A Czech spy! Questions to answer! Why won’t he respond? With the British press crossing the line into full fake news, Paul Mason takes us through the online undergrowth of smear merchants and explains how the alt-right sets the agenda for the MSM.
Mason has been a senior editor at the BBC and ITN and worked for more than 25 years in the national, business and broadcast press. He won the Royal Television Society specialist reporter of the year in 2012 for covering the Eurocrisis with BBC Newsnight.
Of course this is nothing new. Fake news is a method of social control and since the beginning of organised communities people have abused power by lying, misrepresenting and distorting.
In 1972 Stan Cohen published what is now considered one of the most important sociological theses. His exploration of labelling theory within the media and the use of hyperbole to froth up the public with the intention of making their ‘news’ more easily digestible and readable is widely recognised as essential reading. The outcome was that events became opportunities to create what Cohen called ‘folk devils’ that through careful manipulation would lead to ‘moral panics’.
The media effectively become opinion leaders in which reality is only partially important or relevant. We are all victims of this manipulation. However, some much less so and others much more so depending on how news is approached. If we can learn a critical imagination we at least have the tools to analyse and investigate for ourselves. If not we effectively inject news in to ourselves determined primarily by our socialised sympathises. Reality then has little to do with our consequent knowledge and the control mechanisms continue to win.
Over to us again.
Douglas James
