During the general deluge of accusations of antisemitism against Labour and the left, The Sunday Times labelled Mike Sivier of Vox Political (@midwalesmike), not just as a garden-variety Jew-hater, but as a holocaust denier. Four other papers got swept up with this propaganda.
Now, with a full year elapsed, the paper has admitted its claims were bogus. The details of the falsehoods are written up here.
Vox Political is a fairly prolific left-tilted independent provider of news and comment. In a fast-changing news scene, it is precisely the kind of platform that corporatist hard-rightists seek to discredit, with scant respect for fact.
If he’d lived in 1930s Germany, Sivier would have risked going to the death camps, with the millions of Jews, gipsies, homosexuals and other targets of fascism. Murdoch’s rags, on the other hand, might well have dutifully whipped up the hysteria of The Reich. His modern operation frequently platforms hard and far-right ideologies, including antisemitic tropes. These include the notion that George Soros was somehow funding the “Caravan” – a hollow racist scare story about US-bound migration through Central America, which was especially hyped in the run-up to November’s mid-term US elections.
The highly two-faced accusations of antisemitism have been covered a lot by Media Alert. they have perhaps died off for a while, but corporate bullies using their platforms to lie about independent journalists is probably here to stay.
Stephen Durrant
