The Broadcast
The screens never slept.
Daniel remembered when newsrooms had windows -- back when "journalism" meant sunlight on notepads. Now it's the sterile glow of teleprompters, reciting scripts and pumping approved narratives into the veins of the city.
"Crisis in the Strategic Zone," the anchor murmured, her smile serene despite the footage of burning cities flickering behind her. "US experts agree: intervention is necessary to protect democracy."
The chyron scrolled its verdict: Northrop, Raytheon and Lockheed rose with every building leveled, every hospital burned.
Daniel adjusted his headset. His job was simple: splice drone footage to show "precision strikes," not orphaned limbs. Edit refugee screams into static. Spin war crimes into justified acts of heroism.
He'd tried to quit once. That's when they showed him the Archive -- decades of identical broadcasts, the same words, the same wars, only the dates changed.
"They're not lies," his supervisor had chuckled. "They're... calibrations. The public sees only what keeps them useful."
Useful. That was the word.
Citizens were resources -- first for labor, then for blood. When they questioned the veracity of the news, the media fed them terror -- or breadcrumbs of outrage.
When they broke free of the illusion the media syndicate had created, they were cast out of a society they helped build. Deported, targeted with false charges, arrested in the dead of night by masked agents of a terror state -- stripped of dignity, voice and worth.
That night, Daniel smuggled out a hard drive. He aired it on a pirated frequency: raw footage of what the media syndicate had sanitized. The screen showed bankers and generals toasting as the latest death tolls scrolled beneath them like a ticker-tape parade.
For six minutes, the city saw the truth.
Then the power went out. In the dark, Daniel laughed.
They’d kill him, of course.
By morning, US officials were spinning lies again -- amplified by the media syndicate. The war crimes continued, as the indoctrinated chanted: "USA! USA! USA!"
License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
attribution: 640kb.neocities.org
Date: 02 june 2025