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qqueenofhades · 4 years

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(1/2) Honestly, Hilary, you are a blessing. I want to scream about your amazing Fic, how I love Immortal Husbands and the whole Immortal Family and how I had more fun learning history from your writing than in my whole damn school. But I also want to appreciate your TOG answers and meta. All the more because my friends outside the internet saw TOG as some boring movie with shitty plot and I'm just here in the corner, wanting to scream at someone who will understand about FINALLY seeing...

"(2/2) ...some GOOD queer representation, without throwing stereotypes in our faces, and I can't even begin with the found family trope because THE FEELS. Anyway, what I was trying to say with this rambling: thank you. <3"

....I’m sorry what. Who. Who is saying this. Straight people? I feel like the answer is definitely straight people. Because they have had EIGHTY FUCKING THOUSAND shitty action movies with the Boring White Man Hero, the disposable Muslim-coded (or actually Muslim) villains, the equally disposable eye-candy female love interest who either gets fridged or is secretly evil, Grimdark Everyone Is Secretly Bad And Nothing Matters crap philosophy, Moral Hand Wringing Over Superhero Violence, on and on. So of course they can moan and whine about “iT’s nOt OrIGinAL” and apparently not sufficiently Grimdark and Amoral, and how the dynamics of the team are completely reshuffled in a way that actually doesn’t prioritize THEM, and like.... this is why I never trust media only beloved by straight people, and only ever watch anything after it’s been recommended to me by a trusted queer friend. Because sometimes I remember the difference, and WHOOF.

Because: the gays and people of color DESERVE formulaic action/superhero movies as much as the Generic White Bro (in fact, we can all agree, far more than the Generic White Bro). This is the trap where every piece of media that’s not made by a Mediocre White Man has to be the best all-time of its genre, apparently, rather than using some of the same well-loved storytelling tropes but recoding them and re-deploying them for a more diverse audience. Instead of the Hard Bitten White Man Action Hero, we have Andy and Nile (two women, and Nile as a young Black woman who literally cannot be shot to death, in the year 2020, is fucking revolutionary on its own don’t @ me). As I said in my first meta, even Booker, who comes closest to fulfilling that trope, is made the closest thing to a “villain” there is on the team and even then for entirely sympathetic motives that rest on him having teary-eyed conversations with Nile about how he misses his family and feels like he failed them. His emotions help drive the story in an actually GOOD and useful way, rather than sacrificing everyone else to coddle him through his feeble heterosexual manchildness (why yes, I AM staring directly at the Abomination without blinking). Nobody in the story is EVER penalized or made a fool of for loving their found family (itself an intensely queer trope, even before the queerness of the individual characters) or trying to do the right thing even in the middle of the horrors, and frankly, I just want to consume more media with that as the main message. I’M SO FREAKING TIRED OF GRIMDARK. GOD. IF I WANTED THAT I COULD JUST TURN ON THE NEWS.

And of course, my BELOVED Joe and Nicky: an interracial, interreligious gay couple that has been wildly in love for literal CENTURIES and gives me the opportunity to do things like write the most self-indulgent historical romance backstory fic ever with DVLA. They met in the embodiment of religious conflict and have transcended that, there are never any cruel jokes or expectation for you to congratulate the narrative for being so beneficent as to give you “an exclusively gay moment” (fuck you Disney!). Joe and Nicky’s love story is central both to who they are as characters, doesn’t revolve around them being suffering or being Tormented over being gay (when the cops pull them apart for kissing, they beat the cops the fuck up, WE STAN), gets to unfold naturally in the background of the story with these beautiful little beats of casual intimacy (the SPOONING /clutches heart) and since THEY LITERALLY CANNOT DIE, no chance of the “burying your gays” bullshit. Even when they’re captured first by the bad guys, and I briefly, upon first viewing, worried that they were going the Gay Pain route just for cheap emotional points, they remain constantly united and fighting together and able to do stupid things like flirt when they’re strapped to gurneys by a mad scientist. Then the rest of the team ends up right there with them, so it’s not something that happens to them alone, and Nile comes in to save everyone’s asses, and Joe and Nicky get ANOTHER beautiful moment of fighting the bad guys and being worried about each other and tender even in the middle of this chaos and GOD! MY HEART! MY WHOLE ASS HEART! I LOVE THEM!

