War Propaganda Destroyed the Media - Patrik Baab

The Insider’s Judgment: Biography and Uncomfortable Truth

A war reporter with decades of field experience now dissects the structures that turned journalism into a participant in war.

Patrik Baab is a German journalist, political scientist, and bestselling author with more than forty years of experience in international reporting. He has worked extensively in conflict zones including the Balkans, Afghanistan, Russia, and Ukraine, with a strong focus on first-hand observation and field research.

Baab gained international attention for his book “On Both Sides of the Front”, in which he documents his reporting from Ukraine and critically examines Western media narratives surrounding the war. His work emphasizes analytical depth over ideological alignment and challenges simplified, moralistic framings of complex geopolitical conflicts.

He previously worked for Germany’s public broadcasting system and taught journalism and media ethics at academic institutions. As his analyses increasingly diverged from dominant political narratives, Baab became a prominent independent voice outside the media mainstream, known for questioning power structures, propaganda mechanisms, and the erosion of journalistic standards in times of war.

German journalist Patrik Baab has reported from both sides of the frontline in Ukraine – and argues that Western media has become a narrative machine for the NATO apparatus. A reckoning with ownership structures, career fear, paid fact-checkers, and the largest propaganda complex since World War II.

Three Levels of War – and the Media Is Fighting on All Three

The first level is the war at the front. The second is economic warfare through sanctions. The third is the propaganda war – and the media is fighting on all three.

Glenn Diesen opens with the central question: Patrik Baab has reported from both sides of the front in Ukraine – a perspective that no longer finds space in Western media. He has covered the Balkans, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Russia.

He has written a new book titled Propagandapresse – The Propaganda Press – and launched a YouTube channel called Gegen den Strom, Against the Stream. What exactly is happening to Western journalism? Baab’s diagnosis is unambiguous: “The media in the West don’t cover reality anymore. We’ve reached a level of anti-factual reporting.”

The evidence, Baab argues, is right there for anyone who has been on the ground. Things he personally witnessed and investigated in Ukraine are simply not covered in Western media. There is what he calls an apocalyptic blindness – the risk of nuclear warfare in Central Europe is not represented. The living conditions of ordinary people in Ukraine are absent from Western reporting.

And the background and prehistory of the war – its long history going back well before February 2022 – has been deliberately removed from the conversation. Former NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg himself acknowledged that the war did not begin in February 2022 but in 2014 with the coup on the Maidan. That basic historical context has been suppressed.

What disappears on the ground and vanishes in newsrooms:

• The apocalyptic risk of nuclear warfare in Central Europe – not a topic
• The living conditions of ordinary people in Ukraine – invisible
• The prehistory and historical background of the war – systematically omitted
• The moral hazard: hundreds of thousands dead, no acknowledgment, no debate about ending the war
• The press’s own rules – hearing both sides, reality-checking – abandoned entirely

Diesen breaks it down into a structural picture. The war in Ukraine is being fought on three levels simultaneously. First, the military war along a 1,400-kilometer frontline, where Russian forces advance step by step and Ukrainian casualties – according to a leaked document from the Ukrainian general staff – stand at approximately 1.7 million dead or missing. That number alone, if true, would be one of the defining catastrophes of the postwar era. It is not covered.

Second, the economic war through sanctions, which have demonstrably failed but keep being renewed in new packages, with each failure treated as a reason to try again rather than a reason to question the logic. And third, the propaganda war. Baab is direct and unambiguous: “The media are part of that war.” Not bystanders, not reluctant participants – combatants.

What makes this observation more than editorial criticism is that Baab is speaking from the inside. He was a reporter for North German public television. He has seen how the decisions get made, where the pressure comes from, and why journalists who want to keep working make the choices they make. The problem is not individual cowardice or bad faith, though there is plenty of both.

The problem is structural. And to understand it, Baab identifies five interlocking causes that together explain how an entire media ecosystem can lose contact with reality while remaining entirely functional as a system.

