A media complex that prioritises a grazed ear over a massacre deserves to be abandoned

The western corporate media are in no position to wag their fingers at alternative media

The journalist Jonathon Cook describes the job of the western corporate media as to groom us, drawing attention to the different language used about Israeli attacks on hospitals and schools than Russian attacks.

In so far as Israeli attacks even generate headlines now (spinning their atrocities has been replaced by simply ignoring them), Israel is rarely named amid much chatter about ‘“targeted operations” and “strikes”, whereas Russia is always named and their heinous actions roundly condemned.

There is a word for this kind of manipulative ‘journalism’ – propaganda.

For propaganda to succeed it has to disguise itself as something else, it has to purport to be on a mature, diligent, sober and fearless quest for truth and justice. Of course propagandists are on no such mission, they are rewarded with money, status and fame for backing one side only – the winning side.

Propagandists must surmise the winning team and their requirements without being told, career survival depends on internalising the worldviews and requirements of the powerful.

In a world in which most people either serve the news factories or are taken in by them, it can appear that mainstream churnalism represents a safe and reliable place to seek ‘balanced’ opinions free of ‘fringe’ views that can be safely discarded, but this an inversion of the truth.

Truth and morality are not defined by comfort zones nor by the spread of their acceptance. Things are either true or they aren’t and morals must transcend opinion polls. The so called ‘middle ground’ of contemporary ‘responsible’ journalism is in fact an extremist position, for true journalism requires that you often back the losing side, taking positions that will offend the sensibilities and agendas of the powerful.

You don’t get a nice a nice job at The Guardian or the BBC for drawing people’s attention to the truth or for trying to make and win a moral argument, the same applies to the so called ‘centre ground’ of politics which is defined by fealty to the winning teams. Julian Assange’s moral stand was rewarded with prison and Jeremy Corbyn’s with political exile.

With this in mind I always roll my eyes when mainstream media outlets feel the need to wag the finger at social media. A great example of this came yesterday in the wake of the assassination of Donald Trump.

Now whenever The Guardian feels the need to do one of their ‘Analysis’ pieces it is for one of two reasons:

(a) The winning team is in trouble and their narrative needs shoring up

(b) The Guardian is in trouble and needs to shore up its position as the supposed flagship of the left-liberal media.

The Guardian’s analysis pieces are amongst their most banal and nakedly self-serving articles and the U.S. Guardian propagandises much more straightforwardly than the more insidiously manipulative UK branch.

Thus this headline from George Chidi set the tone for a truly laughable payload: “Cool heads needed as political fringe dwellers spread disinformation after Trump shooting”

Now this is a typical and reflexively defensive response from mainstream propagandists like The Guardian. The gathering ‘encroachment’ of the blogosphere and social media threatens the control of media behemoths and the people they serve. The aim here is to simultaneously discredit ALL alternative voices and to buff The Guardian as the arbiter of ‘cool heads’, with theirs being seen as the coolest of all.

So ‘responsible’ journalists occupy this mythical non-partisan middle ground and heroically respond with ‘facts’ to counter the ‘lies’ that people not on the payroll of a major news portal might spread. As we have seen a gazillion times with the western media coverage of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza, ‘facts’ can be changed, arranged in an order more helpful to Israel or routinely ignored when they don’t suit the agenda of the powerful Israeli lobby.

Well that certainly leaves us in no doubt as to who we ought to believe. While its perfectly true that Trump’s base of supporters have leapt on this incident to add credence to the lurid claims that they routinely make on social media, they are not the real target here.

Trumps MAGA crew would never dream of reading The Guardian anyway and the ‘spiral of shit’ was ‘self-sustaining’ before the shooting. When perusing the corporate media we must ask ourselves four questions:

1. Who is the target audience for this article?
2. What are the messages it wants to convey?
3. Whose agendas does it serve?
4. How is the payload disguised?

In this instance the target audience are:

(a) Middle class American liberals who traditionally vote for the Democrats.

