Liberal media: the barking dog of institutional power
There was a recent Reuters investigation revealing that one fifth of sitting US Congress members, living presidents, and Supreme Court justices are direct descendants of slaveholders. Liberal circles celebrated this as exemplary accountability journalism. But this celebration reveals the sophisticated mechanism by which modern media manufactures consent. Not through falsehood, but through strategic structural omission.
The investigation was conducted by journalist Blake Morrison. He meticulously mapped genealogical connections between today’s political elite and their slaveholding ancestors. He traced lineages through census records, slave schedules, estate documents, and family bibles. He identified at least 100 members of the 117th Congress with ancestral ties. The investigation even named the enslaved individuals where records permitted, giving human names to those previously reduced to property listings alongside sorrel horses and folding tables.
The dog is on the chain
Morrison’s reporting frame focuses on the personal impact of discovering these genealogical connections. It frames the story through individual family history and curiosity. It systematically avoids examining the legal and financial mechanisms through which slaveholder wealth was preserved, compounded, and transferred into the present day.
The Reuters investigation, like much accountability journalism, perpetuates the fiction that wealth passes simply from father to son. This is not how dynastic wealth operates. The actual mechanisms, trust law, estate law, corporate inheritance, land title chains, and complex financial instruments, remain entirely unexamined. By failing to map and explain the legal instruments that protected and grew slaveholder wealth across generations, the investigation performs a crucial ideological function. It transforms a systemic analysis of racial capitalism into a personalised narrative of ancestral discovery. The story becomes about individual bad apples and their personal reckonings with family history, rather than about the structural continuity of wealth extraction from enslaved labour into contemporary financial and property systems.
The everyday reproduction of consent
This is not accidental. It represents the operational logic of what Walter Lippmann termed ‘the manufacture of consent’ in his 1922 book Public Opinion. Lippmann argued that the professional class should manage democracy because they know about power and because raw political reality is too complex for most people. Columbia University’s journalism school is the training arm of the institution most closely associated with Lippmann’s legacy. And it’s where Blake Morrison teaches interviewing and investigation.
Now consider a story that Reuters is not currently investigating. In March 2026, the Poynter Institute reported that Thomson Reuters (Reuters’ owner) has multiple contracts with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), one of which gives DHS access to number plate reader data. Reuters journalists themselves signed a letter demanding the company explain what human rights and civil liberties due diligence it has undertaken in relation to this contract.
This story is not historical. It’s happening now. And it is about US government surveillance. Thomson Reuters has a $22.8 million open contract with DHS that runs until 2026. Another company, LexisNexis has a separate $22.1 million contract. These contracts support ICE and Customs and Border Patrol operations, including immigration enforcement and deportations.
A YouTuber, Ali McForever, traces the connections between state power, media systems, and global economic structures. Her analysis reveals how the manufacture of consent operates not through crude propaganda but through the careful cultivation of partial visibility.
She argues that Reuters will trace a family tree across centuries but will not trace a contract across subsidiaries. They will name an enslaved ancestor but will not name the shell company receiving ICE funding. They will expose a genealogical connection but not a procurement chain.
She also argues that Morrison’s investigations are formulaic. Although the story is always factual, the conclusion is invariably some bad apples and a regulatory gap. That is deliberate, not incidental omission. Legal wealth transfer mechanisms or surveillance infrastructure never appear anywhere in the investigation. A story containing falsehoods can easily be debunked yet stories that are structurally true but conclude just before the system is made visible produce something more durable. The wagging tail of accountability without any bite.
She argues further that Morrison’s work occupies a space where a systemic critique would otherwise exist. It occupies this space deliberately while Thomson Reuters takes millions from the same agencies that Morrison claims to expose. The public receives confirmation that journalism performs its watchdog function while never barking against the actual levers of power.
Trust structures
Let’s consider what a genuinely systemic investigation would require. Mapping trust structures established in the 19th century that remain active today or tracing land titles through Jim Crow-era legal mechanisms designed to protect white property ownership. Examining how corporate charters and financial instruments allowed slaveholder capital to transform into industrial and banking capital without passing through the father to son inheritance model that Reuters implicitly assumes.
Tracing the Thomson Reuters contracts through their actual ownership layers. Revealing which data brokers operate the number plate reader databases for ICE. Exposing the procurement chains that connect historical slaveholder wealth to contemporary border militarisation. This is work that Ali McForever has done. This is the work that Reuters deliberately avoids because it would expose their own complicity.
Journalism that maintains intimate proximity to power while performing the ritual of critique is in thrall to King Capital. It names the brokers but not the banks. It traces the genealogy but not the wealth. It exposes the contract but not the procurement chain.
This is workers’ consent being manufactured in its most abstracted form. Not through raw propaganda, but the careful cultivation of partial visibility, we are shown enough to believe ourselves informed, while the actual mechanisms of power, legal, financial, structural, remain unexamined behind a veil of individual narrative and personal moral narrations.
For socialists, we know when the bourgeois press celebrates its own accountability, we must ask what remains unseen. What legal instruments go unexamined? What ownership layers remain obscured? What surveillance contracts go unexamined? The answer reveals not mere journalistic failure, but journalistic function. To manufacture the consent necessary for the continued operation of capital and its dog, the military industrial complex, one carefully framed investigation at a time.
A.T.