The Bias and Downright Lies of the UK Media over EU Referendum
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Anthony Hilton, Evening Standard[/caption]
I have been planning on writing on the EU Referendum for some time now, having debated it in Bournemouth for the Dorset Humanists. For the US and other non-UK readers here, this is about as all-consuming in the UK as Trump and Clinton in the US. Because it is wholly important. Will we remain in the EU? Probably not, if the media will have anything to do with it.
Every morning, my partner and I wake up to Wave 105's Steve Power reading the news headlines of the all main British newspapers. It is completely depressing. Statement after statement trashing the EU. Every day. These newspapers include The Sun, The Times, The Telegraph, The Daily Mail and The Express.
I can tell you, being aware of psychological phenomena such as illusion-of-truth effect and the mere exposure effect means that you really get a grip of the damage being done, particularly to the undecided. Just hearing the negativity, and seeing it, time after time, day after day, in a relentless onslaught, will eventually result in credibility. it is how advertising works, it is why people argue we should not debate Creationists and climate deniers, and so on. The oxygen of publicity gives credibility where it is not necessarily rationally earned.
Where The Guardian and Mirror are the only bastions for the left (the Independent is only running online nowadays), the left has little by way of mouthpiece. Here is an example of the headlines this week, so far:
Thatcher Minister Quits Tories in Brexit Row - The Telegraph
Brexit Boost as Business Billionaire Votes to Leave - The Times
Outrage at Bid to "Rig" EU Vote - Express
Cam Buster - The Sun (Debate Hero Hits Out: Quit UK if we vote Remain) - The Sun
The Albanian Double Killer Who's Lived in Open Borders UK for 18 Years - The Daily Mail
Let's pick three of these to see a little about which I am talking.
- The Telegraph reports on a Minister in Thatcher's time (1982 for feck's sake - a "Falkland's Ally") quitting the Tories as a front pager, but not a Leave Tory MP, and present Health Minister, switching ranks due to the financial lies that the Leave campaign, she claims, are consistently peddling. So they are promoting minor Leave news over much much more major Remain news.
- The Times mention one single UK business (and for some time the only one mentioned on the endorsements wiki page section for Leave, which now features five businesses). There re over five times as many Remain businesses and hugely more business leaders. They do a massive front page for one leader and neglect to mention the vastly more numerous business leaders supporting Remain.
- The Daily Mail. The Bloody Daily Mail. Did we have open borders 18 years ago? No. Do we have open borders now? Technically, no. Is Albania a member of the EU and part of the Schengen Agreement? No, it is a candidate country, but not a full EU country. This is the epitome of misleading headlines. These cynical bastards need to be called out on such misinformation and intentional misleading of the population.
This is just one day, one simple day, in the UK media. This is happening every day, and I, for one, am sick of it. And that Murdoch quote at the top of the page pretty much sums it up. Indeed, as of the 19th May, three of those newspapers are being investigated by Ipso for inaccurate reporting on the EU pertaining to eight particularly egregious stories.
As Donnachadh McCarthy recently wrote:
...the anti-EU campaign will have the full force of Murdoch's and the other 4 extremist right-wing media billionaires papers whose agenda is to destroy all our human rights.
As I wrote in The Prostitute State, over 80% of UK papers are owned by five extremist right wing media billionaires: Rupert Murdoch, (Sun/Times), Barclay Brothers (Telegraph), Richard Desmond (Express) and Lord Rothermere (Daily Mail).
Murdoch is Australian living in New York, Rothermere lives in France, the Barclay Brothers in the tax havens of Monaco and Guernsey. All of them use tax haven entities to avoid UK taxes.
So key question is in light of the above list, why have these billionaires for decades tried to destroy the EU's democratic institutions?
Indeed, in a slightly longer quote, he states:
For decades I have watched the EU-hating Rupert Murdoch abuse his political and media power in the UK, to try and destroy the democratic institutions of the EU.
I have long feared his enormous power to destroy EU co-operation, if it ever came to a UK Brexit referendum, knowing that he has vast resources to enable him to manipulate the referendum result in favour of Brexit.
Make no mistake it is Murdoch more than any single UK citizen has brought about this referendum, despite the fact that he lives in the USA and is Australian.
I wrote in my book The Prostitute State - How Britain's Democracy Has Been Bought, about his political blackmailing of the entire UK political classes, as revealed by the Leveson Inquiry and in Tom Watson MP’s book Dial M for Murdoch.
In particular, I mentioned Murdoch’s political assassination of Conservative Prime Minister John Major, and his anointment of Tony Blair, because Major would not do Murdoch’s bidding and attack the EU. See the extract below.
SO WHY?
Why should Murdoch who does not even live in the UK, hate the EU so much and put so much effort into destroying it?
Why does Murdoch want to destroy all the human rights, employment rights, workers rights, social rights and environmental protections that our shared EU democracy has voted to give us?