Five Causes – the System Explaining Itself

The media doesn’t lie in spite of the system – it lies because of the system. Ownership, working conditions, education, NATO propaganda, and digitalization interlock into a machine that produces conformity without anyone needing to issue orders.

Baab lays out the five structural causes methodically. The first is ownership: newspapers and broadcasters are privately owned, and private management has the legal right to define the editorial line. That alone would be unremarkable in any liberal framework – until you add public broadcasting. In Germany’s public media system, politicians sit on supervisory boards.

The careers of editors-in-chief depend on the goodwill of exactly those politicians. Baab speaks from personal experience: “If I don’t want to represent that line as a reporter, the bosses have the power to end my career.” The formal independence of public broadcasting, so often cited as a safeguard against propaganda, turns out to be a polite fiction. The supervisory structure ensures alignment without the need for explicit censorship.

The second cause is the working conditions inside newsrooms. The bulk of journalistic work is now done by freelancers or journalists on fixed-term contracts of one to five years. This is not an accident. A journalist paid by broadcasting minutes or published lines writes what the bosses want to hear – not because they are dishonest, but because their livelihood depends on it.

They are not in a position to take principled stands. And those bosses, Baab observes, are mostly linked to transatlantic organizations or to political parties that hold a transatlantic line. The structure of dependency runs from the freelancer up through the editor to the political and economic networks that ultimately control what gets published and what does not.

The five interlocking structural causes:

• Ownership structures: private media defines political lines; public broadcasters follow the politicians’ will through supervisory board control
• Working conditions: fixed-term contracts and freelancer dependency make conformity a matter of economic survival, not ideology
• Journalist training: unpaid internships in expensive cities produce a class-based selection that ensures only certain perspectives enter newsrooms
• NATO propaganda: 27,000 Pentagon PR employees and a five-billion-dollar annual budget conducting cognitive warfare at industrial scale
• Digitalization: private corporations have become the market itself, deciding what information reaches the public and what does not

The third cause – NATO propaganda – is addressed separately below. The fourth, training and education, points to a structural self-reproduction that is perhaps the most elegant element of the entire system. And the fifth, digitalization, has fundamentally altered the information landscape in ways that reinforce every other factor.

Together, these five causes do not merely explain individual failures of coverage. They explain why the system as a whole has become what Baab calls a propaganda and censorship complex – a term that once sounded hyperbolic but has become, in his telling, simply accurate.

The Class Question – Who Sits in Newsrooms and Why

Unpaid internships in Munich, Frankfurt, and Hamburg filter out anyone without wealthy parents. The perspective that reaches newsrooms is the perspective of those who hold company shares – including shares in defense companies.

Baab names a structural truth that is rarely spoken aloud in discussions of media failure, because it implicates the very people who would need to speak it. Anyone who wants to become a journalist for television or print in Germany must complete numerous unpaid internships in expensive cities – Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg.

For working-class students, for the children of ordinary families, this is simply not possible during semester breaks. You cannot work and do unpaid internships at the same time, in cities where rent alone consumes a significant income. The internships are a class filter, and they work as intended.

The result is what Baab observed among his own colleagues: “Most of my colleagues were sons and daughters of the upper classes, of rich families – children of dentists, managers, and so on.” These are not bad people. But they bring into newsrooms the perspective of their class – a class that holds company shares, that has investments in financial markets, that benefits from existing institutional arrangements.

And that class, Baab notes pointedly, holds shares in defense companies. They profit from the war. But they don’t talk about that. Instead, they say in public: “We must help the poor Ukrainians against the bad Russians.” The sincerity may be genuine. The structural conflict of interest is real regardless.

The self-reproducing logic of class-based selection:

• Unpaid internships function as economic barriers that filter out working-class candidates before they enter the profession
• Those who get through carry the perspectives, assumptions, and interests of their class into editorial decisions
• Defense industry shareholding among the upper class creates a structural conflict of interest that is never disclosed
• The result is not conspiracy but something more durable: shared assumptions that require no coordination

Diesen picks this up from a different angle. You don’t even need to propagandize journalists after the fact. It’s enough to select the right ones. He cites a New York Times job posting from 2016 that opens by describing “Putin’s brutal and oppressive regime threatens freedom across Europe” – and then seeks an “independent journalist.” The selection is built into the hiring process itself. The person who gets that job has already demonstrated the ideological alignment the institution requires. No further instruction is necessary.

