Saturday 18 February 2012

The End of the Mass Media?

For as long as there have been newspapers we, the people, have been manipulated by the editors and publishers. We have bought what they told us to buy, watched the films and television they told us to watch, eaten the things they told us to eat, or followed the latest fad-diet, again at their behest. Millions of us have over-looked the fact that statistically we all share our ‘star-sign’ with approximately one-twelfth of the population and have managed to find some personal relevance in the inane gibbering of Russell Grant and ‘Awwwwooing’ of Mystic Meg.

“The Sun” famously claimed that they had won the 1992 general election for the Conservatives, against the run of play. The “Evening Standard” made the same claim in 2008 after it handed the London Mayoral election to Boris Johnson. These were no idle boasts, but a chilling, ‘in-your-face’ demonstration of the power of the mass-media to impose their will up to the highest level, via the ballot-box.

For years, the broadsheets sold their wares at a fraction of the going rate on university campuses. An insidious way of getting their hooks into the decision-makers of the future.

This shameless manipulation of the population has not been limited to the print-media, of course. The BBC is effectively a wholly-owned subsidiary of the cultural-marxist elite paid for by an effective poll-tax, but with a bit of surreptitious EU funding thrown in for good measure. Nothing impartial in the Beeb’s news coverage, I’m afraid. And don’t think for a moment that ITN is any more likely to present the facts, without its own spin being vigorously applied. Here’s an interesting link.

Light at the end of the tunnel.

Here’s the good news. We the people and lest we forget, the voters, no longer have to get our news and opinions from agenda-driven proprietors or NUJ propagandists. The booming section of the internet colloquially known as “the blogosphere” has freed us up.
My first port of call each day, nowadays, is my twitter-feed. I follow a few satirical types for light relief, some tweeters of both left and right-wing political persuasions, some UK-based, some foreign sources, some accredited journalists but mostly just the man and woman in the street.
Guess what. The opinions of the ordinary people are no less erudite or relevant than those of the journalists, MPs and broadcasters I follow and having nothing to gain financially by putting their truths out there, almost certainly more honest.
For every @afneil I will give you an @Englandstruth.
The internet has broken the traditional mass-media’s stranglehold on the political process.

Onwards and upwards.
Greg UKR

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