Dear old mediocratic establishment. It's not enough for il-liberals that they utterly dominate the cultural agenda. No, they need to conceal their dominance by use of the fiction that it's the other side which dominates. The old 'right-wing hegemony' fantasy. And of course, it is onto them (the evil Right) that blame for all our problems must be deflected.
Things have got a little dishevelled? Attitudes a little negative as a result? It's all the fault of the (supposedly) right-wing press, according to Polly Toynbee. Scapegoats include:
- Rupert Murdoch who "can take substantial credit for the tide of vulgarity that now floods the UK" (Toynbee approvingly quoting the FT's Martin Wolf)
- "the corrosive Fox News"
- "the Daily Mail ... the most toxic current cultural force"
- "the internet ... strident, mostly male rightwing cynics, haters and wild conspiracy theorists"
- "the newspaper agenda, slavishly followed by the BBC, [reflecting] a profoundly dystopic image of a society where nothing works, everything gets worse, public officials are inept, public services fail, tax is wasted, lethal dangers proliferate, and everyone conspires to lie about it."
- "an overwhelmingly rightwing bias [which] helps explain why Eurobarometer finds the British the least sympathetic of EU nations towards the poor." [It could just as easily be because Britain has a level of welfare state way beyond what the average European would consider reasonable.]
Tim Worstall comments that "it isn't because the press is right wing that we think the unemployed are workshy shiftless chavs, the press is right wing because we already think that the unemployed are workshy shiftless chavs." But I would question whether the press as a whole is "right wing" at all. It depends on definitions. Does the bulk of the British press come out in favour of leaving markets undistorted, and against Blairist interventionism? Not as far as I can see.
4 comments:
Isn't it nice for once to hear the voice of sanity? Polly always tells it like it is --- and it ain't always easy to figure out what's going on, when the whole world's completely controlled by the dark forces of capitalism...
"Strident, mostly male rightwing cynics, haters and wild conspiracy theorists deter more reasonable participants."
This should shame us all into action. I recommend the introduction forthwith of a state-funded outreach programme to stop reasonable participants feeling so discouraged. For years the victimhood of the reasonable participant has gone unacknowledged, making their daily determent even harder to bear. The marginalisation of these people MUST STOP NOW. Perhaps the only positive thing that society's reasonable participants could draw from this egregious injustice is the consolation that being so ill-used will help them to empathise all the more exquisitely with our legions of socially excluded.
"The newspaper agenda, slavishly followed by the BBC, reflects a profoundly dystopic image of a society where nothing works, everything gets worse, public officials are inept, public services fail, tax is wasted, lethal dangers proliferate, and everyone conspires to lie about it. ...Good crime, health or education figures are distorted by reporting of the one indicator that has turned downwards."
Yes, folks, we've never had it so good --- crime is at an all-time low and educational achievement is at an all-time high. All thanks to the marvels of socialism. It's about time this was said, too. I hereby nominate Polly for the Walter Duranty Prize for fearless and penetrative journalism.
Check out the Biased BBC blog. The BBC is the largest broadcasting corporation in the world in terms of audience numbers. And by far the biggest in Britain. You will trolls constantly logging egregious examples of bias from the BBC. Such as genocide apology and vicious anti-semitism.
The Guardian Newspaper, a paper that is funded by advertising public service jobs (jobs in the BBC for example), is right to resent Rupert Murdoch. He threatens their ill-liberal hegemony: An ill-liberal hegemony so strong it can overturn democratically elected governments. Search for "Guardian Lies" for some interesting information regarding the 'cash for questions' scandal to see what I mean.
Liberal Elite. I used to laugh at that.
That last line is to assume that "right wing" is the same as "non-interventionist in markets".
Unfortunately not so.
The British "right wing" is as interventionist as the left, just in slightly different matters.
The British Press, like most of the British people, are not classically liberal, which is what we wish they were.
Point taken; "right wing" hasn't necessarily meant minimal intervention, except perhaps under Thatcher. But I'm not convinced the British press is "right wing" on any definition of that term. Certainly Ms Toynbee's evidence for the claim seems weak.
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