This observation has consequences that go beyond individual newsrooms. If the class composition of journalism ensures a structural alignment with certain political and economic interests, then the problem cannot be fixed by improving journalism’s ethics codes or strengthening editorial independence. The pipeline produces the result. You would need to change who enters the pipeline – which means changing who can afford to enter the profession at all. That is a political question, not an editorial one, and it is one that the profession has no interest in raising about itself.

NATO Propaganda as Cognitive Warfare

The Pentagon has 27,000 PR employees and a five-billion-dollar annual budget – and NATO propagandists don’t want to change what people think, but how they think. That is the difference between information warfare and cognitive warfare.

Baab explains the third cause with a precision that goes beyond conventional media criticism. NATO propaganda is not delivered to the public as information – it is conducted as cognitive warfare. The distinction matters enormously. Information warfare operates on the level of content: it introduces false narratives, denies true ones, floods the zone with noise. Cognitive warfare operates on a deeper level.

It targets the thinking process itself. “NATO propagandists don’t want to change what people think. They want to change how people think. That’s much more powerful.” The goal is not to convince people of specific propositions but to establish a mode of thinking – one driven not by reason and evidence but by emotion, identity, and tribal loyalty.

The instrument for this is Russophobia, but Russophobia understood not as a mere attitude toward Russia but as a cognitive operating system. Once installed, it does not require maintenance. The person who has internalized Russophobia as a default emotional orientation does not need to be fed new propaganda about Russia – they will generate it themselves, or they will accept it uncritically when offered, because it confirms what they already feel rather than what they have reasoned.

Baab puts the scale of this operation in stark numbers: the Pentagon, by old figures, employed 27,000 people in public relations with an annual budget of five billion dollars. Those numbers have only grown. No individual newsroom, no editorial team, no single journalist has the time, manpower, or resources to confront this apparatus on equal terms. The asymmetry is the point.

What cognitive warfare concretely means in practice:

• Not correcting individual facts but establishing the interpretive frame within which all facts are processed
• Establishing Russophobia as an emotional reflex that precedes rational evaluation
• Denouncing anyone who reports ground-level facts as a “Putin propagandist,” regardless of the facts themselves
• Replacing the journalism norm of hearing both sides with the security norm of denying legitimacy to one side entirely
• Using the scale advantage of a multi-billion-dollar apparatus to overwhelm any capacity for independent verification

What makes this analysis important is that it explains the durability of the propaganda. Propaganda built on false facts is vulnerable – facts can be checked, discrepancies can be exposed, the whole edifice can collapse when reality intrudes. Propaganda built on cognitive rewiring is far more robust. When the facts themselves become unbearable – when Ukrainian casualty figures reach catastrophic levels, when peace negotiations are sabotaged, when the military situation deteriorates beyond denial – the cognitively rewired audience does not update its model. It rejects the facts. That is not a failure of the propaganda. That is what success looks like.

Digitalization – the Private Corporations Are the Market

In the liberal era, companies go to the market. In the digital world, the leading companies are the market itself – and they decide what gets sold on it.

Baab addresses the fourth and fifth causes together, and the argument here shifts from institutional to technological – though the two are deeply connected. In the classical liberal framework, the market is a space where sellers and buyers meet on roughly equal terms, governed by competition and the flow of supply and demand. The great insight – or the great problem – of the digital era is that this model no longer applies to information.

Amazon is not a participant in a market for goods. Amazon is the market. Google is not a participant in a market for information. Google is the market for information. And the owners of these markets exercise a qualitatively different kind of power than ordinary market participants: they decide what is available for sale at all.

