The globalists’ propaganda arm becomes a withered limb as Brits en mass lose trust in their media.

Just when you think the reputation of the UK media couldn’t sink any lower, it just did. An annual survey undertaken by EurobarometerEU, across 33 countries, puts the UK at the bottom, with a net trust of -60. Yes that’s right, minus 60. It’s a fall of 24 points since last year. Just 15 percent of Brits trust their print media. But it’s not the only survey showing a similar trend.

How did we get here? I’ve got a collection of old newspapers and magazines dating back several decades. Part of the problem is that newspapers have morphed into viewspapers. The distinction between reporting and comment has been blurred. Back in the 70s, leading publications only had one comment piece and an editorial. Their pages were packed with news items, with stories reported factually and without a ‘bent’.  

As bad as the Iraq War propaganda was, things have got even worse since then. Obnoxious  gatekeepers have ensured that the parameters of what can and can’t be said in print have narrowed still further.

In the mid-Noughties, I was writing regularly in the UK mainstream print media. So too was John Pilger. Our articles were popular with readers, but not with the gatekeepers. When I wrote a balanced, alternative view on Belarus for the New Statesman in 2011, I came under fierce gatekeeper attack.

I forgot that on Belarus and many other issues, only one point of view was allowed. Silly me.

Only one thing can save UK print press

Today, the lack of diversity of opinion is one of the reasons why newspaper sales have crashed – (sales have slumped by two-thirds in the past 20 years), and conversely why ‘alternative’ sites, and media outlets where a wide range of opinions ARE heard have done so well. Who wants to pay money for a paper when the political views published in it range from pro-war centrist-left, to pro-war centrist-right?

If there was a single newspaper or magazine column which examined forensically whether  Labour really did have an anti-Semitism ‘crisis’ under Jeremy Corbyn, I must have missed it.

And apart from Mary Dejevsky in the i paper, where was the journalism examining the many inconsistencies in the official narrative of the Skripal case? Why has ‘Private Eye’, which bills itself as ‘anti-Establishment’, not covered the ongoing Philip Cross Wikipedia editing scandal?

And what about the Covid-19 coverage? Has any journalist asked the very simple question: if the virus is as bad as the government says it is, and a domestic lockdown is necessary to stop its spread, why have flights continued to come into the country (including from virus hotspots) unchecked? I’m sure the old ‘Eye’ of Richard Ingrams and Bron Waugh would have if Wikipedia had been around then.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still some good columnists out there, but sadly you can count them on one hand.

The only thing that can save UK print media from total collapse is if there is a large-scale clear-out of the faux-left/neocon-dominated commentariat and their replacement by writers who actually address the issues that readers are interested in. Newspapers used to be published for their readers, now it seems most are published for people who write for other newspapers – and to enable ‘Inside the Tenters’ to congratulate each other for their ‘brilliant’ articles on Twitter.

The smug, mutual back-slapping nonsense, seen at its worst at journalist ‘award’ ceremonies,  has gone on for too long. We need more old-style chain-smoking journos, not frightened of telling truth to power – and less smoke and mirrors.

Trust in British print media can be restored, but only if we go back to the future. 

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