Excellent UK-based media analysis
Eliot Jacobson is a retired professor of mathematics and computer science who regularly appears on our Twitter feed discussing the climate crisis. He sends tweets under the grim title, ‘Your “moment of doom” for the day’. These channel the latest news on rapidly rising carbon emissions and temperatures, catastrophic examples of extreme weather, and so on. It’s depressing fare, and Jacobson is candid about the level of anguish he feels:
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Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky making a speech in Westminster Hall on 8 February, 2023On 21 February 2023, climate scientist Professor Bill McGuire issued a stark warning:
‘Remember this date. First rationing of food in UK due to extreme weather. Things will only get worse as climate breakdown bites ever harder.’
The 20th anniversary of the illegal, unprovoked US-UK war of aggression on Iraq comes at an awkward time for a UK press currently suppressing the truth of the illegal, provoked Russian invasion of Ukraine. It’s particularly awkward for our fearless watchdogs to recall the great anti-war march of 15 February 2003 when, in 2023, they are busy stifling dissent protesting America’s horrific proxy war in Ukraine.
People in power get nervous when the population’s trust in national institutions plummets. It has often been a precursor of significant social unrest, even revolutions.
If we were to choose a hill to die on, it would probably not be in defence of a British prince.
In truth, we don’t need to like or support – and may even abhor – the targets of media bias highlighted in our analyses. Our goal is simply to provide examples that most clearly expose the propaganda function of ‘mainstream’ media. Inevitably, that involves our focusing on thorns in the Establishment’s side.
Julian Assange once observed that, ‘Nearly every war has been the result of media lies.’For daring to publish evidence of US war crimes, Assange now sits in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London, at risk of being extradited to the US within the next few weeks. The prospects for a fair trial range from miniscule to zero.
On November 15, as 90 Russian cruise missiles struck at Ukraine’s energy network, a companion US-UK propaganda blitz blamed the Russian missiles for the deaths of two workers on a farm in Poland.
Last month, the United Nations environment agency issued arguably its starkest warning yet about the climate crisis. The failure by governments around the world to cut carbon emissions means there is ‘no credible pathway to 1.5C in place’. Limiting the rise of global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels was the international agreement at COP21, the UN Climate Summit in Paris in 2015.
In Part 1, we described how state-corporate media non-reporting of evidence relating to the sabotage of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines on September 26 was an example of how the truth on key issues is increasingly being quarantined from public awareness by ‘mainstream’ media.
Last week, Alex Nunns, author of ‘The Candidate – Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path To Power’ and former Corbyn speechwriter, described the current assault on democracy within the Labour Party:
‘What’s happening in the Labour Party is new. The Labour right, having had the shock of their lives in 2015, are now intent on eradicating the left entirely. This isn’t how their predecessors thought. It’s a new departure in Labour history that’ll have long term consequences.’
So why the change?
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The damaging revelations about the Labour Party in the recent four-part Al Jazeera series, ‘The Labour Files’, and the almost totalitarian silence in response by British news media, should ram home the illusory nature of ‘democracy’ in the UK.
Last February, Emily Maitlis left her role as presenter of the BBC’s Newsnight programme to join rival media group Global. In a recent speech, Maitlis made a surprising reference to Theresa May’s former communications director Sir Robbie Gibb:
‘Put this in the context of the BBC board, where another active agent of the Conservative Party – former Downing Street spin doctor and former adviser to BBC rival GB News – now sits, acting as the arbiter of BBC impartiality.’
If every single high-profile journalist, politician and priest is currently expressing heartfelt devotion to Britain’s deceased, 96-year-old monarch, it is not because she ‘served’ her country diligently in doing her ‘duty’ for 70 years. The powerful interests that determine Britain’s political and media agenda are not sentimentalists; they do not impose ‘managed democracy’ as a kind of game. Propaganda blitzes are always pragmatic.
Rousseau wrote:
‘We have physicists, geometricians, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians and painters in plenty; but no longer have a citizen among us.’
Increasingly, now, we do have citizens among us: scientists – particularly, climate scientists – who are awakening from their ‘mainstream’ slumber to the reality that they are citizens of a decaying society on a dying planet.
In 1990, Tom Cruise, star of the 1986 blockbuster, ‘Top Gun’, said:‘Some people felt that “Top Gun” was a right-wing film to promote the Navy. And a lot of kids loved it. But I want the kids to know that’s not the way war is – that “Top Gun” was just an amusement park ride, a fun film with a PG-13 rating that was not supposed to be reality. That’s why I didn’t go on and make “Top Gun II” and “III” and “IV” and “V.” That would have been irresponsible.’
It would indeed, and one can only admire Cruise’s honesty and selfless determination… in 1990… not to mislead young people.
Why, then, 32 years later, would Cruise decide to appear in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’? The Daily Mail provides a clue:
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In the terrifying opening to his 2020 novel, ‘The Ministry for the Future’, Kim Stanley Robinson depicts an intense heatwave in India. In an ‘ordinary town’ in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, people are struggling to cope with unbearable heat and humidity. It is the combination of the two, measured by the so-called ‘wet-bulb temperature’, that is potentially fatal. When it approaches the core body temperature of 36C, sweat cannot evaporate and humans can no longer cool themselves down. Dehydration rises to dangerous levels. Vital organs become seriously stressed, especially the heart. Unless the body temperature is reduced, death follows in a matter of hours.
Humanity’s great Achilles’ heel, the flaw that may well determine our fate, was summed up in a couple of lines in the classic Simon & Garfunkel song, ‘The Boxer’:
‘Still a man hears what he wants to hear
‘And disregards the rest.’
There has been much gnashing of ‘liberal’ teeth and pulling out of ‘centrist’ hair following the Tory government’s announcement that the BBC licence fee will be abolished in 2027.
One of the most damning assessments of COP26, the UN climate conference being held in Glasgow, came from Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist:
‘#COP26 has been named the must excluding COP ever.
This is no longer a climate conference.
This is a Global North greenwash festival.
A two week celebration of business as usual and blah blah blah.’
In their classic book on the news media, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky presented a ‘propaganda model’ of how the major broadcasters and newspapers operate. Whereas the ‘mainstream’ media declare that their aim is to educate, inform and entertain the public, their actual societal purpose ‘on matters that are of significance for established power’ is to avert any ‘danger’ that the public can ‘assert meaningful control over the political process’ (Herman and Chomsky, ‘Manufacturing Consent’, Vintage, 1988/1994, p. 303).
The New Dark Age 