This changes everything about the information environment. What you can find on the internet has been filtered – not once, but repeatedly, through the upload algorithms of private platforms and, Baab argues, through the active involvement of intelligence services. The result is not the free marketplace of ideas that the internet was supposed to enable. It is a curated information environment in which certain kinds of content are amplified and others are systematically suppressed.

“This is not freedom of information – it’s just a private decision, nothing more.” The fact that the decision is made by corporations rather than governments does not make it less consequential. In some ways it makes it more so, because corporate censorship lacks even the formal accountability structures that constrain state censorship.

The digital transformation of the information environment:

• Private platform corporations have become the market itself, not participants within it
• What reaches the public has passed through multiple layers of algorithmic and intelligence-service filtering
• The appearance of open access conceals a deeply structured curation of what can be found
• Upload filters operate invisibly, creating the impression of a free internet while systematically shaping its content

On the consumer side, the transformation is equally profound. The main medium today is the smartphone. News is consumed on the subway, on a bicycle, while walking – in conditions of divided attention, brief focus windows, and constant interruption. Baab observes that editors know this, and they have responded rationally to the incentive structure it creates: personalization and emotionalization outperform analysis and context in the metrics that determine whether a story gets engagement. “Reporting is becoming more and more just what’s on the screen.

It doesn’t go deeper anymore.” The result is a structural bias toward emotional simplicity and against the kind of nuanced, historically grounded reporting that would allow audiences to understand a conflict like the one in Ukraine. Not because editors want to mislead their audiences. Because the platform economics of the smartphone age reward what misleads and punish what informs.

Lying by Omission – the Press Method of the 21st Century

The accusation is not that the press spreads false facts. The accusation is more damning: it selects from reality only what fits the narrative, and calls the selection truth.

Baab is specific about the mechanism: “What the press is doing here is lying by omission.” This is not the crude propaganda of totalitarian systems, which fabricate events wholesale and require the audience to completely detach from observable reality. Western propaganda of the current variety is more sophisticated. It works with real facts, real images, real voices – but it selects from reality exclusively what confirms the desired narrative, and excludes, systematically and consistently, everything that would complicate or contradict it. The result is a picture that is composed entirely of true elements and is nonetheless profoundly false.

The former Chief of Staff of NATO in Germany, General Harald Kujat – now retired – described this in terms that Baab finds apt: a three-eye concept involving ideology, incompetence, and ignorance. The incompetence is visible in the most basic professional failures. Journalism has rules. They are not complicated. You answer seven questions: who did what, when, why, how, for what reason, and where did the information come from. You hear both sides.

You perform a reality check. These are not idealistic standards – they are the minimum technical requirements of the profession. And they are not being met. Stories run without the other side being consulted, without sourcing being verified, without the most basic questions being asked about whether the official account holds together.

The concrete distortions that omission produces in Ukraine war coverage:

• No substantive reporting on the nuclear risk in Central Europe, despite that risk being real and documented
• Ukrainian losses of 1.7 million dead or missing – the kind of figure that would define any other conflict – absent from coverage
• The sabotage of the Istanbul peace process by Boris Johnson, confirmed by multiple independent sources across multiple countries, treated as a fringe claim
• The prehistory since 2014, including the Maidan coup, acknowledged in private by Western officials but excluded from public narrative
• The recruiting methods of the Ukrainian military, which by multiple accounts have become brutal – not covered

The ignorance that General Kujat identified is equally significant. Most German journalists, Baab observes, know nothing substantive about Ukraine, about eastern Ukraine, about Russia – its history, its politics, its internal dynamics. They have no idea what is happening on the ground because they have never been there, they do not read the relevant languages, and they have no access to the local knowledge that would allow them to evaluate what they are being told.

“They just have no idea what’s happening on the ground.” And the vacuum that ignorance creates is inevitably filled by ideology – because ideology is the cheapest and most readily available substitute for knowledge. You don’t need to understand a situation to have strong feelings about it. And strong feelings, in the current media environment, are what gets published.

Wikipedia as an Intelligence Product

Wikipedia says Baab was a poll watcher for Putin. A court proved the opposite. The entry keeps being repeated. Intelligence services write on Wikipedia – and newsrooms accept it as a source.

