Do you have sympathy towards or even support Jeremy Corbyn? Perhaps you recognise and feel angry about the relentless campaign in the corporate media to discredit his leadership of the Labour Party?
Do you recognise and feel angry about terrorism and war crimes conducted by the state of Israel against the civilian population of Gaza?
Do you feel that a news organisation like the BBC, funded by the public and trusted to be impartial – should avoid obvious bias in favour of right wing politics and corporate power?
If you feel any of these things then The Guardian has a message for you – you’re morally wrong, you need to shut up, be smeared, labelled and reminded over and over that your place in life is to listen to what The Guardian tells you to think.
You might wonder how The Guardian does this – its quite simple – they have a three stage plan.
Stage One: Take a small real-life happening, remove its context and blow it up into a full blown news event with live blogs, flashing red headlines and recycled reportage from other sections of the corporate media.
Stage Two: Quickly call in paid “opinionators” or public figures (with vested interests) to shriek moral outrage about the manufactured news event – the hysterical nature of the outrage is designed to leave no doubt that the targets of this outrage are bad, dodgy evil people.
Stage Three: Write solemn pompous editorials reflecting on the manufactured news event and the manufactured moral outrage about the manufactured news event.
Within a few days The Guardian has delivered two text-book examples of their propaganda strategy at work – both aimed at Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.
First we had Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party smeared as anti-Semitic – an extraordinary accusation, all the more breathtaking because it was based on almost nothing.
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Stage one – make stuff up.
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An ill judged remark from Ken Livingstone and a couple of Facebook posts from Labour MP Naz Shah were seized on by The Guardian as evidence of widespread anti-Semitism within the Labour movement.
That really is all the evidence The Guardian needed to create hype sickeningly indicative of their true intentions.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/28/antisemitism-row-divided-labour-party
Antisemitism and Labour: three days that shook the part. Apologies, more revelations, Commons questions and two suspensions – how the row unfolded
Three journalists scratched together every possible source of hype about Labour’s alleged anti-Semitism.
They quoted Daily Mail headlines, tweets from Guido Fawkes blog and “several” (Blairite) MP’s as evidence of how Labour had been “plunged” into a “damaging row”.
The response from Labour was to suspend Livingstone and Shah making it clear that anti-Semitism had no place in the party – something that the over 400,000 Labour members needed no reminding of and were in no row about at all.
Still, The Guardian had all it needed to create a lot of fluff about Labour’s “huge” problem with anti-semitism.
Here is the Guardian fearlessly covering this non-story:
Here, Here, Here. Here, Here, Here and of course we had a whole front page section of the website dedicated to “Labour Anti-Semitism” alongside minute-by-minute updates on Live blogs for days on end. All this based on one remark and two Facebook posts.
Eagle eyed readers might also have noticed Tory Zac Goldsmith playing the race card in the election for Mayor of London. He used pictures of the 7/7 London Bombings to imply that Sadiq Kahn (a Muslim) was a terrorist threat to the safety of the city – naked and disgusting dog-whistle racism.
Oddly this didn’t lead to the Guardian reporting on a “crisis”, a “row” or anything that might have “engulfed” the conservative party in controversy about Islamaphobia.
Boris Johnson is now comparing the European Union to Hitler – a remark which has oddly not led to a flurry of articles investigating the moral tone of the Conservative party.
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Stage two – Moral outrage
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Faux news needs lots of faux outrage to appear real. We soon got lots of that.
“shocked and horrified”
Party members assumed they were the good guys, incapable of prejudice. But now Ken Livingstone and Naz Shah have laid bare the left’s capacity for racism
I saw the darkness of antisemitism, but I never thought it would get this dark. The party faces a huge problem that must be surmounted, if only for moral reasons
It’s time the left faced up to anti-Semitism. You could have powered the National Grid with the amount of energy the left was expending on telling Britain’s Jews they were wrong to feel grossed out by all this
Labour and the left have an antisemitism problem. Under Jeremy Corbyn the party has attracted many activists with views hostile to Jews. Its leaders must see why this matters
British Jewish leader: Corbyn must stop fobbing off antisemitism in Labour
Chief rabbi: Labour has severe problem with antisemitism. Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis says crisis engulfing Labour has ‘lifted the lid’ on bigotry and calls for decisive action by party
Corbyn may not be antisemitic. But is he a real leader? Instead of crying smear tactics Labour must ruthlessly confront claims of anti-Jewish prejudice – as Iain Duncan Smith did when Tory leader
Corbyn’s Labour must be more decisive on antisemitism. Until the party stops dragging its feet when accusations crop up it will be seen as no friend to Jews or to the state of Israel
All this and much much more. So many Guardian resources tied up with commenting and reporting on Labour’s terrible problem with anti-Semitism. Oddly none at all lamenting Tory inaction on islamaphobia.
