Oh Dear, Nesrine, Are The Progressives Losing Their Grip On The Means Of Indoctrination?

Adding to the clamouring appetite for sharp challenge is a new information ecosystem where there are now more ways to dispute mainstream accounts of political reality.

Translation: the MSM can’t get away with lies and lying by omission any more…

The process of fragmentation combined with persistent monopoly is one that is mirrored in the media. Over the past two years alone, entire outlets have grown and flourished over what it seems is the media’s inability to adequately capture and express anger over Gaza. From Zeteo (dubbed a “breakout hit”) to Drop Site News, which launched only a year ago, now has almost 400,000 subscribers and closely works with journalists in Gaza, there is a vast appetite for more uncompromising discourse and intimate coverage of the Middle East and complicity on Gaza.

If you say so, Nesrine. But I think you’ll find most people are heartily sick to death of the constant bleating about Palestine.

Still, this has not diminished anger at mainstream outlets because it is understood that these organisations still have enormous reach and therefore power over public opinion, and by extension political outcomes. It is why the New York Times’s reports on starvation in Gaza have been heavily contested by pro-Israeli government voices, as the paper holds huge authority in the one country that has power over Israel.

Ah, one of the many, many fallacies Nesrine labours under is the fallacy that the media shapes public opinion, rather than reflecting it.

But all that residual power, from politics to the media, does not change the fact that something big is up for grabs – the default belief that these establishment institutions deserve their power, whether it can be taken away from them or not.

Nothing of course on how they've been found to have been abusing it? 

The risk now is of a sort of permanent bifurcation. On the one hand, increasingly out-of-control hysteria on immigration empowers ghouls like Farage and makes them and their poisonous rhetoric permanent features of our lives and politics, while rage over Gaza and economic policies constantly clouds the political atmosphere. On the other, a government is caught in the headlights, unable to tackle anything, while also hoping that it’s too big to fail and its opponents too small and diverse to succeed. What if the problem isn’t that the centre cannot hold, but that it can, and in doing so brings about a new, volatile, miserable status quo of escalating rage and impotent government?

Well, since that will provide you with more column inches than you already get, why are you worried?