Baab speaks about himself as a case study – not out of self-pity, but because what happened to him is replicable and systematic. His Wikipedia page contains the claim that he served as a poll watcher for Putin during the referenda in autumn 2022. A court has proven categorically that this is false. The entry keeps being repeated. The mechanism Baab describes is straightforward and deeply troubling:

“This is a framing invented by the secret services, because the secret services are writing on Wikipedia and shaping the information there.” Wikipedia operates on a model of open editing, but in practice, certain entries – particularly those concerning politically sensitive individuals – are maintained and shaped by actors with institutional resources and political interests. Intelligence services have both.

What makes this operationally significant is not the Wikipedia entry itself but what happens downstream. Newsrooms operate under enormous time pressure. Journalists working on daily deadlines in an era of shrinking editorial staffs do not have the time to independently verify the background of every person they cover. Wikipedia is fast, it appears authoritative, it is universally accessible.

The editor-in-chief probably has nothing else. So the false framing enters one newsroom, gets picked up by another, circulates through the media ecosystem, and within a short time is treated as established fact – not because anyone has checked it, but because everyone has seen it somewhere. The judicial ruling that contradicts it never generates the same volume of citation. Corrections don’t travel as far as accusations.

The mechanics of reputation destruction through Wikipedia:

• Intelligence services shape politically sensitive Wikipedia entries through the platform’s nominally open editing structure
• Newsrooms under time pressure use Wikipedia as a primary source rather than a starting point for verification
• False framings circulate through the media ecosystem and quickly acquire the appearance of established consensus
• Court rulings and factual corrections do not generate equivalent circulation – the asymmetry is structural
• The result is a permanent damage to credibility that requires no individual act of malice by any particular journalist

Diesen confirms the same dynamic for his own Wikipedia page: under “occupation,” it once listed not “professor” but “Russian propagandist official.” He describes the labeling method with precision: “If someone ‘has been accused of’ something – if enough people write it – it becomes almost obligatory to add the word ‘controversial’ or ‘pro-Russian.’” The phrase “has been accused of” is doing enormous work here.

It requires no evidence. It requires no named accuser. It requires only that the accusation exist somewhere in the media record – which it will, because the media record is being written by people who are themselves embedded in the system Baab describes. No context, no argument, no factual basis. Only the framing matters. And the framing, once established, is self-reinforcing: every new journalist who writes about Diesen or Baab will consult the existing record and find the label already there. Why would they question it?

Fact-Checkers as Propagandists

Fact-checkers have never been to the front. They don’t check facts – they measure narratives against government propaganda. That is their business model.

Baab’s verdict on the fact-checking industry is precise and devastating: “I’ve never seen a single fact-checker on the ground, at the front line, or in a war zone.” This is not a rhetorical point. It is the core of the indictment. Fact-checking, as it is practiced by the major institutional fact-checkers that have proliferated across Europe over the past decade, does not involve the kind of independent investigation that would be necessary to evaluate claims about what is happening in a conflict zone.

It involves consulting existing media records, official statements, and institutional sources – and measuring the claim in question against what those sources say. If the claim is consistent with what NATO, the European Commission, and the major Western media outlets say, it passes. If it is not consistent, it fails. This is not fact-checking. It is narrative enforcement dressed in the language of empirical inquiry.

Diesen offers an example from personal experience that illustrates the mechanics with unusual clarity. In a debate with Norway’s former foreign minister, only his statements were subsequently fact-checked – not hers. He had argued that Boris Johnson sabotaged the Istanbul peace process in spring 2022, at the behest of the United States and the United Kingdom.

This claim is supported by a remarkable range of independent sources: the Turkish foreign minister confirmed it, President Erdoğan confirmed it, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett confirmed it – Bennett had served as a mediator in the peace talks and spoke publicly about their sabotage. Germany’s former Chief of the Armed Forces, General Kujat, confirmed it. A Bloomberg interview from March 2022, conducted with American and British officials, explicitly stated that the only acceptable outcome was regime change in Moscow. And Zelensky himself, in an Economist interview in late March 2022, said that many Western countries wanted Ukraine to fight a long war with Russia in order to exhaust the Russians, even if it destroyed Ukraine.

