Mark Cantrell, @man0words.bsky.social

The media’s absurd coverage of the RAF Fairford arrests is opening the public's eyes to the way reporting can quickly move away from the facts to promote the hidden agendas of the Britsh and US security establishments. Nonetheless, some may find the claim that the media in our “democratic” societies is not confrontational to, or at least distant from, the state hard to believe. Such an idea may be new to them. That should not be surprising. After all, how did each of us form our foundational view of the world – of who are the good guys, and who the bad – if not from spending a lifetime reading and watching media owned by billionaire-led corporations and the state? Since quitting the establishment media myself a quarter of a century ago (I worked for the Guardian), I have dedicated much of my time to identifying some of the most egregious examples of skewed journalism – reporting that consistently presents events in ways that serve not their audiences’ interests but those of the powerful: the corporations themselves; western security establishments; and Israel, the lynchpin of the West’s war industries. In such cases, the establishment media readily abandons even the pretence of neutral, fair or dispassionate reporting. It serves as little more than a propaganda factory. This has been all too visible in the coverage of Israel’s mass-slaughter in Gaza, a genocide that could not be named as such. It was visible in the coverage of Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine that had, in fact, been provoked by Nato for decades, as it expanded across Europe with a clear intention: either to corner Moscow militarily or drive it into a retaliatory attack on Ukraine that would provide an opportunity for the West to bleed Russia on a proxy battlefield. It was visible in the sustained media campaign of antisemitism smears against Jeremy Corbyn, that rarest, and most dangerous, of things: a leader of a major political party who promoted socialist policies for the benefit of the public, not billionaires, and was a vehement critic of Israel long before it showed its genocidal hand. It was visible too in the media pile-on against Julian Assange, whose Wikileaks whistleblower platform exposed British and US war crimes while also threatening to destroy the media’s top-down model. Having ridiculed him for claiming asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy for fear Washington would seek to extradite him for exposing its crimes, the media then treated his seizure by British police and incarceration for years in a high-security London prison, while the US sought his extradition for exposing its crimes, as entirely unremarkable, as barely worth reporting. I could go on and on. There is consistent pattern when the establishment media deals with the most important issues, the very ones in which our national security states are most invested. Then the media jettisons even the semblance of critical distance from the state. RAF Fairford is just the latest example of how, in such important moments, the media serves as nothing more than the security state’s loudspeaker. This is an extract from my latest article Reporting of the RAF Fairford arrests blows the idea of a ‘free press’ out of the water. Find a link to the rest in the reply post below ⬇️