And just the fact that it’s not the Evul Mooslim Turrorists or Boilerplate Scary Eastern Europeans or whoever else who are the bad guys, but Big Pharma, nasty white men with too much money and not enough ethics, the CIA (at least tangentially; they could have pushed a lot harder on that but I’ll give Copley individually a pass), and the very forces that want to stop the Old Guard and discount what they do (helping the little people) as worthless... GOD. That is fucking POWERFUL. They literally take the time to explain with Copley’s Conspiracy Wall that even the little things the team does, when they can’t see it themselves, spiral out through centuries and have positive effects down the line. And it’s NOT just in the Western world (no scene in the movie takes place in America, none of the main four characters/heroes are American, and they only go to England when the English villains capture them). They’re in Africa, in Asia, in South America, in all these places where the Western/imperial world order has harmed people the most and in a way that Euro/American audience often gets to forget. On the surface this might be an action movie with Charlize Theron beating up men (which I mean, that alone is fine if you ask me) but there are SO MANY WAYS in which it achieves these deeper moments of meaning and subversion of the narrative that we are so often fed and the ways it could have done this (i.e. the same old Mediocre White Man ways).

I love the fact that the team unabashedly LOVES each other as their family members (I will never get over them all liking to sleep in one room even in their safe house in France), even when they struggle, and that they continue trying to make it right and never consider leaving Booker behind, because he screwed up but they still love him (and he them). I LOVE LOVE LOVE that this movie gave me not just Joe and Nicky but Andy and Quynh: two completely badass queer couples who kick tons of ass and have romance and Drama and rich and well-realized lives outside being used as emotional manipulation or suffering porn for straight people. (I realise it’s only been two weeks since the first one released, but where is my sequel, I have Needs. Especially Andy/Quynh and Quynh/Joe/Nicky needs). I was disappointed that they’d gotten rid of Quynh in a Bad Medieval Way to cause pain for Andy and then shocked and DELIGHTED when she turned up alive in Booker’s apartment at the end of the film. I LOVE that this movie gave me Nile Freeman and everything that she represents in the middle of this hellish year. I even love Booker! BOOKER! When he’s usually the character type I can’t stand and have the least patience with!

So yes. I have watched it three times already. I am sure I am going to watch it several times more. It just makes me so happy.

#the old guard #the old guard meta #joe x nicky #weaverofthenight #ask

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canchewread · 6 years

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Editor’s note: Originally, I was going to save this quote until Bernie Sanders declared he was running for President in 2020, but I think there’s enough evidence that he’ll eventually declare now to confidently proceed with this write up - if he chickens out, I guess I’ll just have to deal with this post being thrown in my face for a while.

Today’s quotation comes from Matt Taibbi’s 2016 US Presidential election campaign book, “Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus” - a volume that mostly consists of essays Taibbi released over the course of the entire campaign (Primaries and General Election) with some glue in the introduction and concluding portions of the book, to tie the whole thing together.

As those of you who regularly read my work here on Can’t You Read are no doubt already aware, I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi’s writing - both in terms of style and the value of the content he provides. While nobody who can effectively work in mainstream media for over a decade should be trusted completely, I think it’s fair to say that Taibbi is, by the comparatively poor standards of his industry, an honest, rational observer of an institution (U.S. politics) that is anything but honest and rational. He is also, despite the numerous attempts to smear him, a fundamentally decent human being and that still matters a little bit in the world of American politics - although, maybe not as much as it should.

As for the book itself - Insane Clown President is ultimately a frustrating collection of writing; while two thirds of the book represents Taibbi at the absolutely height of his powers and easily ranks among his best work, the remaining third feels like a bunch of social media posts and fan mail cobbled into something resembling a narrative, then inserted into the book to fill out the page count. For example, while hashing out the rules of the GOP debate drinking game and conducting unofficial primary polls was probably a lot of fun for Taibbi’s followers on Twitter, it simply doesn’t translate into an enjoyable experience when transported onto the written page - the effect is actually quite jarring and somehow manages to detract from the rest of the extremely high-quality analysis Matt brings to the table.

