With few exceptions the news that will shape public discourse is subject to a de facto censorial process of powerful government and corporate elites beyond accountability to the public. It is here that Sigmund Freud’s notion of repression is especially helpful for assessing the decrepit state of media and public discourse in the United States. In Freud’s view, one’s collective life experiences are registered in the subconscious, with those particularly disturbing or socially impermissible experiences being involuntarily suppressed, only later to emerge as neuroses. Whereas suppression is conscious and voluntary, repression takes place apart from individual volition.
With opinion polls indicating at least half of the public distrusting the official account of September 11th, the foremost basis for the “war on terror”, no public event has been more repressed in public consciousness via the mass media than 9/11. The enduring usefulness of Freud’s theory is suggested in repeated manifestations of the repressed episode to haunt the public mind for which a surrogate reality has been crafted.
Peter Dale Scott describes occasions such as the assassination of President John Kennedy and September 11th as “deep events” because of their historical complexity and linkages with the many facets of “deep government”—the country’s military and intelligence communities and their undertakings. The failure to adequately explain and acknowledge deep events and pursue their appropriate preventative remedies leads to continued deceptions where unpleasant experiences are contained and a new “reality” is imposed on the public mind. Together with the notion of repression, the term is also applicable for considering how instances of such historical import are dealt with in mass psychological terms, or, more specifically, by ostensibly independent alternative news media capable of recollecting the real.
For example, on May 1, 2011 President Obama announced the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the mythic mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, to an apparently ecstatic nation. Most conventional news outlets reported Obama’s announcement unquestioningly because it fit the scheme of their overall erroneous reportage on September 11th. When alternative news media and bloggers almost immediately pointed to various contradictions in the story—the observations of eye witnesses to the raid, doctored photos of bin Laden’s alleged corpse, and international press reports that Bin Laden died many years prior—corporate news outlets acted swiftly to repress the well-reasoned critiques as “conspiracy theories” with a barrage of swiftly-produced editorials and op-eds. Indeed, the announcement of Bin Laden’s supposed demise came just four days after the Obama administration released the president’s purportedly authentic long-form birth certificate, an event at once uncannily amplified and repressed by the proclamation of bin Laden’s fate; where the vocabulary of repression produced another term, “deather”.