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Stage Three – Pompous editorials
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The sheer volume of articles insisting that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party has huge problems is designed to brow beat you – they don’t commission and publish all these column inches for nothing.
Once The Guardian has decided that something exists – their next step is to lecture you about it.
This one is par for the course. Corbyn is smeared as cack handed and sluggish in his response to charges of anti-Semitism (it took only 24 hours for Naz Shah to be suspended, – by contrast tory Zac Goldmsith has faced no disciplinary action whatsoever for his racist gambits)
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Why they do it
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(a) You are to desist from choosing your own political leadership – The Guardian doesn’t like Jeremy Corbyn – so they must show you the error of your ways.
(b) You are never to question corporate power and its right to tell you what to think – if you do The Guardian will come after you. You’ll be branded an extremist, sexist, anti-Semitic, misogynist or any other muck they can throw at you.
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Another example
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Take Laura Kuenssberg – nakedly biased against Jeremy Corbyn and uncomfortably paid for by the public and working for a supposedly impartial BBC as a political editor.
Her bias is so cringeworthy and obvious that some of the people who pay her salary got up a petition to get her sacked – since she is clearly not fit for purpose, 30,000+ in fact.
Craig Murray documented how The Guardian invented a story about the petition being sexist and misogynist based on no evidence offered much less produced.
38 Degrees removed the petition and Craig Murray asked them for evidence that supported its removal – they point blank refused to produce any . Undeterred Craig went looking for the evidence and was able to prove that the story ran by The Guardian was a fabrication .
The Guardian untroubled by the truth, published a flurry of morally outraged articles HERE, HERE, HERE, based on the lie that Laura Kuenssberg was attracting sexist abuse from Corbyn’s supporters.
and the pompous editorial reflecting on the news that The Guardian made up dutifully followed….
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In Summary
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The Guardian makes up news events to smear figures on the progressive left – then they invoke morality so they can browbeat and demoralise anti-neoliberal political sentiment.
If their naked propaganda didn’t have the resources of a multi-million pound digital news portal, it would seen for what it is – political pamphleteering for corporate power.
It is very important that The Guardian has its progressive camouflage removed once and for all – they really are no different these days from The Daily Mail and the rest of the right-wing UK press.
I implore all right thinking people to ignore The Guardian – its a lost cause now and an enemy of progressive politics everywhere.
Nobody is going to unseat the neoliberal establishment except us – the people, we must hold our heads up high and keep fighting in spite of the propaganda flung in our faces every day.
Only read The Guardian in order to confront its lies and bullshit and then tell it to get stuffed.
”Only read The Guardian in order to confront its lies and bullshit and then tell it to get stuffed.” I do, and have done for a long time – know your enemy, particularly when they are a right-wing wolf, in an oh so politically correct, liberal clothing.
Brilliant piece , well said and I totally agree , now an ex graun reader of some 30 yrs , completely disgusted by the trash it has now become.
Shame on you Graun and your new American Editor tho the truth of your ownership and their vested interested is now laid bear .
What to do about it , any cleaver hackers out there want to take their site down please !!!
Keep up the great work S.H , now I read only other non mainstream sources and The Morning Star . Join the labour party and fight the Corporate rot within it The Progress group and it’s Labour MP members need to be removed . Its the only way ordinary folks are going to get a say in the future of this country. Remember 99% not the 1% are the people that matter.
I have read the Guardian since the 1980s, when I was a student. I have stopped buying it, but continued to read it online, and frequently commented on articles.
The Laura Kuenssberg fiasco was the last straw for me. I have stopped reading it altogether, and I am sure my blood pressure is better for it.