How can the mainstream media possibly be fair and objective during this Election campaign? Ok, amongst the national print media there are ‘main’ newspapers that have already come out, or have always been out on the ‘side’ of the left or the right, but they, strange as it may seem, are actually in the minority. The real question is how we can expect objective reporting from the journalists and feature writers everywhere else? There are the magazines, the regional and local papers to consider. What about non-political tv programmes and childrens’ tv but with subtle undertones editorially?
They did it with the whole global warming/climate change scam, so it’s obvious that it’ll be in full swing during the run up to the General Election. How can we stop them? How can we know who’s likely to be filing subjective copy?
The increase in online blogging and the need for almost every journalist to flex their ego by blogging about their loves and hates gives us one immediate tell-tale insight into their make-up. They have an opinion on everything via their blogs and more succinctly via social networking like Twitter. With Twitter you get hints from the list of who they follow and who they ‘talk’ to, whilst via their blogs you can read them unloading and using phraseology they might not use in the mainstream media, but nevertheless it’s this that gives them away.
It doesn’t take anybody too long to garner details of the political leanings of each and every journalist in the country. Of course it’s pointless looking at the witterings of those who put themselves up as a ‘leftie’ or a ‘rightie’ or a ‘liberal’ or whatever, because we already know about them; they are the ones who are being honest with us. It’s the more subtle lesser known journos we need to be extremely concerned about, as these are the ones producing most of the words we read or have read to us by tv and radio presenters. These are the ones who pretend they are impartial and objective as they produce words for mainstream media, and yet rant with a slant via social media and blogs.
Anybody can take a look, and anybody can come to the same conclusion. It is a fact that the overwhelming number of journalists and copy writers, editors and suppliers of words we should trust are either Liberal or Labour leaning. They are definitely not Conservative nor are they UKIP or BNP. In fact they are extremely anti anything right of Labour. How do we know? Because they’ve told us so! Their blogs are full of it, their throw-away statements via Twitter and the like say it, and who they connect with tells us more. It reveals everything.
During the times of Election campaigns, a way to protect objectivity might be for a journalist writing a piece relevant to politics, to declare in the by-line what their political allegiance is. Or, maybe there’s a need for a Big Brother style independent website with a look-up table with journalists names, their leanings, and links to the proof and evidence of subjectivity.
This isn’t a perfect solution. Back in the 1970s the National Union of Journalists told its members that anybody writing anything about the National Front that showed them in anything but a very negative light would lose their NUJ membership. In those days no NUJ membership, no job. In the end, journalists would write very subjective accounts of the National Front’s activities and they did it very well in order to build mistrust and propaganda against the organisation. (Whether it was deserved or not isn’t the issue. The issue is that nobody was allowed to write in an unbiased way.)
So, having done it before very successfully, it’s possible that today’s non-‘rightie’ journalists will still be able to slant their articles against the Conservatives, possibly more by what they neglect to say rather than what they remember to say, even if they did nail their own colours to the mast.
For this election campaign, all we can hope for is the exposure of the journalists who lie and twist things. The alternative is that they will be working for anybody but the Conservatives to nudge them into power on May 6th, and that can’t be right, can it?
England's England 