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Politics cannot change until our media does – The vicious circle of the media and public opinion

“Most of what passes as political journalism would fit better in a gossip column” – George Monbiot 

No matter how broken and dilapidated it gets, we will never be able to change our political system while we have media that is controlled in the interests of the ruling class, and operated against the real working class people of this country.

The UK has one of the most biased media in Europe, with six billionaires owning or having a majority of voting shares in most of the national newspapers. It is no wonder that their papers mostly supported the Tories in the last general election. The Tories reduced the top tax rate, and want to reduce it further, giving massive tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires. How can we hope for genuinely progressive agendas (such as reducing wealth, income and power inequality) when the system is so heavily vested in a tiny percent of media oligarchs such as Rupert Murdoch and The Rothermere Family, and ran directly in contrast to the interests working class people?

This level of media control is only ever normally exceeded by the likes of Nazi Germany, The Soviet Union and North Korea, or in political fiction; exemplified by the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. To see this in practice, look no further than the British Broadcasting Corporation, the main media organisation in the UK, originally designed to act as the counterweight to commercial media. In the last election, they took it upon themselves to defend the shambolic Tory party election campaign, stooping to misreporting facts and straight-up defending the government choices about not attending various leaders’ debates. This was not their job. Their job is to report facts to inform the viewer in an unbiased manner, serving the public democratically. False neutrality is worse than being biased in one way or another, as it is hard to detect. False neutrality is propaganda.

The 2019 General Election highlighted a media system that is not fit for purpose. There was nothing ‘fair’ about it, ‘fair’ being one of the intrinsic principles we base our elections on. Money sets the agenda. The state of ‘business-as-usual’ is enforced, because it works not for the more than half of Brits living pay check to pay check (i.e. the normalisation of economic insecurity), but for shareholders, CEOs and corporate entities that are based overseas (for shameless tax avoidance purposes) and profit vastly from poverty, misery, disasters, disease and speculation. These unelected powers are in the pockets of the media and can spin the message of the media however they like, for the right price, bankrolling our democracy. This is the systematic media hell we live inside of. No one should ever be this powerful. No one should ever be this unaccountable.

 

What can you do about this?

Educate yourself and others. Learn about our media. Teach others who do not know.

Evaluate your sources. Teach yourself and others to practice critical thinking skills. Who funds them? Where did they get their information? What are their agendas?

Support media reform and alternative media organisations. Media pluralism and ethical journalism are essential. See below.

 

Further reading:

https://www.mediareform.org.uk/who-owns-the-uk-media

https://www.mediareform.org.uk/resources/media-ownership-reports

https://www.doubledown.news/we-are/


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