“Fatah isn’t committed to exterminating Israel.”
Unfortunately, Israel is not committed simply to exterminating the Palestinians of Gaza, it is actually doing it. Even the Israeli press has acknowledged this.

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“Is it any accident that one of the earliest austerity actions was to close public libraries, the one place you could go and look at source material?”

That’s a fair point, and from my experience of a lifetime collaborating with these sharks, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. However, sadly I suspect the real truth is that public libraries are simply an easier target than closing down a part of a hospital for example.

On a more positive note, we still have the internet

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I believe the “news” was always shaped by vested interests and there is no such thing as a Golden Age of press probity. When Hearst Artist Frederic Remington, cabled from Cuba in 1897 that “there will be no war,” William Randolph Hearst cabled back: “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

However what is different now is the sheer hysterical blatancy of their manipulation.

I think this is because the stakes are much higher. Far more people are literate and follow domestic or international events, so far more people have to be convinced of the dominant paradigm. The Internet has provided more sources of alternative information, though you have to be very careful with those, too. We are living through a period of wind and fog, when news outlets of all kinds are competing to push their line and more and more it becomes a case of pandering to readers’ preconceived ideas as much as actively brainwashing them.

I sometimes think”too much information” is just as demoralising as “too little”. My views on Ukraine for example would be diametrically opposed to the mainstream narrative, but that is because I have been exposed to a competing version of the facts on the ground, which seems to me more plausible. However, this knowledge may be partial and distorted, too – it almost certainly is. This leaves me no better placed to do anything about what I consider to be a massive geo-political miscalculation, and at odds with those around me have bought into the conventional wisdom. In other words, I am just as neutered and helpless as the people who never bothered to query any of it at all, and probably more unsettled by it.

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I discovered at quite a young age that a lot of what you read or hear in the papers is just wrong. Anyone who has been the subject of a story in the press, or interviewed by a reporter will know this. Even reports on something as simple as a football match may be entirely wrong, though admittedly they do manage to report the correct score almost all the time—though not always, as for example The Guardian’s scorecard for the test match a few weeks ago completely omitted the name of the Yorkshire batsman Joe Root who scored a century, possibly an indication of anti-Yorkshire bias in the Manchester Guardian.

But going back to personal experience, often photographs show the wrong person, or name people in the wrong sequence, spell their names wrong, and so on. In any story that has medical content words are almost inevitably spelled wrong, and in particular when the names of drugs are mentioned it is de rigueur to take a shot at spelling the name phonetically, but never to check it from a reputable source.

Actually I worked for a newspaper in Florida for a while as a part-time job as a proofreader, so I could see what goes on in a newsroom at first hand, and talk to many of the reporters, sub-editors, and even occasionally try my hand at laying out pages. What I discovered was that many reporters were lousy writers and completely relied on other people cleaning up their text, so that stories passed through several hands before they were published, and each set of hands added to the distortions and errors as well as removing some.

One of my most amusing stories of news in action was when I was sitting just behind a reporter as he was taking a phone call from the local sheriff calling from his car after a City Hall meeting. As the sheriff spoke, he was pulled over by one of his own officers for speeding, then proceeded to berate the officer with the “do you know who the hell I am” routine, forgetting that his cell phone on the seat beside him was still open (this was in the early days of cell phones). This became a front page story and almost certainly contributed to Richard H. Worch’s failure to be re-elected in the next election cycle. OK, so it was not amusing for him.

Anyway, you are lucky to get half the facts right in any given story, as the reporters are often more interested in getting the assignment finished so they can go to lunch with their girlfriend, etc. and their perception of what constitutes accurate reporting is obviously constrained by their own point of view, life experience, and so on.

For commercial media the real name of the game is selling advertising space, not reporting the news, and while that cannot be said to be the case for the BBC, one has to remember that the BBC really assumed its prominent place in the consciousness of the British nation during World War II when it was the national propaganda station. George Orwell worked for the BBC during the war doing propaganda broadcasts to India, and much of what you find in Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects his BBC experiences.

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