Don't believe what you read in the Media

Even though many politicians have attempted to define Britishness, and many have used this term as a stick to silence valid political dissent; I feel there will always be a British custom that is part and parcel of the British conscious. This custom is: not believing everything we see, read or hear in the media; and as I will uncover, it can no longer be perceived as a hunch or a collective form of skepticism, rather it is real and based on facts.

No one can deny the power and influence of the media. The media is supposed to be impartial, truthful, and factual and it must be independent of political agendas. In other words it must serve the Public and not make the Public its servants. However, this can only be described as the antithesis of today’s media.

The media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, owns The Sun, The Times, Sunday Times and Sky. These have access to millions of people; The Sun for example has approximately 7.8 Million readers every day. If it was possible to influence Mr. Murdoch and win him over to your ideas, surely wouldn’t you try to persuade him to support you world view? You would, considering the amount of people your ideas will have access to. Now, if you were a politician, wouldn’t you almost definitely try and persuade Mr. Murdoch? Of course you would.

This is precisely what happened on March 19^th 2003, one day before Britain sent it’s troops to Iraq. A freedom of information request found that Tony Blair had several phone conversations with Mr. Murdoch. As a result, the next day The Sun ran articles which supported the war. A leader article, the column which represents the ‘voice’ of the newspaper told ‘our boys and girls’ to ‘fight the good fight with all your might’.

The Times printed an uncredited commentary which exclaimed Mr. Blair was ‘right to have taken the fateful step and initiated this campaign’.

Mr. Blair also had phone conversations with the media mogul, who is also the head of News International, on March 11^th and March 13^th 2003. Following both talks, The Sun printed articles accusing the then French leader Jacques Chirac of being a ‘worm’ and ‘wimp’ for not committing troops.

Raise your hand if you have complete trust in the media.

The implications of this FoI request, which was only granted recently, as the government stated that the conversations were held in private, hence the delay; is that there may always be a strong bias in the media supporting varying political agendas. This suggests that we are never exposed to unbiased perspectives.

Therefore, next time we read that Muslim extremists are the new bogey men in this post-cold war era; keep this in mind and try to find out what really is going on. After all, when politicians and the media where busy maligning the Muslim community last year, a BNP activist was caught with the biggest amount of chemical explosives ever found in the UK. This shocking find was never reported in the main stream media. He had extremist literature and it wasn’t a Jihadist manual.

They probably found a copy of The Sun too.