The upshot here, are of course passages like the one quoted above, from a chapter appropriately and presciently titled - “June 9th, 2016: Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons from Their Brush with Bernie.” It is in moments like these that Taibbi seems to have his finger directly on the pulse of the class conflict between the voting public and the political elite (of which the mainstream media is effectively a public relations arm) in the United States. Unfortunately, despite Matt’s incisive analysis of the problems that would eventually define the entire 2016 election, the author’s (somewhat myopic) attachment to a liberalized ideal of previous editions of the Democratic Party, ultimately prevents him from drawing the obvious conclusion his own writing exposes throughout the book - that Trump is going to win, because American politics and its political media, are both fundamentally broken.

Despite these issues however, Insane Clown President’s most important contribution to understanding the current US political environment is Taibbi’s ability to recognize both swine emperor Trump and Bernie Sanders as symptoms of a populist insurgency waged not against internal factions within the normal framework of U.S. politics, but in opposition to the entire elite American ruling class and its institutions - our “establishment” if you will.

Before I go any further into what this means for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination race however, I’d like to talk a little bit about the false media narrative that the left wing populist movement behind Bernie Sanders is somehow “the same” as the revanchist, reactionary right wing movement that propelled Herr Donald to the White House in 2016 - a narrative which is, in a word, bullsh*t. While both political phenomenon are motivated to some degree by a mistrust of, alienation from and even outright loathing of the U.S. establishment and its institutions, the reasons for that mistrust, the overall end goals and the origin point of these respective insurgencies are totally different.

The far right “populist” movement that Trump was able to usurp during the 2016 Republican primaries, has its roots in Paleoconservatism and the largely AstroTurf, billionaire-funded conservative “Tea Party movement.” It is a fundamentally reactionary movement, created by the rich to blame America’s ills not on deregulated capitalism and an absurdly greedy ruling class, but instead on the proverbial “other” - brown-skinned immigrants, Muslims, the gay and transgender community, women, African Americans, the Jewish left, political correctness, big government and most of all, the dreaded “socialists, communists and liberals.” At its core, what we now call “Trumpism” is a revanchist Frankenstein’s Monster; the result of decades of weaponized and fetishistic worship of American exceptionalism, white supremacy and the absolute rule of capital - the only problem for the architects of this movement is that Trump managed to hack the code and establish his own mini-cult of personality by being more explicitly fascist and hateful than they were.

The movement propelling Sanders to the forefront of American politics by contrast is a genuine, grass roots endeavor. Although it’s easy enough to make the argument that the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, anti-fracking activists, and the Black Lives Matter protests have all provided inspiration and ideological underpinnings for this democratic socialist wave, the fact is that there is no unseen hand at work here; no billionaire backers, no guerrilla marketing wunderkinds, and no AstroTurf corporate media campaigns can claim responsibility for the phenomenon Sanders has helped embody in American politics. I say helped, because this too represents a key difference between the DemSoc wave and Trumpism; as a policy-focused movement, this new American left isn’t just about Bernie Sanders and already we’ve seen inspiring young leaders like Lee Carter, Rashida Tlaib, and especially Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez step to the front with their own democratic socialist message.

Finally, unlike Trumpism, this Sanders-inspired DemSoc insurgency is a movement whose policy proposals match their rhetoric; striving for economic equality, environmental protections, universal health coverage, increased educational opportunities for all, a restoration of democratic rights, better jobs with improved working conditions, the right to collectively bargain, affordable housing, ending mass incarceration, women’s rights, civil rights, and yes, despite what you’ve heard in corporate media owned by rich white people - ending racism and injustice against all marginalized people. Indeed, particularly on the issues of supporting Palestinians living under Israeli apartheid and ending American imperialism abroad, the movement Sanders helped to inspire appears to be driving him further to the left on the political spectrum; although not as much as some, myself included, would like.

In short, if Trumpism is about dragging the country back to a more explicitly white supremacist era, the movement Sanders helps represent is about establishing a fairer, more compassionate and more democratic America than the world has ever known - even under FDR.

There is however, one potential analogue between these two insurgencies and this is where I think the above quote from Taibbi’s book comes in; while there are no real similarities between Trumpism and the Sanders movement, there are a great deal of similarities between the ways both established U.S. political factions and their media minions have responded to an insurgent voter’s revolt.