What the fact-checking industry systematically produces:

• Measurement of claims against official narratives rather than against independently verified evidence
• Selective application: dissenting voices are fact-checked, official voices are not
• Single-source refutation: one disputed source cited to dismiss a claim supported by multiple independent sources
• Irrelevance as method: when facts are inconvenient, the fact-check addresses a different question than the one asked
• Authority laundering: conclusions that would be dismissed as political if stated by a journalist acquire a veneer of empirical legitimacy when issued by a “fact-checker”

The fact-checkers Diesen encountered cited, as their sole counter-source, a colleague of Zelensky’s – and noted that he was a questionable source. Everything else was simply ignored. The Turkish confirmation, the Israeli confirmation, the German military confirmation, Zelensky’s own statement – none of it was addressed. One questionable source was deemed sufficient to dismiss a claim substantiated by multiple independent sources across multiple countries. This is not a failure of fact-checking. This is fact-checking working exactly as it is designed to work in a propaganda ecosystem: not to establish what is true, but to protect what must not be questioned.

Three Hundred Government Organizations Posing as NGOs

Germany alone has more than 300 NGOs paid by the government. Their purpose is not civil society – it is to attack anyone who refuses to follow the official narrative.

Baab identifies the institutional backbone of the propaganda infrastructure with a term that deserves to enter standard usage: GONGOs – government-organized non-governmental organizations. The nongovernmental label is a legal fiction. These organizations are funded by governments, serve governmental narrative priorities, and operate as attack infrastructure against anyone who dissents from those narratives. Their targets are journalists like Baab who report from the wrong side of the front, academics like Diesen who draw the wrong conclusions from the evidence, and any media outlet that platform voices outside the approved range.

But these 300-plus GONGOs do not operate in isolation. Baab situates them within a broader network of ideological apparatuses – schools, universities, churches, think tanks, media organizations – that are all, in his analysis, working in the same direction. This is not a conspiracy in the conspiratorial sense. It is a system, and systems produce coherent outputs without requiring central coordination.

Each element of the system has its own institutional interests, its own incentive structures, its own career pressures – and those interests, structures, and pressures all point the same way. Toward conformity with the transatlantic framework. Away from anything that challenges the core assumptions of that framework.

The architecture of the ideological apparatus:

• 300-plus GONGOs in Germany alone, funded by government, tasked with narrative enforcement
• Think tanks, universities, and media organizations embedded in the same transatlantic network
• Young academics working on short-term contracts, economically dependent on institutional approval
• Transatlantic organizations – German Marshall Fund, Young Global Leaders, Soros-affiliated foundations – as career gatekeepers
• Now: the Heritage Foundation attempting to extend the same model through the AfD to the German right

Inside this apparatus, Baab observes, the workforce consists largely of young academics on fixed-term contracts of one to three years. Project-based work, no security, total dependence on the continuation of institutional relationships. “They’ll do whatever their bosses tell them to do to get a new contract.” This is not a cynical description of individuals without integrity. It is an accurate description of what precarious employment conditions produce in any institutional context.

When your livelihood depends on your continued usefulness to an institution, and that institution’s continued existence depends on producing certain kinds of outputs, your intellectual production will align with those outputs. Not because you have been ordered to. Because the alternative is professional extinction.

The Legitimacy Crisis – and the Attempt to Escape It

The war narratives will collapse – or the elites will manufacture new ones. They sit in the prison of their own lies, and every career depends on staying inside.

Diesen poses the question that gives the entire conversation its political urgency: the Ukraine war is approaching its end. When it ends, the lies that were told to manufacture and sustain public support for a multi-year war of attrition will become, at least partially, visible. Ukraine was winning – until it wasn’t. The Russians were running out of missiles – they weren’t. Putin was dying – he isn’t.

