Newspapers have been in steep decline for decades. The young do not buy them at all, getting news from online sources, mostly on their mobile phones. Coronavirus looks like hastening their demise and their owners, corporations, have even approached politicians for direct funding. Now, it seems, some politicians have urged the public to support them.
Clearly, I’m not paying to see just whom. I’m guessing it’s the kind of white/pink male Unionist often interviewed uncritically in these same newspapers. Please let it not be Nicola!
Nowhere, across the globe, are state or corporation-owned media the friends of the people. Conrad Black, former owner of the Telegraph once said something like:
‘If the ‘little man’ thinks the press is on his side then the ‘little man’ is in more trouble than I thought.’
Those much-used examples of the journalist employed within the mainstream media, exposing the corporations or powerful politicians, are rare exceptions which merely illustrate the fact that 99.99% of the time they represent the interests of the powerful who pay them in order to ensure the obedience or ignorance of the masses. For every George Monbiot, there are a thousand apologists for the Conservative Party or for British Aerospace.
In Scotland, there is a further abuse, by the BBC and the media corporations, as the voters’ aspirations for a form of independence based on higher standards of honesty in politics and of greater equality in life chances, threaten the interests of over-lapping elites working in and served by both.
It is for good reasons that Noam Chomsky could not work in the MSM but Andrew Marr can.
For all its many problems, only social media media platforms offer us any future for a public sphere informed by honest, evidence-based, people’s sources.
Sites like this one are just nodes within a vast matrix of cultural exchange where millions of citizens can communicate relatively unconstrained by the editorial power of elites.
The political and media establishment will warn us of fake news and conspiracy theorists and we do need to educate each other and our young in ways of identifying them but we do not need the advice of those professional communicators, owned by the state or the corporations, whose work is generated only to serve their interests. That they, in their bubbles, sometimes believe themselves to be operating on a higher level than the citizen journalists of the web, only tells us how habitual and semi-conscious that kind of behaviour becomes in institutionalised human beings.
We do not need them. Let them fade from our history.
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
First thing is, I don’t do conspiracy theories . I also don’t do coincidences. Way back in the 70s and 80s I was active in trade union politics and the Labour Party and got used to the telltale sound of a tapped phone.
I get my email from Sky, via Yahoo. It can be infuriatingly slow – like when you’re waiting for a code to let you access another site – but I noticed about 5 weeks ago (just after I joined Talking Up Scotland) that a lot of messages to me were ending up in the spam bucket. Talking Up Scotland was one – but the other sites dumped in the spam bucket included Politico Brussels, Politico EU, Amnesty, Futurelearn – and a whole lot of commercial sites like Sky (!), Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Majestic Wine (that one hurt!), M&S and M&Co (how ridiculous) – and a few polling sites including Yougov.
I’ve been receiving information from almost all of these sites for years now. I also make money from some of the polling sites.
Worse, it keeps on happening. I’ve now written to Yahoo. But a techie friend tells me Yahoo, like other online providers, is trying to reduce the amount of spam but is encountering so many problems they are now about 4 days behind in answering complaints.
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Thanks. Yes, social subject to abuse too but it’s so big it’s not entirely controllable.
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Social media
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Great article, John!
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Agreed. You only have to look at the idiot headlines just now, howling for a ‘return to normal’ to realise how poisonous they are.
On the bright side, my parents in law have been weaning off the daily m**l by dint of isolation. There will be many like them who perhaps will feel free of a burden of anger when it is not constantly fuelled? I hope they aren’t secretly hoovering up the online filth edition.
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Thanks
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Rather than fade from view, unfortunately they’re screaming the place down like the weans when not allowed chocolate!
But like the weans they’ll just have to grow up a bit and sulk in the corner for a while because folk are ignoring them.
Noticed the other day that my local shop is sending back all but 5 papers now which is quite remarkable really. Still, never mind…
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I haven’t bought a Britnat “newspaper” for years. It would be great to see them all disappear.
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After their death a free honest Press and TV news can be born.
Cf Eire
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