The Aestheticisation of Journalism Is a New Kind of Fascism

Fintan O’Toole

Karl Marx spoke of alienation: how a sort of hyper-capitalism alienates you from the product, the thing that’s created. Today, you no longer know or care about the things you use – the clothes you wear, the food you eat. Where does the product come from? Under what conditions is it produced? What happens to the people who have to make it? You’re alienated from all of that.

One of the things that we’re living with right now – something that is new to the current situation – is a complete alienation of a younger generation from the way in which journalism is produced.

I know this from my own experience of teaching younger people in America.

The idea that somebody has to investigate, has to spend years learning how to do that, has to spend years doing it, has to take personal risks, has to find somebody to give them enough money to live while they’re doing it, and that it has to be distributed – all of that is removed, I think, from the sense of it.

Journalism now is something that just ‘appears on your feed’.

About 12 years ago, I was teaching a class in the United States and afterwards some of the students said ‘we read your piece on Facebook’ – and I replied ‘I don’t write for Facebook’. They went on to say ‘Oh no, you did. It’s on Facebook. What are you talking about?’ I explained I had written it for The New York Times and they looked at me and said ‘No, no, it was on Facebook’. They literally could not grasp the fact that Facebook had scraped or syndicated it from the newspaper – that there was an institution called The New York Times which had to pay me to do it: that I had to put work into writing the article and there was this whole system that produced it. These were very smart, clued-in young people, but they just found it really difficult to grasp that idea.

Philip Graves was an Irish journalist who unmasked one of the great conspiracy theories of the 20th Century: ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which purported to be the record of a secret meeting of a Jewish cabal at the World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. It is a complete fabrication. The document, which set out a fake Jewish conspiracy to control the world, was concocted by the Russian secret police in Tsarist Russia.

Antisemitic Nazis such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels took it up. But Winston Churchill was also among those who gave it credence, and the person who spread it most widely in the United States was Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company.

If everything is aesthetic, then everything is a story, everything is a drama. And the underlying result is that you question: what is the reality?

The disinformation was everywhere – and was simply accepted as fact. There are familiar issues here that we still face today.

The Times of London wrote an editorial about the document saying “well, we’re just asking the question … We’re not saying it’s real, but really, there’s something concerning here, which we really need to know about”. Yet, it was a Times foreign correspondent, Philip Graves, who proved that it was a concoction – and revealed where it came from.

In his diaries, Goebbels admitted that ‘Graves is right. It’s obviously fake, but it tells a bigger truth’. This is exactly the same line used by US Vice President JD Vance, when he was questioned about the veracity of the story that migrants in Maryland were eating domestic cats and dogs.

It doesn’t really matter whether the allegation is based in reality or not: it’s a story we’re telling, and even if the details of the story are not true, it tells a ‘bigger truth’ – as if we’re going to a movie or a play.

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin famously wrote during the rise of Hitler that “the aestheticisation of politics is fascism”. In the same vein, the aestheticisation of journalism is a new kind of fascism.

If everything is aesthetic, then everything is a story, everything is a drama. And the underlying result is that you question: what is the reality? What is the truth? And then – is there such a thing as truth?

It is driven by the algorithms, which are there to make fortunes for people, but are also fundamentally driven by the denial of climate change. The single most important thing that Donald Trump has to keep saying is that climate change is a hoax. Why? Because if climate change is not a hoax, then the various forms of disaster capitalism are obviously unsustainable.

If you accept that climate change is happening, then you have to change the whole way that society is organised. So, a critical part of the Trump agenda is to say that climate change is not real. But if climate change is not real, then your own reality is not real.

The fact is a major American city burned down in recent months – large parts of LA were devastated by wildfires – and yet this has disappeared from the public conversation. You don’t find anybody talking about it or addressing it. Imagine if half of Dublin had burned down a few months ago and it just didn’t matter. This is disconnecting people from their own reality.

It’s about journalism and the media – but at the heart of this is: how do you convince people that they’re not seeing what they’re seeing? That they’re not experiencing what they’re experiencing? How do you get them to actually deny their own reality?

If the agenda is to make people literally disbelieve their own lives, their own eyes, then there’s not a great deal of evidence historically that you can do that forever.

Fintan O’Toole is an award-winning Irish journalist and literary critic for The Irish Times. This is an edited extract of a discussion with journalists Carole Cadwalladr and Misha Glenny at the Borris House Festival of Writing and Ideas in June 2025