My mother - though not so much my father, who was really only interested in sports - loved to watch news and discussion programmes and I grew up in the company of political journalists and broadcasters such as Brian Walden and Robin Day.
And even until just a few years ago, I would regularly watch the Channel 4 News or Newsnight. But then something changed. I'm not sure exactly what, or when, but something definitely changed and I began to increasingly sigh and roll my eyes when watching. Now I just don't bother, I simply switch over or switch off - the ultimate act of disconnect and something which, as a lover of TV, I am loath to do.
Something similar has also happened between myself and the world of printed news. There was a time, for example, when I would actually buy (and read) The Guardian. But that's no longer possible, despite the fact that they still, even now, employ some excellent columnists, such as Marina Hyde.
The sad fact is that almost all of the entire mainstream media has become viscerally objectionable in the last decade. Not least in their coverage of the coronavirus pandemic which has been a constant stream of government propaganda and scare-mongering. If and when this (so-called) Covid crisis is over, it won't just be our politicians who will be obliged to hang their heads in shame and resign, but every journalist and news reporter who has been an active participant in the incitement system.
What Peter Sloterdijk once said in an interview about the global media's complicity with terror, can now be paraphrased about their collusion with governments vis-à-vis the Covid-19 conspiracy (i.e., the attempt to manipulate and exploit a disease and people's fear of falling ill and dying):
As soon as there is news about coronavirus - the rate of infection has increased, for example - journalists have to be clearly aware of their responsibility. Should they simply pass on the information, should they enhance it in some manner, or should they decide to play down the story and effectively put it in quarantine (an excellent method formerly used to avoid mass panic). Perhaps the viral nature of our contemporary media is more dangerous than Covid-19 itself, because it can create chaos in the social, political, and economic systems of a society and rapidly spread hysteria in entire populations. Unfortunately, the complicity between global media and this pandemic has now become so well hamonised over the last eight months or so that we have to speak of genuine collusion and effective co-dependency. At some point we have to say openly: you, the journalists, are the dealers in this game.*
* See: Peter Sloterdijk, 'Thus Spoke Sloterdijk', interview with Res Strehle in Selected Exaggerations, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Marglois, (Polity Press, 2016), pp. 192-201. The paragraph I'm part-quoting, part-paraphrasing is on pp. 196-97 and begins "A thought experiment could be useful here."
For a related post to this one, click here.
