits of people and their possessions. Oil painting itself became a product of a social class relation. “Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects. Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.” (Berger, 1972: 87).
Newspapers—“one-day bestsellers”—differentiated locality, by their very names. The subject of newspapers were living people, around the reader. What the subjects were reported to be doing (and how it was reported) framed the society to which the reader belonged. To Anderson’s calculation, newspapers and their conception of the world, led to the global, social fact of the nation-state.
Nation-states never existed, until they did. The first Modern nation-state, with a secular constitution that (sui generis) conveyed authority to govern civil life and commerce, and that eventually claimed the monopoly on legitimate violence within its soon-to-be-expanding borders, was the United States. A free press is iterated in the first amendment because it built Modern community and identity.
USA Today, like its namesake, USA, was colorful, featured bold typeface, and offered the most commercially-appealing morsels (Fun Size!) of stories. Most were three- or four-paragraph pieces with a headline that could substitute for reading the whole thing. But USA Today is a broadsheet, better suited for business travelers at a hotel or in an airport, than for daily, urban commuters.
That is where the METRO, founded in Sweden with the format exported to Philadelphia and other major U.S. cities, stepped in. METRO stories made USA Today stories look like treatises. METRO stripped the 3-paragraph story to a 3-sentence story. It was a tabloid, much better for subway reading, and it was free. The newspaper appeared in Boston in 2001 and could be found at T stations until it shuttered in 2020.
The METRO was showing how to condense reporting by the syllable, when Twitter came around with its 140-character limit and de-centralized network. Twitter created a need for URL-shortening apps, redirecting links with long titles to a truncated, 8-character (often Libyan) address. Tweets could then direct people to the source of information, and this became widely practiced. Tweet about something and show people where they could find more information themselves. Hashtags also served a similar purpose, when they shared the same one(s) as the source.
This new, electronic media form has been breaking down old information systems, as can be seen by the dwindling of hard copy, daily periodicals. As the asynchrony and placelessness of the internet gain greater influence on how we work and live in the world, the distant becomes local. The nation-state—built on narrative frames of people living in a place, simultaneously—becomes less secure as an institution. Replaced, more and more, by the transnational corporation as the means of organizing human activity and identity.
Under the Trump Administration, part deux, ICE has assumed the role of “protecting America,” while the nation-state itself is in decline. Their actions over the past week—and the Administration’s—have thrown the legitimacy of state violence into a crisis, for half the nation.
More Americans Now Want ICE Abolished—A Stark Change Since Trump Took Office 1/13/2026
ICE agents today are not acting like any previous incarnation of federal authority that anyone living in the United States can remember. Their closest American cousins are the Slave Patrols; closer still the German SS.
Minneapolis has been occupied by ICE, at the direction of the White House. One person has At least two people have been shot (another shooting happened between first draft and publication), and multiple U.S. citizens have been arrested for protesting.
Robby Roadsteamer was arrested for the second time. The first, in Portland, OR, was for “trespassing,” though video shows ICE agents crossed over the Magic Blue Line and carried him back, to make him trespass. This time was in Minneapolis, where a squad of 20 agents marched outside their “gated community” to gang tackle him and frogwalk him back into the compound, to write him a traffic ticket. All the other protestors (many of whom were also on the street) were left alone.
It lends further evidence to my suspicion they are running a bounty system.
Early yesterday morning, the DOJ said they had concluded their investigation and there will be no charges filed against the murderous ICE agent because he was acting in “self-defense.” Indeed, he was defending his self-conception, when he got angry enough to kill.
What came out soon after, though, was a tweet by CBS News, informing the world that according to “official sources” the ICE agent suffered “internal bleeding” from being struck by Renee Good’s car.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who fatally shot Renee Good last week in Minneapolis, Johnathan Ross, suffered internal bleeding to the torso following the incident, according to two U.S. officials briefed on his medical condition.
It was unclear how extensive the bleeding was. CBS News has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for more information and has not yet received a reply. This story will be updated as we learn more.
Videos from the scene showed Ross walking away after the incident.
Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, previously acknowledged that Ross was taken to the hospital after the shooting and was released the same day.
As many people have noted “internal bleeding” would include bruises. Others mentioned that a dirty cop would have their buddy punch them somewhere on their body for cover. In any case, hospitals do not discharge people with real internal bleeding, until the bleeding has been stopped.
Like hemorrhoids, which is another form of internal bleeding, a real pain in the ass is CBS offered nothing for substantiation. No link to a story, government report, or video. Bupkis. The Administration’s strategy in dealing with the murder has been to blatantly lie, and this report is rightfully understood to be an extension of that strategy.
It is like they are testing whether, when the public refuses to believe the Administration officials at the podium, will they trust a Corporation to tell them what violence is legitimate and what is not?