In 2012, and fresh off the heels of a traumatizing insurgent Tea Party revolt within the party, the Republican establishment put all its chips down on making Barrack Obama a one term president. Expending what would turn out to be the last of their political capital, the GOP establishment managed to force through the Butcher of Bain Capital, “center-right” candidate Mitt Romney during the GOP primary process - a choice distinctly divorced from the anti-elite sentiment (if not reality) of a Tea-Party base now openly indulging in Birtherism and starting to warm up to, you guessed it, Donald Trump. It was the type of calculated bet the party elite would only have been prepared to make if they were sure Romney would win the 2012 presidential election, because they were essentially gambling that deposing the hated Obama would quell the rage their reactionary base felt at being betrayed by the GOP elite, embodied in the form of Romney.

In retrospect, it seems obvious now that when (despite all of Karl Rove’s rosy projections) Romney went down in flames, the GOP establishment was fatally fractured; having demonized Obama as literally an enemy of the American people, when the Republican brain trust failed to deliver his head on a platter that morning in 2012, they effectively lost the revanchist right who’d powered their surge back to political relevance only two years before.

From the outside however, this was not immediately apparent; the Republican leadership quickly announced an election autopsy and soon enough the same people who’d failed Republican voters in 2012 were offering their prescriptions for how to win the next one in 2016. Putting their mighty heads together, these elite GOP power brokers came back with arguably the only candidate more Republican establishment than Romney, Jeb Bush.

It was as we now know, a drastic miscalculation but one that should have been recognized long before Trump won the GOP nomination. When Party leaders lacked the ability to preemptively weed a wild and opportunistic seventeen candidate Republican nomination field, including, incredibly, a credible “center-right” candidate from anointed establishment GOP champion Jeb Bush’s *own* state - the writing was already on the wall for a party leadership group that was only keeping up appearances after exiting 2012 essentially politically bankrupt and broken.

Moving the timeline forward four years, it’s extremely difficult not to see strong parallels on the Democratic side of the ledger. Here too we see a party that barely staved off a radical insurgency by expending an enormous amount of political capital to ram through a highly-unpopular candidate, all the while dismissing the growing outrage from the left wing portion of their base as irrelevant because Hillary Clinton would definitely be the next President of the United States. After losing the 2016 election, the Democratic establishment quickly conducted an autopsy, made some vague platitudes about listening to the angry left-wingers that backed Bernie Sanders and ultimately decided to keep doing the same things they’ve always done before; just like the Republican Party in 2012. Yet, as the 2020 Democratic Party race opens, it is clear that the liberal establishment no longer has enough control over the party to weed the field, and prevent more than a dozen nearly-identical centrist candidates from splitting a vote that would otherwise be united under one candidate, preordained to fight off Bernie Sanders once again.

Can a broken, politically bankrupt Democratic Party hold off Sanders a second time doing essentially the exact same things that failed to hold off Trumpism on the GOP side of aisle?

I wouldn’t bet on it - as beloved American author Samuel Clemens is often (and perhaps falsely) reputed to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

