David Cameron has dropped in on Rupert Murdoch for a Christmas soiree, a celebration of the corporate interests at the heart of Britain.
Since the May election an emboldened Tory government is ruthlessly exerting it’s corporate muscle in utter disdain for the ordinary people of Britain, and the corporate media, equally emboldened, welcomes its own for Christmas as it viciously attacks democracy and accountability in particular attacking Jeremy Corbyn with sneering disdain for anything resembling reality.
In an especially bold move the corporate propaganda sheet, the Telegraph, sent out hundreds of thousands of emails on the day of the May general election 2015 urging people to vote Tory for which it was awarded a £30,000 slap on the wrist for breaking direct marketing rules.
In the week that saw Jeremy Corbyn elected leader of the Labour party George Osborne’s diary reveals he had several meetings with the corporate media for ‘general discussion’ it’s not difficult to imagine the content of those meetings.
David Cameron’s employment of Andy Coulson, ex-editor of the News of the World and now ex-convict, as his director of communications, despite several apparent warnings about him, was a marriage of the corporate dark arts, media and political, to enhance and promote Cameron’s position rather than benefit the nation.
What is called the main stream media exists to represent corporate interests and presents news that serves those interests and will withhold, squash or distort news which does not serve those interests. The brutal attacks on Jeremy Corbyn are a fine example of the self serving corporate media in action, socialism and democracy being two of its primary enemies and targets.
Elections are important as is, therefore, voting, but it’s more important to understand that elections are not democracy, they merely set the stage on which democracy is or is not played out. Democracy is the people actively engaging in the processes and progress of society which crucially includes protest and dissent. A great many people have no idea that is what democracy is for the very good reason that such knowledge and understanding is withheld and rarely, if ever, discussed whilst elections are publicised with uncountable hours of corporate media coverage and presented as if elections are the be all and end all of democracy. Many people express a lack of faith in politics and elections and therefore do not vote (the turnout for the 2015 general election was 66.1%) but beyond, perhaps, an expression of their discontent take no further action.
In Britain today real democracy is struggling for its life and democratic action by the people for the people is ignored, attacked or wilfully distorted as undemocratic. Protesters chanting, ‘whose streets, our streets’, often sounds like bravado in the face of fully kitted out riot police ready, able and willing to wade in and suppress peaceful protest. Events nearly a year ago in Parliament Square, remembered as the ‘tarpaulin revolution’, and the subsequent fencing of ‘Tarpaulin’ Square under the feeble pretext of grounds maintenance relied heavily on the alternative media for anything like the coverage it rightly deserved. The beating that the Occupy movement took in London last winter is something it has yet to recover from although it is a measure of the perceived threat the establishment feels Occupy presents that such heavy handed measures were taken.
One of the primary roles, if not THE primary role, of the corporate media is what is called the engineering or manufacturing of consent based on the idea that the public are too stupid to know what is best for them and must be controlled to serve the ruling, wise, political elites and the interests of capitalism through advertising. The furore around the democratic election of Jeremy Corbyn to become leader of the Labour party and the relentless vilification of him since is merely the latest glaring example in a long history of the manipulation of the public ‘mind’; the crowd. The BBC is not exempt from this public manipulation as John Pilger wrote, “The BBC began in 1922, just before the corporate press began in America. In the same year the British establishment was under siege. The unions had called a general strike and the Tories were terrified that a revolution was on the way. The new BBC came to their rescue. In high secrecy, Lord Reith wrote anti-union speeches for the Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and broadcast them to the nation, while refusing to allow the labor leaders to put their side until the strike was over.”
The view from the top is that an informed public is a dangerous public and must be controlled at all costs and therefore democracy (the people) must be suppressed. Since the advent of the Internet, democratically available information and public communication has been enabled as never before and the grip of the corporate media has weakened as has the governments ability to dominate political discourse. We have available to us an apparatus for democracy but the fight to suppress it is on, not least in the Tory governments Snoopers charter under the pretext of countering serious crime and terrorist extremism. Blanket surveillance as protecting our lives, liberty and freedom is a contradiction in terms, it creates a virtual panopticon in which government seeks to control people through the power of unseen observation and the fear that something we might do or say will bring us to the attention of and intrusion from those who observe us. Democracy is our right to be informed and to act, but it is under intense attack, it really is a case of use it or lose it as governments become ever more oppressive aided and abetted by the corporate media.
Keith
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/dec/21/rupert-murdoch-david-cameron-christmas-party
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/dec/21/telegraph-fined-email-conservatives?CMP=share_btn_fb
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11204150
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results
https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2014/10/21/the-tarpaulin-revolution/
https://occupylondon.org.uk/locations/tarpaulin-square/
https://chomsky.info/19890315/
https://terry-kidd.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/engineering-consent.html
https://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=2409
