 The news has nothing to do with newsworthiness. I don't mention it often, but I actually do have a degree in journalism. I graduated with distinction from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2003, and while it would be another 13 years before I'd ever put my degree to any use, the experience played a massive role in forming my opinions about the mainstream press. One of the lessons I think about a lot came at the beginning of my two-week internship with Channel 10's Eyewitness News, which is now 10 news first. When I was watching the show's bedraggled news editor put everyone's story assignments up on the whiteboard one morning. I'd been paying a lot of attention to TV news at the time because that's what we were studying, and I'd noticed that the stories Channel 10 would cover were always exactly the same as the ones that would be covered by Channel 7 and Channel 9, usually in exactly the same order. Why do you guys always cover the same stories as Channel 7 and Channel 9? I asked. Do you guys like, phone each other to coordinate? He laughed. Nah, but it's a bit strange, isn't it? He agreed. I guess it was what you call news sense. Even back then I had a hard time believing that all news editors had some magical sense, which caused them each to know which are the most newsworthy stories day after day in a whole world full of events and ordeals. Since that time I've learned about the groupthink effect that working in the mainstream press tends to have on people's minds according to those who've made their careers there, and the fact that journalists who either don't know how to or don't care to dance to the agenda-setting task of the plutocratic media don't find themselves promoted to news editor. It's not that editors are coordinating with each other across outlets or receiving instructions on what to report from oligarchs and government agencies. It's that if they were the type who needed to do such things to know what to report, they would not be working where they're working. How did the mainstream press know to ignore the scandal of a Ukrainian Nazi being applauded in the Canadian parliament? How did they know to smear Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn? How do they know to support every war while ignoring homelessness and economic injustice? It sure ain't new sense. In a contentious 1996 discussion between Noam Chomsky and British journalist Andrew Ma, Chomsky described a filtering system that selects for obedience and subordination, which determines who gets to the top of the most influential platforms in the western world. He derided the false image that mainstream journalists have of themselves as a crusading profession who are adversarial and stand up against power, saying it's almost impossible for a good journalist to do so in any meaningful way in the western press. Well, how can you know that I'm self-censoring? Ma objected. How can you know that journalists are I'm not saying that you're self-censoring? Chomsky replied. I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. What I'm saying is that if you believe something different, you would not be sitting where you're sitting. In a 1997 essay, Chomsky added that the point is that they wouldn't be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they're gonna say the right thing anyway. By the time I graduated, I already figured out that I wouldn't be able to use my journalism degree to do any actual journalism. It had been made abundantly clear to me that I'd have to spend my first year's rewriting copy from Reuters and AP and avoiding making any waves, and that even if I made it past that point, there was very little to look forward to. The TV reporters at Channel 10 would write their stories before going to the scene of their reporting and just look for things to support their pre-written narrative. So there was never any actual fact-finding or real journalism happening on the ground. So I didn't bother. I raised some kids, I did some corporate work, I ran a little business and a little echo blog and spent time learning about life instead. I couldn't have predicted at the time that the internet would eventually give rise to a new wave of crowd-funded journalism that would make it actually possible for me to spend my time on this planet doing what I do today. But now that it has, I find myself thinking back on that news editor at Eyewitness News and noticing that the stories that I focus on are almost never the same ones being covered by the mainstream press on any given day.