NATO had no skin in the game – it manifestly did. The Istanbul peace process collapsed spontaneously – it was sabotaged. How will the political and media establishments handle the exposure of these lies? How will they navigate a crisis of legitimacy that is already visible in falling trust in media institutions across Europe?

Baab’s answer is not optimistic. He sees two theoretical possibilities: the narratives collapse under the weight of accumulated contradiction, or the elites manufacture new ones. His prediction is the latter. “I think they will do that. They’ll try to create new propaganda narratives.” The reason is not cynicism for its own sake. It is structural. Journalists, academics, media figures, and politicians who have spent four years inside the propaganda complex are now so deeply invested in its truth claims that the capacity to exit has been foreclosed.

“They’re sitting in the prison of their own lies – they can’t get out.” This is not metaphor. If the Istanbul sabotage story is true, then the media organizations that suppressed it for years are implicated in a catastrophic journalistic failure. If the casualty figures are real, then every institution that described Ukraine as winning while those casualties mounted has a profound accountability problem. The safest path, institutionally, is to keep the narrative running and hope the contradictions can be managed.

The pattern of four years of Ukraine war coverage that will require managing:

• Russia supposedly ran out of missiles since March 2022 – the claim was repeated annually despite being demonstrably false
• Putin was reported to be dying of various diseases – with new diagnoses introduced whenever the previous ones expired
• Ukraine was winning – consistently reported as such until the military reality became impossible to deny
• NATO had no involvement – the deepest and most consequential of all the systematic omissions
• The peace process collapsed on its own – the suppression of the sabotage story is the single most important omission of the entire war

Baab cites Upton Sinclair with the directness the observation deserves: “It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” This is not a remark about dishonesty. It is a remark about the structural production of false belief. The journalists who covered this war as NATO intended did not, for the most part, do so because they knew they were lying. They did so because the institutional environment made certain conclusions possible and others professionally fatal. The prison of lies is not a metaphor. It is an incentive structure. And incentive structures are remarkably durable.

The Majority Is Silent – But It Wants Peace

Merz enjoys no trust among the population – yet the press tries to lend him credibility. Germany’s media doesn’t represent public opinion. It manufactures one on behalf of the government.

Baab is pessimistic about Germany specifically, and his pessimism rests on a distinction that is important and underappreciated: the distinction between what the population believes and what the media presents as public belief. Most Germans, Baab argues, are sleepwalking toward catastrophe – not because they support the war, but because the propaganda machine has made it extremely difficult for them to develop an accurate picture of the situation. “Most Germans believe the government narratives because they want to believe them.”

The desire to believe – to maintain the comforting story that Ukraine is winning, that the sanctions are working, that NATO is simply helping a democratic country defend itself – is itself a product of the propaganda environment. People believe what they have been given to believe, and then they want to believe it, because the alternative is too destabilizing.

And yet: Merz has no credibility with the public. The press is trying to give him some, and failing. Baab has taken the logical step: he no longer talks to the press. He talks to normal people. In public discussions and book readings across Germany, he has found a consistent pattern: the media’s picture of German public opinion does not reflect what German people actually think.

The consensus that the media presents – strong support for continued military support for Ukraine, acceptance of the costs, confidence in the government’s strategy – does not exist in the population in the way it is portrayed. “The media in Germany don’t represent public opinion. They’re creating a fake opinion led by the government.” And the fake public opinion then becomes a justification for policies that actual public opinion would not support.

The structural gap between manufactured and actual public opinion:

• Media-presented consensus: strong public support for Ukraine policy, acceptance of economic costs
• Actual population: wants peace, skeptical of costs, unable to access information that would support their skepticism
• The mechanism: fake consensus becomes self-fulfilling by making dissent appear marginal and uninformed
• Merz’s lack of credibility: visible in polling, invisible in coverage
• The war’s continuation: dependent on a manufactured public support that actual public support cannot sustain long-term

Baab invokes Gramsci: in his terms, those who favor peace and honest reporting have lost cultural hegemony – the capacity to define what is normal, what is reasonable, what counts as common sense in the public conversation. The warmongers have it, and they are faster. Part of the reason they are faster is that the survival of the current political class in Germany, as Baab bluntly states, depends on the continuation of the war.

