Greta the Swede: Manufacturing the Nazarethian Preachers.

Byline: Srdja Trifkovic

Greta Thunberg soared from an apparently lonely girl protesting climate change with a hand-written cardboard placard outside the parliament building in Stockholm to one of the bestrecognized faces in the world, at least for a brief while. The Western media conglomerate would like its consumers to believe that the phenomenon has occurred spontaneously and on its own merits. Greta is in the news, they imply, because she is intrinsically newsworthy. As it happens Greta's "spontaneous" rise was neither true in fact nor possible in principle. Greta was not "in the news," she became news because there is an agenda behind her launch.

This is confirmed by ample empirical evidence. It could not be otherwise. The media do not "reflect" reality, and they are not designed to do so. They process reality and seek to shape reality in line with the ideological assumptions and political ambitions of their owners and controllers. There is no "journalistic freedom" in the news media space, on either side of the Atlantic, any more than there is "academic freedom" in the departments of sociology, history, or anthropology in today's Anglosphere. Both the media and the PC infested academe exist for a clear purpose. They are in the twofold business of:

Setting the agenda by imposing and vigilantly maintaining a strict hierarchy of mandatory, desirable, or merely approved topics for debate

Manipulating their consumers (readers, watchers, students) into seeing those topics as important per se, and accepting their treatment within the prescribed terms of reference.

In the unreported reality there is a major, well financed PR machine behind Greta. It is controlled by powerful international actors and lavishly financed from discrete sources. This machine has enabled her to appear on the covers of magazines, to yield over three million results on Google, to meet Pope Francis and various world leaders, to address the UN, etc. At the very least it would seem intuitively legitimate to ask how exactly this phenomenon happened. But no major news outlet, TV channel, or newspaper has allowed let alone encouraged its reporters to go in search of the "untold story of Greta Thunberg." Most major media outlets are owned by a half-dozen companies. This enables the elite class to impose a specific message on the consumers rapidly and massively. Greta's meteoric rise is the fruit of such media saturation.

She embodies the ability of the media to manufacture...