One of my heroes, the late Christopher Hitchens, once slammed the filmmaker, Michael Moore, declaring him as: "a loud-mouthed demagogue that is only one step ahead of the papers." Such a succinct and scathing character assassination applies equally to the mainstream media of which Moore (and Hitchens, although that never meant he spared it any ire) is and were respectively an integral part. Moore once gave a stirring address when accepting his Oscar for Bowling for Columbine that received boos from a seemingly liberal Hollywood crowd, although 2003 is another era regarding politics and its talentless cousin, identity politics.
"A lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on," Winston Churchill once said. The media's complicity in a multiplicity of deception elevates itself to a level akin to an art form, being pernicious, pervasive and persuasive all at once. Execution of their subversion of reality ramped into overdrive when Brexit and Trump caused media's casting couch of sexy narratives to become a fainting couch for editors and their financial backers. However, the will to undermine the new political landscape did not diminish the media's hatred - usually with CNN at the helm; I wonder if Trump pissed off Ted Turner in the past? Mainstream outlets immediately aimed over the bow, dusting off an age-old bogey man that they have used to try and scare America with for over half a century, Russia.
#PissGate and Russia rigging the election in Trump's favour, a news story that undercover footage revealed is mostly ratings driven that Mr. Whitelash Van Jones dubbed a "Nothing Burger," evolved into the media's broken record. The snail's pace of truth failed to turn in the direction of Antifa until recently too, chiefly ignoring the organisation's repeated destruction of cities, striking counter protesters over the head with bike locks and assaulting random people they deem Nazis - including veterans in wheelchairs. Following Charlottesville, the tragic death of Heather Heyer at the hands of James Alex Fields Junior, who drove a car into a crowd of demonstrators, no one could fail to notice anything other than the right. Regardless, President Trump cut through the bias to the heart of the problem, citing how partisan violence has grown into a legitimate concern in the US once more.
The media took the President's disavowal as an indication of support for the Charlottesville right, but Antifa's continued appetite for chaos has swelled to a level even mainstream news cannot ignore. When a petition to declare Antifa an official domestic terrorist organisation totalled more than 300,000 on the White House's website, the flimsiness of mainstream media's narrative became glaring to them (mostly). Lo and Behold even The Daily Show host, Trevor "Trump-is-to-blame-for-everything-from-bad-weather-to-Ebola," Noah denounced Antifa! Such a sudden u-turn from companies that either glossed over their violence or supported them looks suspicious, almost as though the mainstream media may have something to hide.
When a demonstration erupts into violence in the UK, many people say the following or something similar: "Oh, did Rent-A-Mob turn up?" It is certainly not beyond the realms of fiction for the media to pay agitators to whip up crowds and turn them towards violence, many suspect George Soros of doing so already and the press have form in this area. The phone hacking scandal in the UK dragged even magnate King Makers like Rupert Murdoch out to answer questions, causing Britain's most popular Sunday newspaper The News of the World to close. Much of the fallout of these revelations caused reporters such as Mahzer Mahmood's, The Sun's "Fake Shiekh" imprisonment and substantial cash settlements paid to members of the public and celebrities. Furthermore, UK paper The Daily Mail allegedly offered a large sum of money to the ex-wife of Robert Murat (a former suspect in Madeline McCann's disappearance) for her to say Murat had a child porn dungeon in his basement. So the media is not above paying out money to influence stories for their delectation and to fit a narrative and in two years that have been nothing but polarising, such unsettlement benefits news ratings. No amount of trying to quash ad revenue, James Damore type firings or Comedy Central stooges lambasting Trump can silence the only working polarisation, internet binary. Soon we may witness the level of media's complicity in stirring the pot and the breaking news of their failed engineering, and I say, not a moment too soon!