- Re: XR Rebel Daily #5 Archived Message
- XR Rebel Daily #5 - Ian M September 7, 2020, 12:48 pm
Posted by Ian M
on September 7, 2020, 12:56 pm, in reply to "XR Rebel Daily #5"
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Media critique is struggling to go beyond 'billionaire owners bad' but they provide some alt media links at the end and close again with the Ed Jones article that offers a manufacturing consent-type critique of UK media incl many of the examples we're familiar of here and namechecking ML, Chomsky, N.Ahmed and others: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/five-reasons-why-we-don-t-have-free-and-independent-press-in-uk-and-what-we-can-do-about/ Have posted encouraging messages to the newsletter team, requesting a 'deeper debate' that includes the supposedly leftwing media orgs and their role in managing public discourse and 'not merely of the 'billionaire-owned press', which implicitly lets them off the hook and runs the risk of making it a culture-divide issue ("metropolitan liberal elites want to take away our red tops")'. Somebody posted the recent Craig Murray article approvingly, which might be a good sign https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/09/media-freedom-show-me-the-msm-journalist-opposing-the-torture-of-assange/ We'll see... I ***** UK Gov or XR: Who’s the bigger danger to democracy? 6/7TH SEPT | London The bamboo towers swayed in the dark of night, the empty delivery trucks switched off their engines and settled in – no papers coming out tonight. As the sun rose on our newspaper blockade, the bamboo towers held as strong as the rebels’ resolve. According to Boris and Priti, XR committed the anti-democratic act of preventing the British public’s access to the free press. But in a pantomime of irony, the Council of Europe just issued a formal warning (a ‘Level 2 media freedom alert’, no less) to the UK government for blacklisting investigative journalists that it didn’t like. This came just hours before Boris saddled up his high horse to very seriously lecture us on our ‘completely unacceptable’ attack on democracy. He’s not calling us ‘uncooperative crusties’, anymore, is he? Credit: the New York Times, purveyors of news and nightmares. Here are some things that we consider unacceptable: six billionaires control Britain’s ‘free‘ press; Murdoch’s empire contributes, in the words of one of its own senior execs, to ‘the spread of climate change denial and lies’, with the M-bomb himself entwined with fossil fuel interests; Murdoch’s people have met with the government 206 times in the last two years. Oh, and that every single PM in office since Thatcher has been Murdoch-backed. Questioning the oligarchic choke-hold on our press is not an attack but a defense of our democracy. If you’re looking for truly independent journalism, try openDemocracy, Democracy Now, New Internationalist, or one of the many others celebrated here. |
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