We have just entered the second quarter of the 2000s, well past the years that The Running Man was set in. Just before Thanksgiving I happened to watch both Network and Running Man back to back. The only reason for this juxtaposition was that they were both “movies my dad might enjoy”—which he did. But watching them together over two nights like that, one of the things that struck me is that The Running man could literally be a sequel to Network. Both are about the entertainmentication of the modern world, both feature television executives obsessed with viewing shares, both use violent criminals to achieve winning shares and increase already-winning shares, both are very much about the merging of autocratic government and a compliant news industry. Both are about the merging of news and government with entertainment.

In Network Faye Dunaway’s up-and-coming television exec successfully develops a series about armed bank robbers and murderers acting under cover of political activism. We never do find out what her heiress-kidnapping Liberation Army show is called. Someone jokingly referred to it as “The Mao-Tse Tung Hour” early in development and that’s what the executives and development team keep calling it through the rest of the movie.

The Running Man was much less expertly filmed than Network, especially when it came to cutting it for theaters. We can still see bits remaining of subplots or subcurrents that were removed late in editing or so late during production that related scenes couldn’t be altered.

Maria Conchita Alonso’s Amber was clearly being set up for a tense scene at the end in which she would have trouble remembering the uplink code for the broadcast network, something that needed exact timing as the revolution’s strike team took over the broadcast control room. They cut the remembering scene but not the memorization scene—the latter was necessary to explain Harold Weiss’s disappearance.

Cutting that scene was a surprisingly smart choice for a B-level action movie like The Running Man. It’s such a cliched bit that it mostly only works in comedies today, Army of Darkness being the most iconic but still evident in the modern century in movies like Scoop.

A more interesting cut is possibly Captain Freedom’s awakening. His speech at the end about a “Code of the Gladiators” comes mostly out of nowhere. It looks a lot like the culmination of a character growth that never actually happened. When we first see Captain Freedom, he’s a joke, almost literally a white Bojangles prancing across the screen to promote his parodic exercise show.

Are you ready for pain? Are you ready for suffering? If the answer is yes, then you’re ready for Captain Freedom’s Workout.

Captain Freedom’s exercise show’s apparent target group of overweight middle-aged women is undercut by the fact that the only actual viewer we see is portrayed by a very fit Maria Conchita Alonso—in fact, this initial appearance by Captain Freedom does double duty in that it portrays Captain Freedom as a joke and sets up Alonso’s Amber Mendez as fit enough to survive, with some assistance, the very deadly “Running Man” game show. It would have made more sense to lean into Amber as a typical viewer, making Captain Freedom an icon among a young generation with no memory of any code of fair play among entertainment warriors because it’s a code that Killian has discarded and that Captain Freedom himself has sold out.

Some remnants of Captain Freedom’s more illustrious past remain. His “remember the old days” anecdote being cut off by Damian Killian was superficially a joke–but it does imply that Captain Freedom took his role as a stalker much more seriously than the Mexican-wrestling-style stalkers of the current show do. And most weirdly, there are occasional camera cuts to short sequences of Captain Freedom looking thoughtfully into the distance when Schwarzenegger’s Ben Richards adheres to that long-forgotten code. Captain Freedom is juxtaposed against a studio audience hungry for honorless murder.

Captain Freedom is arguably the most potentially interesting character in the movie, even if most of that potential was either cut or squandered.

But what really struck me and my dad about these two movies, especially The Running Man, is how real they’ve become. We’re very close to the kind of deep fakes that the media in The Running Man was able to create both to impugn Ben Richards and to negate Captain Freedom’s refusal to betray his Gladiator Code.

Even without the ability to deep fake at the level of The Running Man, we have for years been subject to a media that lies by editing: lies through omission, lies through transposing the order of footage, and lies through completely irrelevant footage from years earlier and/or miles away. Ben Richards refused an order to commit crime. He was, through manipulative editing of film and audio and the sequestering of original footage—transformed into a violent scapegoat for government crimes.

The man protesting government misconduct was, through “edited” video, turned into the scapegoat for it.

Where it becomes obvious, however, is when Amber hears about the events at Ben Richards’s recapture. The news report is completely different from what she saw with her own eyes. What she saw at the event was nothing like what was reported. It’s an experience I’ve experienced personally.

Deaths caused by law enforcement were blamed on the innocent protestor. In the midst of a comedic B-movie this struck home, and hard. It was too much like the prosecution of protestors in DC on January 6, 2021, who were escorted into the Capitol, wandered around for a few minutes, and then left peacefully, while the only actual killing that took place that day was committed by Capitol Police.

It’s common in situations like this to bring up Gell-Mann Amnesia, which states that the media gets things wrong through ignorance, by misunderstanding cause and effect. In Michael Crichton’s recounting of it, the media reports that “wet streets cause rain”.¹ But this gives the media more credit than it deserves. It assumes that there remains a relationship between the way the story is presented and what actually happened. What we’re seeing today, and possibly what we’ve always been seeing, are completely made-up lies.

As often as not, what we’re seeing on the news never actually happened at all. George Zimmerman didn’t have pale skin; nor did he ever judge a criminal based on their skin color. Trump never included white supremacists in his statement about fine people on both sides. In the first case, the media literally edited photographs of Zimmerman to make him whiter. In the second two cases, they literally edited out portions of the audio in which the conversation had moved on, creating an implied meaning that simply wasn’t there.

I was in DC on January 6. I was on the front lawn. I saw nothing like what was reported in the media. When I left, it was out of boredom. The people I’d been talking to—about the weather of all things, and how it compared to temperatures further south and further north—had left. It didn’t seem like anything was happening or was going to happen, so I walked toward my hotel and dinner along the way.

It could be, of course, that the interesting stuff was happening on the other side, or at a different time. That’s what I believed for several months. But such a generous interpretation became less and less likely as more footage leaked out and it turned out that the so-called dangerous insurrectionists were little more than old ladies escorted in by police who wandered the building for a few minutes and then left.

It’s very telling that like the raw footage in The Running Man, the surveillance footage of January 6 remains locked up and unavailable to the public except via carefully edited snippets. We’ve been promised the raw footage a couple of times now, and we still haven’t got it.

This is, hopefully, my final January 6 post. We’ll find out for sure after January 20. But it’s a memory, and a lesson, that I’ll never forget. And judging from the massive distrust of and even irrelevance of the legacy media over 2024, it’s a lesson a lot more of us have learned that just those who were present in DC on January 6.

It includes everyone who saw the media downplay an actual live assassination attempt against a former president and major candidate.

It includes everyone who saw FEMA’s intransigence and even outright hostility toward providing aid after hurricanes Milton and Helene.

It includes everyone who witnessed President Biden’s severe mental issues at the first debate, after having been assured by the media of Biden’s sharp mental acuity. It includes everyone who saw that media’s 180° turnaround both on Biden’s decline and on Kamala Harris’s incompetence. The media lies on behalf of the deep state. It lies constantly, instinctively, changing its lies as if it were part of an Orwellian dystopia. And its lies have never been more obvious than throughout last year’s election.

It is, hopefully, a lesson not easily forgotten.