Well, that was an interesting week in politics. I’m disgusted but not surprised by the media storm that deleted all other tasks to wage war on One Nation.
Are we meant to believe that a dozen articles a day, across every major publication, ‘revealing’ old interviews as if they were breaking news scoops, amounts to news?
It did not. This was something else.
Either the entire body mass of news media developed a coincidental obsession with One Nation, or they were pointed in that direction. Maybe this is the influence of click-bait algorithms. Maybe they personally enjoy having a crack at the Orange wall. Maybe they got a fright when a One Nation government stopped being the punch line of a joke and started to look more like Nigel Farage petting Larry the Cat outside No. 10.
We will never know.
I will say that the repetition of outright lies, misleading cuts, out-of-context quotes, and fragments of hour-long discussions is many things, but it is not journalism and these individuals, who never asked a single follow-up question before copy-pasting their colleagues’ disinformation, say a lot about why media empires need to be cut off from government favour and left to fight for survival in the scary wilderness of merit.
To this I would like to proudly say that despite being the oldest continuous media outlet in the English-speaking world, The Spectator is neither ‘Establishment’ nor an obedient drone of failing ministers. My dear Editor has never been able to instruct me to write anything. What you read in these pages is opinion. Honest opinion. Opinion held, and not bought. And we thank you for supporting us, as we are given, in the words of Jeremy Clarkson, diddly squat from the government.
It has long been observed that the power of mainstream media is waning. This is more than a rumour. MSM has been leaning on its friends in government to construct legislation designed to protect it from … shock horror … free market competition.
Some of this legislation has already been put into law. There is more coming. Handouts and protection for a system that has lost its objectivity and, we dare say, its purpose.
Instead of being experts in their field, these media empires that have controlled our information, political opinion, and cultural construct for the best part of a hundred years crumbled the moment social media offered an alternative.
The reasons for this are complex, but they were distilled in the Covid era where what was left of their reputation found itself butchered.
Remember when media organisations repeated, with a straight face, absurd claims about vaccines, transmissibility, contact tracing, and economic impacts they knew to be wrong at the time? When they, for the sake of drama, talked up a handful of deaths as if it was the End Times and failed to provide reasonable context, such as ordinary flu deaths?
That was cultivating hysteria.
Remember when they continued to repeat misinformation, such as ‘being vaccinated prevents infection’, long after it was outed on social media as a fabrication? Do you remember how nothing was said about the government of the day shredding long-held privacy laws, workplace laws, medical autonomy and then looked the other way as the government issued takedown notices to Twitter and Facebook to remove factual information and true stories of vaccine injuries? Remember dehumanising rhetoric from high-profile hosts and two-tiered coverage between the Freedom protests and BLM?
Tell me if this behaviour sounds anything like a ‘free press’?
I remember being locked out of studios and friends who received quiet black-listings by the same organisations who are on screen, today, pretending they were always sceptical of the Covid narrative and they always knew Covid leaked out of a lab in Wuhan. Please. You can still Google the headlines labelling this a far-right racist conspiracy theory.
Public trust declined even further when it was revealed the media at large accepted hundreds of millions in marketing and promotional money from the government during this period. Are we still allowed to ask if it is challenging to remain objective about controversial government policy when you’ve got one hand in their pocket?
I am using Covid as the example, because it represents a clean breaking point. It is the straw on the overburdened camel of truth.
The same media that is outraged about ‘conspiracy theories’ bought into the biggest lie of all … Climate Change. They continue to peddle lie after lie about climate history, human activity, computer modelling, and renewable technology which is, let’s face it, a load of crock wasting public money at the expense of our energy grid and sovereignty. Never have these organisations turned their superior smugness back onto their own falsehoods. Organisations that can look you dead in the eye and tell you men can be women if they want. Misinformation? Conspiracy? As Barnaby might shout, ‘Sittdddown!’
By no means is Covid the whole story of the demise of MSM. It has been existing in a shrinking talent pool of insufferable mediocrity for decades, having grown fat and lazy on a cornered advertising market and captured audience ready to burst at the end of the millennium.
It says a lot about the top-rated talent of network hosts that they can be out-competed on viewership by Gen Z filming political commentary videos in their bedroom.
In some way, the demise MSM is the fault of the globalists who now panic at its passing.
(And a side note to media trying to falsely brand globalism as some sort of nonsense Jewish banking conspiracy – globalism is a rebranding of last century’s failed International Socialism. As a losing ideology in the world war, it has been rebranding itself as world peace instead of open-border global governance. Marxism did the same thing, hiding under the rainbow wool of a confused Woke lamb shouting something about rivers and seas.)
My point is that a world of open borders and international citizens will never agree to having their information curated by a clutch of aging media empires when the world can be scrolled through on their phone.
The problem with social media has never been an influx of misinformation. Misinformation is a hallmark, often a feature, of legacy news. The problem is having dissenting information that contradicts, in particular, government truth.
Remember, ‘We will be your sole source of truth…’?
The New Zealand Prime Minister may have said the quiet part out loud, but that is the general vibe of Western Parliaments.
And while Australian states are in the process of undermining Parliament with parallel racial chambers that have more in common with performance art than governance, most politicians are insistent that social media be reined in.
When they’re trying to hide their economic mismanagement with mass migration, they don’t want the peasants complaining about rising crime and homelessness. They do not like follow-up questions about Islam after terror attacks performed under the banner of a radical sect. And criticism of the Climate Change narrative and general lack of weather-based apocalypse has thrown into question trillions of dollars in wealth redistribution currently underway.
And you know what they really don’t like?
That troublesome Populist party they tried to get rid of in the 90s being in possession of the largest social media footprint in politics. Who needs to queue up for an MSM interview to spruik a policy when you can release it live to over a million people across multiple platforms? One Nation operates outside the media empire, reaching people in their homes and workplaces while their conservative competition look awkward and stilted making social media content for platforms they spent years calling ‘the sewer’ and penning legislation to regulate. Now, they need them.
The world’s first on-paper trillionaire, and one might say the greatest entrepreneur in history, suffered through the tired questions put to him by the Economist. Elon is one of the few who sees both sides of this equation in unredacted detail. He is also the man who spent $44 billion to save free speech.
Let us finish with his lesson on rising Populism and the social media conversation.
Host: ‘You support not just the Populist right, but the far right, in fact, very fringe parties in some countries.’
Elon: ‘No, I support the normal people. What you call the far right, falsely.’
And that is the real legacy of legacy media – the re-writing of ordinary values, traditions, politics, and philosophy as dangerous fringe far-right conspiracy simply because it runs in conflict to the aggressively reforming politics of unhinged radical governments.
Alexandra Marshall is an independent writer. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