- nina illingworth

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clubofinfo · 7 years

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Expert: Last week, Jeremy Corbyn humbled the entire political and corporate media commentariat. With a little help from Britain’s student population. And with a little help from thousands of media activists. Without doubt this was one of the most astonishing results in UK political history. Dismissed by all corporate political pundits, including the clutch of withered fig leaves at the Guardian, reviled by scores of his own Blairite MPs (see here), Corbyn ‘increased Labour’s share of the vote by more than any other of the party’s election leaders since 1945′ with ‘the biggest swing since… shortly after the Second World War’. He won a larger share of the vote than Tony Blair in 2005. Corbyn achieved this without resorting to angry lefty ranting. His focus was on kindness, compassion, sharing, inclusivity and forgiveness. This approach held up a crystal-clear mirror to the ugly, self-interested cynicism of the Tory party, and transformed the endless brickbats into flowers of praise. On Twitter, John Prescott disclosed that when Rupert Murdoch saw the exit poll ‘he stormed out of the room’. As ever, while the generals made good their escape, front-line troops were less fortunate. Outfought by Team Corbyn, out-thought by social media activists, outnumbered in the polls, many commentators had no option but to fall on their microphones and keyboards. LBC radio presenter Iain Dale led the way: Let me be the first to say, I got it wrong, wholly wrong. I should have listened more to my callers who have been phoning into my show day after day, week after week. The Guardian’s Gaby Hinsliff, who had written in January, ‘This isn’t going to be yet another critique of Corbyn, by the way, because there is no point. The evidence is there for anyone with eyes’, tweeted: This is why I trust @iaindale’s judgement; he admits when it was way off. (As mine was. As god knows how many of ours was) Hinsliff promised: Like everyone else who didn’t foresee the result, I’ll be asking myself hard questions & trying to work out what changed… Annoying as ever, we asked: But will you be asking yourself about the structural forces, within and outside Guardian and corporate media generally, shaping performance? And: Is a corporate journalist free to analyse the influence of owners, profit-orientation, ad-dependence, state-subsidised news? Taboo subjects. Presumably engrossed in introspection, Hinsliff did not reply. Right-winger John Rentoul, who insisted four weeks ago in the Independent that, ‘we are moving towards the end of the Corbynite experiment’, appeared to be writing lines in detention: I was wrong about Jeremy Corbyn – The Labour leader did much better in the election than I expected. I need to understand and learn from my mistakes. Channel 4 News presenter and Telegraph blogger, Cathy Newman tweeted: Ok let’s be honest, until the last few weeks many of us under-estimated @jeremycorbyn Translating from the ‘newspeak’: many corporate journalists waged a relentless campaign over two years to persuade the public to ‘underestimate’ Corbyn, but were wrong about the public’s ability to see through the propaganda. Piers Morgan, who predicted the Conservatives would win a ’90-100 seat majority’, wrote: I think Mr Corbyn has proved a lot of people, including me, completely wrong. In a typically dramatic flourish, Channel 4’s Jon Snow’s summation was harsh but fair: I know nothing. We the media, the pundits, the experts, know nothing. Guardian columnist Rafael Behr, who wrote in February, ‘Jeremy Corbyn is running out of excuses’, also ate humble pie: Fair play to Jeremy Corbyn and his team. They have done a lot of things I confidently thought they – he – could not do. I was wrong. In March, Observer columnist Nick Cohen graphically predicted that ‘Corbyn’s Labour won’t just lose. It’ll be slaughtered.’ In an article titled, ‘Don’t tell me you weren’t warned about Corbyn’, Cohen indicated the words that would ‘be flung’ at Corbynites ‘by everyone who warned that Corbyn’s victory would lead to a historic defeat’: I Told You So You Fucking Fools! Apparently frothing at the mouth, Cohen concluded by advising the idiots reading his column that, following the predicted electoral disaster, ‘your only honourable response will be to stop being a fucking fool by changing your fucking mind’. Awkward, then, for Cohen to now ‘apologise to affronted Corbyn supporters… I was wrong’; presumably feeling like a fucking fool, having changed his fucking mind. Tragicomically, Cohen then proceeded to be exactly as ‘wrong’ all over again: The links between the Corbyn camp and a Putin regime that persecutes genuine radicals. Corbyn’s paid propaganda for an Iranian state that hounds gays, subjugates women and tortures prisoners. Corbyn and the wider left’s indulgence of real antisemites (not just critics of Israel). They are all on the record. That Tory newspapers used them against the Labour leadership changes nothing. Former Guardian comment editor and senior columnist Jonathan Freedland spent two years writing a series of anti-Corbyn hit pieces (see our media alert for discussion). Last month, Freedland wrote under the title, ‘No more excuses: Jeremy Corbyn is to blame for this meltdown’, lamenting: What more evidence do they need? What more proof