Friday 27 October 2017

Why aren't the mainstream media talking about the "blue terror"?


Just imagine for a moment that millions of Ukippers hadn't surged to Theresa May's rescue at the 2017 general election and Jeremy Corbyn had won, which is not such a crazy proposition because no political party bagging 40% of the vote like Corbyn did has failed to win an election since 1970.

Now imagine that Corbyn and the Labour Party were colluding to undermine parliamentary democracy at every turn, and their supporters in the media were busy orchestrating witch hunts against anyone who stood in his way (judges, opposition politicians, campaigners, university lecturers ...).

  • Imagine if Jeremy Corbyn hadn't been (twice) elected Labour Party leader in massive landslide victories, but instead had been crowned party leader when his allies in the party and the mainstream media bullied his rival out of the leadership contest.
  • Imagine if Corbyn supporters in the media then used this McCarthyite letter as inspiration to launch a hate-fuelled public witch hunt against any university staff who dare to oppose Corbyn's position.
Of course this is only a hypothetical exercise because Jeremy Corbyn is an elected democratic socialist who has actually been working hard to democratise the Labour Party so that ordinary members have much more say over the direction the party takes, so he would hardly behave in the same profoundly illiberal and anti-democratic manner as Theresa May has been.

But just imagine Corbyn and his supporters had done any of these things. We all know that the Tories and their bully boys in the mainstream media would be shrieking "red terror", drawing parallels with the Stalinist purges, and posing as if they're principled liberals who are determined to stand up for stuff like democracy, academic independence, parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, and freedom of speech.

But because these attacks on democracy, academic independence, parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, and freedom of speech are being orchestrated by Theresa May and the pro-Tory bully boys in the right-wing press, there's absolutely no talk of "the blue terror" whatever, no parallels being drawn with right-wing tyrants and dictators, and in fact the majority of the mainstream press insist on covering these extraordinary political circumstances as if there's nothing wrong at all, and these continual Tory attacks on democracy, freedom, and the rule of law are just business as usual.

The fact that there's virtually no condemnation from the mainstream media, and absolutely no efforts to frame the profoundly illiberal and anti-democratic scheming of the Tories as "the blue terror" tells us an lot about the attitudes of most of the people who work in the mainstream media.

When it comes to Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party they'll shriek outrage over the most inconsequential things (even completely fictional stuff they've lazily churnalised from the Guido Fawkes blog). But when it comes to the shockingly illiberal and anti-democratic scheming of Theresa May and the Tories, they'll turn a blind eye to pretty much anything.

Presumably they're intent on ignoring these extraordinary Tory attacks of freedom, democracy and the rule of law because they believe that Theresa May's ever increasing authoritarianism will never actually be a problem to them as long as they remain fiercely loyal to her cause.

Presumably they're confident that when the "blue terror" ideological purges of the media happen, they'll be safe while the ones who were foolish enough to ever criticise are forced out of their jobs, or dragged off by agents of the state in the middle of the night.

What they don't seem to have cottoned onto is that their continued complicity and collusion with the Tory party is turning ever more people away from the mainstream media, and fuelling the growth of independent media.

They don't seem to realise that if they keep up their sychophantic extreme pro-Tory bias and their complicity and collusion with Theresa May's illiberal and anti-democratic agenda, then many of them could well be out of their jobs anyway as mainstream media audiences collapse and their advertising revenues dry up.


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