Media Fiddles While UK Collapses

Our media class, and its increasing detachment from the world which the vast majority of its viewers, listeners and readers inhabit, has passed before the inspection of Zelo Street on many previous occasions, but never has it shown itself so utterly unable to understand the mood of the people as with the current perfect storm of inflation, unrest, and overall mood of despair.

Strikes? We got them. Was the press interested? Not yesterday, it wasn’t: instead, readers were served up the latest broadside of faux outrage directed at the Sussexes for having the audacity to make a series for Netflix as part of their determination to finance their own lifestyle and not sponge off We The People like the working Royals. Self sufficiency? How very DARE they?

Such is the desperation around the Fourth Estate that Haz’n’Megs will not play the game the press wants them to play, that the Mail used the dubious talents of four obscenely overpaid alleged journalists to heap sneering abuse on their targets. While those concerned cravenly carried out their instructions, the looming spectacle of strike action grew ever larger.

The Daily Brexit, still called the Express, dispensed with alleged star columnists and merely shovelled on the Kensington Palace briefing, that whatever the Sussexes said was “Slurs”, and it was “So Hurtful”. As the paper has been run on a shoestring since the days of Richard Desmond, it’s still whining this morning, invoking the Queen’s memory. Strikes? What strikes?

More upmarket, but nowadays not by much, the increasingly desperate Telegraph also invoked the Queen’s memory, decreeing that the Sussexes had landed a “direct hit” on her legacy. By talking about their story, not hers. In inevitable attendance was the over-promoted Camilla Tominey to claim that the series was “An unashamedly one-sided story full of half-truths”.

That would be the same Camilla Tominey whose name appeared on the by-line of a Tel article linking Megs to ISIS, via her support of the Hubb Community Kitchen and their cook book. The Mail titles lifted the story, which then featured in court papers as part of Meg’s lawsuit against them.

Like “the connection made between the Hubb Community Kitchen (in which the [Duchess] worked with those affected by the Grenfell tragedy as part of a cookbook project that became a New York Times best-selling book) and the al-Manaar Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre (supposedly ‘linked to 19 Islamic extremists’) is at best a highly tenuous and deliberately inflammatory one”.

There was more. “The characterisation of these victims as being linked to terrorism in the same way as the [Duchess] is said to be supporting or endorsing jihadi terrorists through her participation in a cookbook for victims of Grenfell, is as false as it is offensive”. Ms Tominey was congratulated by the deeply unpleasant David Vance for her article.

And, worst of all, the piece appeared to be based on a single source - the Islamophobia peddling Henry Jackson Society. It was bad faith journalism at its worst. But it was unsurprising: since the right-leaning part of our free and fearless press took against the Sussexes, the barrage has been unrelenting, and has featured the same cast of sad, obsessive egos fighting for attention (Mic Wright has given them A Good Going Over right HERE).

But then, surprise, surprise, all changed this morning as the press realised - all too late for their own credibility - that those ordinary hardworking people it claims to champion aren’t interested in their righteous frothing about the Sussexes. Because the grim reality of a cold snap, combined with soaring energy prices, along with those strikes, has focused their minds elsewhere.

More rail strikes. More postal strikes. Ambulance drivers and nursing staff joining in. Border Force officers striking, meaning another hour or two getting through passport control for those willing to chance visiting sad, angry, increasingly poor and increasingly broken Brexit Britain.

A media audience slowly but surely realising that they’ve been had. Twelve years of Governments promoted assiduously by the right-wing press have enriched the rich while screwing over the rest of us. Added to that, Brexit was sold on a series of lies. Project Fear was in fact Project Reality.

On top of that, we are now learning how the Tories enabled their pals to fill their boots on the back of the Covid-19 pandemic. Who paid for those banking tens of millions from the VIP lane for PPE? We The People did. The Tories, egged on by their press cheerleaders, broke the UK. Worse, the current Labour opposition appears too frightened of its own shadow to back the strikers. That, too, is lauded by too many in and around the media.

Perhaps it is the cushion of financial security, that the cliff-edge of vanishing disposable income is for them never likely to come into view. Perhaps the falling circulation and diminishing viewing figures do not send a strong enough message. Perhaps they just don’t care. But soon they will.

This time, ordering those already impoverished by twelve years of Tory ineptitude back to work for the good of the rich will not wash. The economy is on its knees. Services are collapsing. Key workers have had enough. The press might be best advised telling the truth: the UK is a failing state.

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