do the Labour leadership and its supporters require? Freedland helpfully relayed focus group opinion to the effect that Corbyn was a ‘dope’, ‘living in the past’, ‘a joke’, ‘looking as if he knows less about it than I do’. Freedland has also, now, had no choice but to back down: Credit where it’s due. Jeremy Corbyn defied those – including me – who thought he could not win seats for Lab. I was wrong. Like Freedland, senior Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee has relentlessly attacked Corbyn. On April 19, she wrote of how ‘Corbyn is rushing to embrace Labour’s annihilation’: Wrong, wrong and wrong again. Was ever there a more crassly inept politician than Jeremy Corbyn, whose every impulse is to make the wrong call on everything? This week, Toynbee’s tune had changed: Nothing succeeds like success. Jeremy Corbyn looks like a new man, beaming with confidence, benevolence and forgiveness to erstwhile doubters… Apparently channelling David Brent of The Office, Toynbee added: When I met him on Sunday he clasped my hand and, with a twinkle and a wink, thanked me for things I had written. With zero self-awareness, Toynbee noted that the Mail and Sun had helped Corbyn: ‘by dredging up every accusation against him yet failing to frighten voters away, they have demolished their own power’. Former Guardian political editor Michael White, yet another regular anti-Corbyn commentator, admitted: I was badly wrong. JC had much wider voter appeal than I realised Former Guardian journalist, Jonathan Cook, replied: Problem is you *all* got it wrong. That fact alone exposes structural flaw of corporate media. You don’t represent us, you represent power. White responded: You’re not still banging on, are you Jonathan. You do talk some bollocks. Guardian, Telegraph, Independent and New Statesman contributor Abi Wilkinson tweeted: Don’t think some of people making demands about who Corbyn puts in shadow cabinet have particularly earned the right to be listened to… We paired this with Wilkinson’s comment from June 2016: Any hope I once held about Corbyn’s ability to steer the party in a more positive direction has been well and truly extinguished. Wilkinson replied: ‘oh fuck off’, before concluding that we are ‘two misogynistic cranks in a basement’, and ‘just some dickheads who aren’t actually fit’ to hold the media to account. When a tweeter suggested that Corbyn’s result was ‘brilliant’, New Statesman editor Jason Cowley replied: ‘Yes, I agree.’ Just three days earlier, Cowley had written under the ominous title: The Labour reckoning – Corbyn has fought a spirited campaign but is he leading the party to worst defeat since 1935? In March, Cowley opined: The stench of decay and failure coming from the Labour Party is now overwhelming – Speak to any Conservative MP and they will say that there is no opposition. Period. Like everyone else at the Guardian, columnist Owen Jones’ initial instinct was to tweet away from his own viewspaper’s ferocious anti-Corbyn campaign: The British right wing press led a vicious campaign of lies, smears, hatred and bigotry. And millions told them where to stick it. And yet, as recently as April 18, Jones had depicted Corbyn as a pathetic figure: A man who stood only out of a sense of duty, to put policies on the agenda, and who certainly had no ambition to be leader, will now take Labour into a general election, against all his original expectations. My suggestion that Corbyn stand down in favour of another candidate was driven by a desire to save his policies… Jones has now also issued a mea culpa: I owe Corbyn, John McDonnell, Seumas Milne, his policy chief Andrew Fisher, and others, an unreserved, and heartfelt apology… I wasn’t a bit wrong, or slightly wrong, or mostly wrong, but totally wrong. Having one foot in the Labour movement and one in the mainstream media undoubtedly left me more susceptible to their groupthink. Never again. We will see! To his credit, Jones managed to criticise his own employer (something he had previously told us was unthinkable and absurd): Now that I’ve said I’m wrong…so the rest of the mainstream commentariat, including in this newspaper, must confess they were wrong, too. Despite the blizzard of mea culpas from colleagues, George Monbiot also initially pointed well away from his employer: The biggest losers today are the billionaires who own the Mail, Sun, Times and Telegraph. And thought they owned the nation. And: It was The Sun wot got properly Cor-Binned’. And: ‘By throwing every brick in the house at Corbyn, and still failing to knock him over, the billionaire press lost much of its power. After receiving criticism, and having, of course, seen Jones’ mea culpa, Monbiot subsequently admitted that anti-Corbyn bias is found ‘even in the media that’s not owned by billionaires’: This problem also affects the Guardian… Only the Guardian and the Mirror enthusiastically supported both Labour and Corbyn in election editorials. But the scales still didn’t balance. This is a change from Monbiot’s declared position of three years ago, when he rejected the idea that the Guardian was part of the problem. This week, he recalled his own dumping of Corbyn in a tweet from January: ‘I have now lost all faith.’ The full tweet read: I was thrilled when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, but it has been one fiasco after another. I have now lost all faith. Monbiot blamed media bias on the way journalists are selected – ‘We should actively recruit people from poorer backgrounds’ – and wrote, curiously, ‘the biggest problem, I believe, is that we spend too much time in each other’s company’. We suggested to Monbiot that this was not at all ‘the biggest problem’ with ‘mainstream’ media, and pointed instead to elite ownership, profit-orientation, advertiser dependence and use of state-subsidised ‘news’, as discussed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their ‘propaganda model’. Jonathan Cook responded to Monbiot, describing the limits of free speech with searing honesty: This blindness even by a “radical” like Monbiot to structural problems in the media is not accidental either. Realistically, the furthest he can go is where he went today in his column: suggesting organisational flaws in the corporate media, ones that can be fixed, rather than structural ones that cannot without rethinking entirely how the media functions. Monbiot will not – and cannot – use the pages of the Guardian to argue that his employer is structurally incapable of providing diverse and representative coverage. Nor can he admit that his own paper polices its pages to limit what can be said on the left, to demarcate whole areas of reasonable thought as off-limits. To do so would be to end his Guardian career and consign him to the outer reaches of social media. The same, of course, applies to Jones, who made no attempt at all to account for corporate media bias. Media grandee Will Hutton, former editor-in-chief of the Observer, now Principal of Hertford College, Oxford, wrote of ‘How the rightwing tabloids got it wrong – It was the Sun wot hung it’. On Twitter, we reminded Hutton of his own article, one month earlier: Er, excuse us..! Will Hutton, May 7: “Never before in my adult life has the future seemed so bleak for progressives. Tragicomically, given the awesome extent of his employer’s anti-Corbyn bias, John Cody Fidler-Simpson CBE, BBC World Affairs Editor, tweeted: I suspect we’ve seen the end of the tabloids as arbiters of UK politics. Sun, Mail & Express threw all they had into backing May, & failed. We replied: Likewise the “quality” press and the BBC, which has been so biased even a former chair of the BBC Trust spoke out. Sir Michael Lyons, who chaired the BBC trust from 2007 to 2011, commented on the BBC’s ‘quite extraordinary attacks on the elected leader of the Labour party’: I can understand why people are worried about whether some of the most senior editorial voices in the BBC have lost their impartiality on this. Conclusion – The Corporate Media Monopoly Is Broken ne week before the election, the Guardian reported that ‘a new force is shaping the general election debate’: Alternative news sites are run from laptops and bedrooms miles from the much-derided “Westminster bubble” and have emerged as one of the most potent forces in election news sharing, according to research conducted for the Guardian by the web analytics company Kaleida. These alternative articles were ‘being shared more widely online than the views of mainstream newspaper commentators’. Remarkably, ‘Nothing from the BBC, the Guardian or the Daily Mail comes close’ to the most-shared alternative media pieces. The Canary reported that it had doubled the number of visitors to its site to six million in May. A story by Evolve Politics, run by just two people, was shared 55,000 times on Facebook and was read at least 200,000 times. These websites ‘explicitly offer a counter-narrative to what they deride as the “MSM” or mainstream media’. Indeed, the evidence is now simply overwhelming – the 100-year big business monopoly of the mass media has been broken. It is obvious that the right-wing press – the Daily Mail, the Sun, The Times and Telegraph – play a toxic role in manipulating the public to favour elite interests. But many people are now realising that the liberal press is actually the most potent opponent of progressive change. Journalist Matt Kennard commented: The Guardian didn’t get it “wrong”. It is the mouthpiece of a liberal elite that is financially endangered by a socialist program. In truth, the Guardian sought to destroy Corbyn long before he became Labour leader (see here and here). This means that it did not target him because he was an ineffective leader imperilling Labour. And this hostility was no aberration, not a well-intentioned mistake that they got ‘wrong’. To this day, the Guardian remains Blair’s great cheerleader, despite his awesome crimes, just as it was Hillary Clinton and Obama’s cheerleader, and just as it was Bill Clinton’s before them. While employing a handful of compromised fig leaves, the Guardian has ruthlessly smeared anyone who has sought to challenge the status quo: Julian Assange, Russell Brand, Hugo Chavez, Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, John Pilger, George Galloway and many others. It has also been complicit in the great war crimes of Iraq, Libya and Syria – accepting fake government justifications for war at face value, ignoring expert sources who made a nonsense of the claims, and propagandising hard for the West’s supposed ‘responsibility to protect’ the nations it so obviously seeks to destabilise and exploit. In our view, the corporate journalists who should be treated with most caution are precisely those celebrated as ‘dissidents’. Corporate media give Owen Jones, George Monbiot, