Britain’s real enemy is the corporate media – not our judges

Every day I look at the mainstream media and I see a war in progress. This war has two combatants and one battle. A daily shelling is conducted by vested corporate interests against anyone who tries to speak the truth. As far as I can see, the truth tellers are losing badly, struggling to be heard above the roar of a public relations bombardment unprecedented in human history.

In a world in which big money pervades so perniciously and thoroughly, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Obscuring truths inconvenient to corporate power while extending the reach and influence of big money has become the modus operandi of news factory hacks around the world and they are most expert in doing their job.

Veteran journalist John Pilger quoted Edward Bernays who dubbed public relations as “the invisible government” and reflected that:

Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and film-maker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged. 

We live in a global society which is falling apart, but you would never know it by reading the mainstream media. They churn out the same relentless irrelevant grind 24/7 on and on…

A climate crisis is already upon us – way ahead of schedule and greeted with a wall of silence from the news factories of the world. That the climate crisis of today shows every sign of accelerating swiftly to be the climate catastrophe of tomorrow should occupy every newspaper headline and news bulletin across the globe – but it doesn’t, because the owners of our media don’t want that.

The job of the corporate media is to perform an Orwellian smothering of the truth – their slogan as George Monbiot laments could be picked out in neon letters above the newsrooms of the modern era thus:

“What is salient is not important. What is important is not salient.”

This bias against relevance is much more serious even than the distortions and lies used to undermine dissent and political challenges to the status quo.

This is not just dishonestly taking sides one against the other – nor merely facilitating the orderly transfer of wealth and power to the 1% and their cronies. It is in fact a descent into collective insanity, where we have lost our ability as a species to alert ourselves to danger and respond to life threatening crises.

The world stands on the brink of global conflict – one that could very easily involve nuclear weapons. The mainstream media is an active participant in stoking the flames  – peddling a fictitious narrative in which the proxy war being fought by the U.S. and Russia in Syria is about saving civilians from atrocities . The war in Syria is in fact a reckless and aggressive expansion of U.S. imperialism in the middle east, another in a series of violent “interventions” which have brought death and misery to millions.

The risk of triggering a global conflict that could escalate into nuclear war is not enough to prompt any truth telling amongst the corporate press. All the portals of the so called “liberal media” dutifully bang the drums of war regardless of the potential consequences. Such a profound disconnect between truth and fiction, action and consequence is amoral and terribly dangerous.

It’s an open secret how we came to this disastrous state of affairs. Journalist Nick Davies author of the book Flat Earth News pithily sums it up thus:

I think the most common reason for our failure to tell the truth is simply that we don’t know what the truth is. And Flat Earth News suggests that now, more than ever in the past, we are likely to engage in the mass production of ignorance because the corporations and the accountants who have taken us over have stripped out our staffing, increased our output and ended up chaining us to our desks so that generally we are simply no longer able to go out and make contacts or find stories or even check facts.

Where once we were active gatherers of news, we have become passive processors of second-hand material generated by the booming PR industry and a handful of wire agencies, most of which flows into our stories without being properly checked. The relentless impact of commercialisation has seen our journalism reduced to mere churnalism.

The newsrooms of the global media have been asset stripped to conform to the diktats of oligarch owners and their neoliberal ideology. The news debased, a cheap and nasty product, mass produced and sold en masse to gullible consumers.

Nothing that seriously conflicts with the interests of the owning class is ever reported. A few dissenting opinionators are thrown in to afford the illusion of “balance” but the “news” relentlessly conforms to a wafer thin range of permissible world views.

Whenever the establishment feels threatened, the media bias is nakedly transparent. Take two examples: the financial crash of 2007/8 and the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader.

A major study from Cardiff University in 2013 of the BBC’s news ‘coverage’ of the financial crash concluded that:

BBC coverage was almost completely dominated by stockbrokers, investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other City voices. Civil society voices or commentators who questioned the benefits of having such a large finance sector were almost completely absent from coverage.

Perhaps this explains why a majority of the British public were led to the belief that vulnerable benefits claimants were responsible for the crash and that bankers should escape scrutiny, with bailouts meekly provided and bonuses intact. The BBC didn’t report the news – it created and peddled a pack of lies to protect the powerful and wealthy.

A study conducted by the Media Reform Coalition in conjunction with Birbeck, University of London found that the media have been massively biased against Jeremy Corbyn as his parliamentary colleagues conspired to drive him from office. As Justin Schlosberg reports:

Both the Guardian and the BBC have largely pursued an agenda in which ‘the story’ in relation to Corbyn is relentlessly focused on his alleged leadership failings, cued by his critics across Westminster, rather than the real alternatives to austerity that Labour now offers and which polls suggest are overwhelmingly popular among the British public. The Guardian online devoted more than twice the amount of its reporting on the post-referendum leadership crisis to issues pushed by Jeremy Corbyn’s critics compared to those highlighted by his supporters, and gave more than three times the column inches to commentators calling for him to resign compared to those arguing for him to stay. The BBC’s main evening TV bulletins — which attract several times the audience of any of its other news programmes — were considerably more imbalanced.

What is striking is the disconnect the media creates between reality and truth. If one could remove the fog of lies whipped up by corporate hacks, the majority of the public would support Corbyn’s policy platforms. Corbyn’s politics are not ‘hard left’ at all but solid, even dull,  social democracy of a kind that has formed the true centre ground of British opinion for many decades: a manufactured perception has triumphed over reality.

One is reminded of the 1976 film ‘Network’ – about the empty lies of television. Howard Beale nailed the corporate media forty years ago, every word as relevant now as it was then – just substitute the words “television” and “tube” for “the mainstream media”.

This morning Britain’s foreign owned oligarch inspired media have been on the attack. Three British judges have confirmed that the UK government must seek parliamentary approval for Brexit; as punishment their pictures are in newsagents up and down the land captioned as ‘Enemies Of The People’

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