When asked by an Evening Standard Reporter why he hated the EU so much, his reply was “THAT IS EASY. WHEN I GO TO DOWNING STREET THEY DO WHAT I SAY. WHEN I GO TO BRUSSELS THEY TAKE NO NOTICE.”
Most people have no idea of the extent of Murdoch’s iron propaganda grip on almost everything, we the UK’s Referendum voters have been watching, listening to or reading for decades!!!
His subtle and unsubtle propaganda has been brain-washing us for decades into hating the EU’s democracy, which threatens to regulate him and ensure that he pays the millions of pounds of off-shore tax-haven avoidance his corporations indulge in.
News/Media Outlets Owned by Murdoch
• 3.1 million papers sold every day in UK. (37% of market). He is largest shareholder in Sky News • Sky News Radio supplies the national and international news, sport, business and entertainment news to almost every commercial radio station in the UK. More than 280 stations make up the network, including well-known brands such as Absolute Radio, Capital, Classic, Heart, Magic, LBC, Smooth and talkSPORT, and between them they have a weekly audience of more than 34 million.So when you are listening to your favourite radio station and the news comes on, you are listening to Murdoch’s News. It is almost a complete monopoly. • He is largest shareholder in Five News. • Has shareholding in Vice Magazine • He is the largest shareholder in BskyB. • BSkyB had over ten million subscribers by 2012, giving him direct access into 40% of UK households. It has almost as much revenues as ALL the terrestrial TV channels put together. BSkyB revenues in 2010 were £5.6 billion, dwarfing its nearest rival the BBC’s £3.6 billion and ITV’s £1.9 billion. • It floods the market with advertising and is the fourth largest advertiser in the UK at £127 million annually. • He owns Harper Collins – publishing one in ten books in UK. • He owns 20th Century Fox – responsible for significant proportion of films seen in UK. • He is a joint owner of the Press Association which supplies national news to nearly all news outlets in the UK, including local papers. The PA put very little attention into the News of the World phone hacking scandal. When Tom Watson MP mentioned this to one of their journalists, their reply was “You know we are partly owned by News International, don’t you?”
So PLEASE do not let Murdoch’s power grab for the UK’s government succeed, Help protect us from losing much of the UK’s remaining sovereignty, which the EU’s collective democracies help strengthen.
Extract from The Prostitute State about Murdoch’s blackmailing of Major over EU: “The first was the Conservative Party’s pro-European Union position which he wanted reversed. Unlike the UK government, the EU is big enough to potentially regulate him, which is an anathema to this fundamentalist free-marketeer. In a unique glimpse of how the billionaire press bullies even Prime Ministers, John Major, the former Tory Prime Minister, revealed to the Leveson Inquiry in 2012 that Murdoch had in a private meeting in February 1997, warned him that “If we could not change our European policies, his papers could not, would not support the Conservative government.”
Later that year, the Tories lost to New Labour after 18 years in power. That defeat came after Murdoch's newspapers The Sun and the News of the World had switched their support to Labour, with even The Times remaining neutral. To this day the Murdoch press continues its relentless xenophobic daily campaign of vilification of the EU’s democratic institutions, abetted by the rest of the media billionaires. They have turned much of the naturally pro-European UK public into a snarling foreigner-hating British bulldog, creating a far-right nationalist UKIP party to represent their cause.
After 30 years of their anti-European venomous propaganda, the poison finally resulted in large electoral swings to UKIP in the 2013 and 2014 English local and European elections. The miracle of three generations of a peaceful continent for the first time in European history is never celebrated. The EU has helped protect the lives of millions of young working-class men and women from the wars of their elites for the first time in history. These media billionaires have even got the working classes to hate the European Convention on Human Rights, which is often the only thing standing between ordinary workers and exploitative abuse by the ruling elite. The further irony is that the Convention has its roots in Churchill’s vision for a post-war liberal democratic settlement for the continent, to protect it from ever again being ravaged by the evils of fascism.”
The sheer scope of just Murdoch is utterly staggering. I fear for this nation, and much blame should be laid at the feet of irresponsible journalism.
Of course, it is pretty obvious that, these days, newspapers don't necessarily report news, and certainly not objectively. They are agenda-driven multi-billionaire driven opinion-creators. And, as private institutions, they are free to do that. However, I am pretty wary that most people just don't realise this, or too easily forget it. I recently had a BBQ with family members who spouted claims from the Daily Mail that were simply empirically wrong. Educated people sucked in, through confirmation bias, to agendas that are so plain to see that it is amazing they are overlooked so readily. Amazingly, no I don't want to "exterminate the Albanian immigrants", and no, immigrants aren't "all criminals" (see here for info on this).
But those statements derive all too easily from a media that is the most right-wing in Europe, and don't mind playing fast and loose with the facts.