Andy Mac
‘Crisis’; ‘Calamity’; ‘Chaos’; ‘Emergency’. These are among the favourite words now used in discourse by members of our mainstream media. I can’t recall the precise moment when broadcast news transformed from being a purveyor of facts to political activism on behalf of sectional interest groups, but I do remember it began earnestly in the weeks before the Brexit referendum of 2016. There was fevered talk of a collapse in the UK economy, a precipitate rise in unemployment of 500,000 people, a run on the pound and the inability to strike trade deals with countries outside of the European Union. As you might expect, none of these doom-laden predictions came anywhere near close to being realised. However, it is my opinion that COVID represented a turning point in how the media relates to the general public because, for the first time, media pressure was instrumental in formulating the responses of both the government (as they severely curtailed our freedoms) and the public (who acquiesced in the most compliant fashion imaginable to their own physical and emotional captivity).
What has resulted is a dystopian system of governance and public life subordinate to the collective pressure of media corporations, sectional interest groups and opinion pollsters. This situation would be bad enough if the vast majority of those doing the broadcast media activism were politically impartial. But when that vast majority herald from the same Blairite, Labour-inclined, anti-Conservative stable you have a real problem. Their desire is to catastrophise and exaggerate as many current issues as they can, in the hope that a class of politicians who have been schooled in the social media age – sensitive to the idea of always being seen to be making the right calls with an ‘on-message’ image – will bend the knee to their will. Key to their succeed is to drip-feed collective public emotion with a perpetual sense of negativity. Thus, you could not just have a COVID virus with a 99.7% survival rate, and symptoms similar to flu. You had to have lockdowns, social distancing, isolation, new variants, daily statistics on deaths, endless media appearances by those most committed to the policy and, naturally, a media class desperate always to push for more – rather than less – draconian restrictions. What has resulted is economic disruption across the board. Would both the government of Boris Johnson and the disciples of SAGE have gotten away with the measures they imposed on our country sans the full complicity of the media? I highly doubt it. Having kept the pressure on the Conservative government to keep locking down our economy and society, they now use its inevitable consequences as a cudgel to discredit the party and its new prime ministerial incumbent. For example, they lyingly catastrophised the measures in the Chancellor’s recent mini-budget, endlessly pushing the line that it was ‘a budget for the rich’, to the point where Kwasi Kwarteng has now performed a spectacular U-turn. Is that how we want to be governed? By Twitter responses? By the snide and nasty comments of Sky News hacks? By the latest youmakeitup.gov poll? And by the lily-livered responses of Conservative backbenchers? Kwarteng tweeted (what else?) his 40p tax rate reversal today by saying, ‘We get it, and we have listened’. Actually, you DON’T get it! We don’t want you doing U-turns. We don’t want you being ruled by the MSM, vested parties, and aided by Tory MPs who supported Rishi Sunak. We want you to govern. To have the courage to stand by your convictions. To not succumb to panic mode. The likes of BBC News, the ultra-Remainers and the assorted Lefties will hate you regardless. Understand? You can’t U-turn on weakness. Once it’s shown there’s no going back. Can we expect reversals on the Northern Ireland Protocol? Illegal Channel crossings, etc? Is the scent of blood now too strong for the media to change course, and are you lot too weak to resist it?
If the MSM aren’t in panic mode about the economic strategy of the government, they are with regards to climate change. How many of you reading this just wanted to enjoy the few weeks of hot sunshine back in July without being subjected to news reports of water scarcity, dying crops, predictions of Armageddon ahead, or satellite images of the UK turning yellow? There is no consensus from scientists that climate change (which is undoubtedly happening) is related to man-made activity. Nevertheless, the selective propaganda continues. Sadly it’s continued for so long now, we’ve reached the stage where we’ve decommissioned several fossil fuel power stations and made ourselves ever-more dependent on imported energy sources. You want to know why you’re paying exorbitant fees in order to cook your food, wash your body and heat your home? Then get all the answers you want from a powerful ‘green lobby’ that was abetted by media corporations desperate to change living habits using the tool of environmental fearmongering. The media were wrong about lockdowns; they were wrong about the drive to eradicate fossil fuels. That being the case, why are so many still swayed by their messaging and their agendas on numerous other issues? Simple! Because it’s very easy to gain compliance when you use panic and fear in your armoury. Take the autumn of last year, when panic buying of fuel was caused by media reports of a leaked government briefing discussing the shortage of HGV drivers. In reality, the UK did not have a shortage of fuel, though the panic buying combined with supply chain issues caused by the media and the HGV driver shortage led to many petrol stations running out of fuel. Never once did the media spotlight the blame on themselves for creating that situation, just as they didn’t for the fear they instilled in society during the COVID pandemic. Why not? Because that would entail them being open and honest about the use of panic reporting in the first place, thus rendering the tactic redundant in future scenarios.
Our Establishment comfort zone is one of high tax, high spend, high immigration, global corporatism, the deification of an inefficient NHS and Net Zero devotion. The MSM is the window by which those messages are projected; MSM activism is the means by which those projected messages are augmented; and the use of panic, misinformation and fearmongering are the ingredients essential to gain public acquiescence to the given plan. It would be far better for our mental health if we spent far less time looking at the news, far less time on social media, and far less time feeling stressed and fearful as a consequence.