If the war ends with the outcome now clearly visible – Russian territorial gains, no regime change, the strategic goals entirely unmet – then the politicians who committed German resources, German credibility, and German economic health to this project will face a reckoning. The propaganda machine is running not just to support a war. It is running to protect the political class from accountability for the war.

Against the Stream – the Only Strategy That Remains

Stop reading the propaganda media. Find other sources. Build new ones. Whoever wants to reach the source must swim upstream.

Baab’s conclusion is radical, but the logic is inescapable given the diagnosis. If the media ecosystem is structurally incapable of reform – if ownership structures, working conditions, class composition, NATO propaganda, digital filtering, and the self-reinforcing dynamics of ideological conformity have together produced a system that generates propaganda as its normal output – then the solution cannot come from within that system.

The mainstream media will not self-correct. Individual journalists of integrity will continue to be expelled or marginalized. Editorial standards will continue to be applied selectively. Fact-checkers will continue to check narratives. Wikipedia entries will continue to be written by intelligence services. The GONGOs will continue to attack dissenters. The incentive structure is too robust, and the institutional investment in the existing framework is too deep.

The practical conclusion is therefore the one Baab has already drawn for himself: leave. Stop consuming the propaganda media. Find the outlets that are genuinely trying to report reality. In the United States, Consortium News. In Canada, The Postal Magazine. In Germany, NachDenkSeiten, Overton Magazine, Multipolar.

These are not perfect. They have their own limitations and their own tendencies. But they are operating under a different set of incentives, and that difference is visible in what they cover and how they cover it. Beyond consumption, the task is construction: building new media institutions capable of doing what the existing ones cannot.

What must be built and what must be abandoned:

• The mainstream propaganda media will lose their audience through accumulated discrediting – the process is already underway
• Parallel information infrastructure must be built: outlets that apply journalism’s own rules consistently and without political exception
• Public discussions and direct engagement with audiences outside the media apparatus offer a different kind of legitimacy
• The COVID coverage failure has already begun the discrediting process – Ukraine will accelerate it
• The goal is not to defeat the propaganda machine but to make it irrelevant by making the alternative more credible

Diesen recalls a remark by a senior Czech official: under communist rule, where all official media were controlled by the state, the necessity of a parallel information architecture became clear. Media that would actually disseminate information, allow a free exchange of ideas, present facts and arguments even when they conflicted with the government’s narrative. The point was not that the parallel media were without problems of their own – they weren’t.

The point was that they provided an alternative reference point, a way for people to calibrate the official narrative against something other than itself. The parallel architecture did not defeat communist propaganda. But it created the conditions under which propaganda’s inadequacy became visible to enough people to matter.

The name of Baab’s YouTube channel is deliberate: Against the Stream – not against the storm, against the stream. The stream is the current of the information environment as it has been shaped by ownership, working conditions, NATO propaganda, digital filtering, and the entire system Baab describes. The source – reality, facts, the actual situation on the ground – is upstream.

You cannot reach it by floating. You have to swim against the direction the current is pulling you. That is harder. It requires more effort, more skepticism, more tolerance for uncertainty and complexity than the smooth downstream journey the propaganda system offers. But it is the only way to know what is actually happening.

The question is not whether the current narrative machine will eventually break down. It will. The question is what comes after – whether the collapse of one set of propaganda narratives produces a genuine opening for honest journalism and accountable politics, or whether it produces only a new set of narratives better calibrated to the post-Ukraine information environment. That question will be answered not by the media institutions themselves but by the audience they are losing, and by what that audience builds in the space the old system leaves behind.

Thank You, Patrick Baab.

Sources & Geopolitical References

Substack – US-Edition

This article is also available as a English-language edition on Substack:

    War Propaganda Has Destroyed the Media - Patrik Baab

Original conversation (video)

YouTube-Interview:

    War Propaganda Destroyed Media & Freedom of Speech - Patrik Baab

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