The incompetence of our politicians and the disasters they have created would not have been seen as the successes that they have, without the media having had the role it has and having been there to tell us, and then keep telling us all, that it is so.
So little of the news that we see and hear on so-called mainstream channels and stations is actually news, and the situation has become so bad that the term ‘news’ should be replaced by propaganda or ‘accepted narrative’ as the recognisable and accurate terms for what our most prominent and well known current-affairs mediums actually do.
Whether it is the agendas of the corporate owners or the political masters of the channels and platforms that set these directional agendas for all of us, or just the personal motives and myopic experience of life that drives then journalists and presenters themselves, we must all understand and accept that opinion and news have long since become a wholly interchangeable term.
The irony is that opinion is perhaps as much as 90% – if not more of the content of mainstream news and current affairs programming. Because it is, in reality, a legitimised or sanitised flow of fake news, that from independent or alternative sources would either immediately be called out, or would be required to make clear what it is.
We are in dangerous times indeed, when we are automatically expected to trust information and even action based on the so-called validity of the source, rather than what it is they say, or what it is they actually do…
This Blog was originally published as a part of the book ‘Levelling Level’, which was published in April 2022 and as a series of web pages and blogs soon afterwards. It has been edited and updated by The Author.
Adam Tugwell 