(b) Potentially disenchanted readers of traditional media who (because of the mainstream coverage of the Ukraine, Gaza and the Trump shooting) are starting to believe that they are being misled by the corporate media.

The messages it wants us to convey are that:

(a) We should ignore all speculation about how Donald Trump nearly came to be assassinated, speculation that will direct legitimate suspicion towards the Biden cabal. this echoing point for point Biden’s own press conference.

(b) Guardian hacks are the professional heroic thin blue line against a mob of lunatics.

(c) Ordinary people should defer to the ‘middle ground’ as defined by The Guardian.

The agendas it serves are:

(a) The power bloc of the Democratic party, their allied lobbyists and media partners, and the Biden cabal (the teams that The Guardian are allied with)

(b) The self-promotion of traditional media in general and The Guardian in particular in their bid to avoid being discredited and discarded in favour of alternative media.

The payload is disguised by:

(a) Playing off the most loopy conspiracy theorists on the internet against people who might merely retain an open mind as to who tried to assassinate a key political actor at a crunch moment. To ask these questions is to be smeared as ‘shit’ by association.

(b) By talking about ‘journalists’ in the third person they can disguise the inferred message that the real heroes work at The Guardian.

(c) Hiding behind an ‘expert’ that handily backs up the served agendas.

Now The Guardian would have you believe that they are not ‘Accelerationists’ but let me show you just a couple of examples that throw this into doubt.

Here we have veteran Guardian columnist Simon Tisdall fanning the flames of the Ukraine / Russia war like the good ole accelerationist that he is.

…and how are we to defeat the nuclear superpower of Russia? By embracing lots of lovely accelerationist risk of course! He lambasts “risk-averse Nato leaders” for sticking “stubbornly to a route map to defeat”.

He describes Joe Biden as “ultra-cautious”. This view is not shared by many commentators who regard his foreign policy as reckless and dangerous already, but not dangerous enough for Tisdall as he asks “what use is an alliance that is afraid of a fight?”

How disagreeably cautious. Not firing missiles deep inside a nation that retains the worlds largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, does Biden have no sense of fun? Simon has other plans though:

Great, a direct war then between global military superpowers because Russia would surely attack the western bases of aircraft trying to enforce such a zone. Simon lambasts Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz for being “Overly fearful of nuclear escalation…”

On this matter I must report that I too am fearful of nuclear escalation, but not The Guardian, they are happy to platform this lunatic on a regular basis.

If you want some more accelerationist content then look at the latest outing from George Monbiot also in the Guardian (we discuss it here) in which he argues that if the right U.S. president doesn’t press on with the bloodbath in Ukraine then Europe must plunge into the war in their stead, with every European nation rearming itself in preparation for war with Russia.

While Trump supporters are accused of an accelerationist agenda that may lay waste to the U.S, veteran ‘middle ground’ commentators at The Guardian argue for much less caution and many more weapons for a war that may yet incinerate the entire world! This deranged tub thumping representing the long standing policy of The Guardian towards all of the West’s wars.

The western corporate media are extremists of a certain kind, they propagandise not out of principle or logic, but because there is a certain kind of fame and lifestyle to be had from allying with the PR needs of power. No lie or atrocity is beneath their willingness to spin and cover up.

Client journalism is a hollow amplifier of propaganda for the most psychopathic and greedy people on the planet and its exponents are in no position to wag the finger at anyone for spreading disinformation / lies. This is the festering wound of having propagandists running all the big ‘news’ portals, we lose our capacity for real journalism to confront liars.

On a day when The Guardian devoted bombastic round the clock coverage to the grazed ear of one toxic narcissist, while largely ignoring an Israeli massacre in Gaza which saw over 90 innocent civilians murdered and 300 injured…are we allowed to ask who the real extremists are? Better not ask, that would make me a “partisan”.

I was thinking of a phrase to sum the whole circus at The Guardian / BBC / Sky News etc. How about… “a self-sustaining spiral of shit”?