The Press Corps of Empire: Excavating the Media Machinery of Capitalist Rule: Part I

By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information
May 25, 2025

Introduction: The Press Corps of Empire

In the battle of ideas, media is not a neutral referee—it is a combatant. The dominant press institutions of the Western world do not exist to inform the public. They exist to manufacture consent for war, repression, austerity, and colonial extraction. Beneath the polished language and professional tone lies an infrastructure of ideological control.

This series, The Press Corps of Empire, investigates the origins, ownership, narrative strategies, and geopolitical functions of the most powerful media outlets in the capitalist world. From wire services to elite think tank journals, we examine how these institutions discipline language, distort history, and erase struggle—while laundering the crimes of empire as common sense.

Our goal is not reform, but revelation. We expose these media conglomerates not to make them better, but to help the oppressed break free from their grip.

Preface to Part I: The Associated Press

The Associated Press is often seen as the gold standard of objectivity in journalism. But objectivity under capitalism is a mirage—a political position that cloaks itself in neutrality. In this opening installment, we excavate the AP’s historical roots in war and slavery, its structural role as a corporate syndicate, and its ongoing function as a stenographer for empire.

This is not a story about “bias.” It is a story about power—how it writes the world, who gets to speak, and what is silenced. The AP is not merely a media institution. It is a narrative weapon, wielded by the ruling class in its ideological war against the global majority.

Part I: The Associated Press: The Wire Service That Wrote For The Slave Master

Birth of a Syndicate

Founded in 1846, the Associated Press is widely regarded as one of the oldest and most “trusted” news institutions in the United States. But in the context of capitalist empire, trust is not built on truth—it’s built on consistency. From its very origins, the AP was not designed to investigate power, but to transmit and stabilize it.

The AP was established by a group of five New York newspapers to share telegraph dispatches during the U.S. invasion of Mexico—a war fought not only for territory but for the expansion of slavery. While individual founders varied in their views, the syndicate as a whole aligned with commercial interests rooted in settler expansion and the plantation economy. This was not a matter of overt ideology but of structural function: the AP served to streamline the flow of information that upheld, rather than disrupted, the national consensus of the time.

Whether or not AP journalists explicitly wrote pro-slavery editorials is beside the point. Its wire service helped normalize a social order in which enslaved people were commodified, resistance was criminalized, and conquest was reported as diplomacy. This was ideological work carried out in the guise of objectivity.

The Myth of Neutrality

The AP’s signature is its “neutral” style: sparse sentences, passive voice, and official quotes. But neutrality, in a world structured by inequality and colonial violence, is not a lack of bias—it’s a mask for it. In practice, neutrality often functions as alignment with the dominant power.

“Israel launched strikes after rocket fire.”—No reference to occupation, blockade, or apartheid.
“The U.S. imposed sanctions on Venezuela.”—No mention of the humanitarian toll or the strategy of economic destabilization.
“Protests turned violent.”—No subject, no actors. Just chaos, stripped of context.

These are not one-off lapses. They are systemic features of a wire service whose primary audience is not the oppressed, but the institutions of capital and state. Media scholars, from FAIR to Chomsky and Herman’s Manufacturing Consent, have long documented how “objective” journalism manufactures public consensus in line with elite interests. The AP is not an exception to this rule—it is its archetype.

The Cooperative Model: Corporate Media in Harmony

The AP operates as a nonprofit cooperative, but that structure should not be romanticized. Its members include some of the most powerful corporate media entities in the world: The New York Times, Gannett, Hearst, News Corp, and others. These companies are not neutral actors. They are integrated into the financial, political, and ideological circuits of capitalist power.

This structure ensures that the narratives prioritized by the AP reflect the shared worldview of the U.S. ruling class. It does not require backroom collusion—just institutional alignment. The logic is simple: content that destabilizes the system is filtered out. What remains is reliable, predictable, and profitable.

Global Reporting, Imperial Lens

With more than 250 bureaus worldwide, the AP plays a leading role in shaping how people in the Global North understand the Global South. It consistently privileges sources tied to U.S. and NATO-aligned governments, pro-market opposition blocs, and Western-funded NGOs. Meanwhile, movements for socialism, decolonization, or economic sovereignty are marginalized, if acknowledged at all.

Again, this isn’t necessarily due to individual bias. It’s a result of structural sourcing protocols that favor elite access and institutional credibility—both defined by imperial standards.

The Narrative Supply Chain

AP’s reach is massive. Its content feeds into thousands of local newspapers, global news sites, search engines, and social media platforms. Google News, Meta’s fact-checking system, and Microsoft Start all rely heavily on AP wire content. This creates a kind of narrative monoculture—where the same official framing appears across platforms, disguised as pluralism.

When nearly every story about Palestine, China, or Venezuela is framed through the same wire service, alternative perspectives are not just outnumbered—they are rendered illegible. What we’re witnessing is not just information dissemination. It’s narrative containment.

Conclusion: Journalism in the Service of Power

The Associated Press does not lie outright. Its function is more insidious: it tells partial truths, stripped of context, in a style designed to comfort the reader into complacency. Its authority does not come from transparency or accountability, but from repetition.

To call out AP’s role is not to reject journalism. It is to reclaim it from the infrastructure of empire. In the hands of power, the press becomes not a watchdog, but a stenographer. The wire service that once transmitted updates from a war of expansion now transmits the worldview of a decaying empire—and calls it news.