The news cycle has been full of stories about Colin Kaepernick and the latest speculation of his signing with another football team. These stories are similar to those that have circulated for the past seven years. To recap, Colin Kaepernick played quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers until he was benched and released in 2016. He’s also known for his protests against the police by kneeling during the National Anthem. Nothing else has happened for seven years. Nothing.

The story has not really been about Colin Kaepernick at all.  The story has been (and is) about how the establishment media creates news out of nothing, and keeps the narrative on life support long after the patient has died.

Since 2016, while nothing was happening, we have been bombarded with “news” stories anticipating yet another milestone in Kaepernick’s career. From reading seven years of headlines, a reader would conclude that Kaepernick has actually played football for various teams during that time. An October story announced “NFL world reacts as Colin Kaepernick makes major move.” But, if one reads the actual story, one would see that there was no “major” anything behind the headline. The headlines that pop up on our mainstream news (MSN) home pages are designed to plant a seed in the minds of people too busy to click and read the actual story.

The latest “news” in this nonstory involves a letter that Kaepernick sent to the Jets, in which the Jets were apparently uninterested. His string of consecutive years of unemployment remains unbroken. Over those years, we have been treated to headlines containing speculation and wishful thinking disguised as major announcements involving the Seahawks, Raiders, Redskins, Eagles, Cowboys, and others. Nothing came of any of these items. While the media fiddled, Rome did not even smolder.

In 2017, a media reference to the Ravens’s “pursuit” of Kaepernick was intended to prove that Kaepernick could still play and was being blackballed for his protests. Yet the Ravens did not sign him. “Nothing” was once again the order of the day. But a casual observer would conclude from the headline that Kaepernick was in demand and that a signing was imminent. By the time it became clear that no signing would occur, the headline would be forgotten and the media’s credibility would remain intact (so they believed).

A headline in January 2023 promised the reader an announcement that was “going viral.” But far from a football-related item, it seemed that a documentary filmmaker had added Kaepernick’s name as “executive producer” on a film. “Nothing” remained undefeated. But the casual observer scrolling through the MSN feed’s headlines in search of local weather would conclude that Kaepernick’s career had something viral-worthy happening.

A 2020 CBS headline revealed the extent to which the media would grasp at straws, stating that the Eagles would not “rule out” signing Kaepernick and were weighing “the pros and cons of bringing him in.” CBS probably spent more time phrasing that headline than the Eagles spent actually weighing the pros or cons.

In 2022, USA Today went so far as to list seven teams that should invite Kaepernick to training camp. By that point, they were no longer trying to create a fait accompli with a hyped headline.  They were simply finger-pointing at specific teams and imploring them to comply. Once again, nothing happened.

After the Jets’ “story” died down, the media began announcing a “Major Football Business Move” for Kaepernick. Those who take the bait and click on the story would discover that Kaepernick’s “move” involved becoming one character in a new video game. On October 17, yet another article revealed the media’s addiction to this nothingness by naming “3 NFL Teams That Might Be Desperate Enough To Sign Colin Kaepernick.” One would have to click on and read the article to discover that these scenarios were “unlikely.”

Seven years of “major” “viral” “announcements” and “moves” have amounted to nothing. Every headline in our MSN feed would be neutralized by a careful, critical reading of the stories themselves. But careful or critical readings are not how “news” works. This slow-moving pile of nothing is a microcosm of all manufactured “news” in the establishment media. The media manufactures and quotes “polls.” They invent buzzwords. They create their own heroes (and villains). The headlines become self-fulfilling prophecies. Deeper understanding becomes the enemy of every media narrative.

An observer that actually understands what the media has done with “Kaepernick” would then be in a position to understand Greta Thunberg, climate change, “January 6th,” the danger of “default” from a government shutdown, and various other nonstories that somehow dominate our headlines. The media feeds us one “Gallant Gallstone” (see Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead) after another. Our newspapers and evening news broadcasts have long been a Potemkin village. Today, that village has moved into our computers to dominate the feed on our MSN homepages. 

Repetition is a key element of this strategy.  Similar headlines appear over and over as we search our computers for something else. If we try to ignore the story that they push, we are more susceptible because the headline is all we see. But ignore it we must. We ignore “Hollywood” and the handful of publicists that peddle “statements” from their celebrities on any issue of the day. We have tuned out CNN to the point of irrelevance. We have walked away from Bud Light and caused tremendous financial loss to the parent company. We must also learn to ignore repetitive headlines that attempt, on their own, to create a narrative about our Bread and Circuses.

We cannot chase each Kaepernick story down the rabbit hole to its irrelevant and empty conclusion. We simply must recognize the likelihood that each headline is either false or so skewed as to be irrelevant. We must learn not only to ignore the headlines, but to reject them on sight. The only alternative is to read and deconstruct every story. We can chase our own tails this way only for so long. We have our own issues to pursue. As with other heavily promoted nonstories, we must develop the expectation that we are being manipulated in some way and forget about it. That is a difficult task in this case because so many people are somehow vested in the outcome of NFL games. We are more easily manipulated in this case because it involves our “bread and circuses.”  We will be fully vaccinated against this manipulation only if we reject the entire “bread and circuses” instead of attempting the impossible task of enjoying the circuses while avoiding the politics that go with it.

Colin Kaepernick’s football career is not the point. It has not been the point since 2016. But this charade can serve a purpose. If we remember how we were constantly prodded with the dangling baubles of misleading headlines for so long, we will build the mental tools necessary to resist other inevitable narratives.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.