We normal people have two incredibly difficult and very serious problems to overcome. One is a basically mendacious and corrupt system of government, which routinely lies to us when, for example, it tells us it has no money for our essential services such as a well-funded NHS or free universities (like we used to have here in the UK), but has no trouble at all finding money to fund illegal wars and foreign terrorist groups, or finding hundreds of millions to bail out bankrupt zombie banks. Or when it slanders Russia or attacks Syria, for example, without any verifiable evidence or legitimate reason for doing so. A growing number of people are slowly beginning to understand this problem.
The second major problem we have is much less well-understood, but closely related to the first. It’s the fact that the main sources we use for the information that forms our opinions are not only not fit for purpose, they’re often downright deceitful and untrustworthy. These sources, comprising most national newspapers, radio, and TV stations, are totally unreliable because even when they do occasionally produce a good piece of work we just don’t know how much of it we can trust or believe. The evidence for this is vast. All that’s needed is simply to think carefully about almost any “news” item they produce.
Take one easy example: the front page of the 5th May edition of The Times newspaper, reckoned by many to be wholly trustworthy, stated “MPs call for inquest as Corbyn fails election test”. So at first glance it not only appears that the Labour Party suffered a humiliating defeat in the recent local elections, but also that this defeat is so important it deserves to be the leading story on the front page of this august truth-teller. Yet a quick glance on page 6 of the same paper shows that last week’s elections increased the number of Labour councillors by 59 — more than any other party. The Tories lost 31 councillors, but somehow it’s Labour that failed the “election test”.
This blatant misinformation-spreading is not unusual. It can be found dozens of times on any day of the week via our national newspapers or radio and TV stations. Over the years it has misled people into producing the disastrous Brexit result (following decades of xenophobic ranting by the country’s two most widely-read newspapers), supporting illegal foreign wars, and meek acceptance of the ruinous austerity policies of forty years of capitalist rule. Our system of government is in terrible shape, but it’s the complicit mainstream media that keep it propped up.
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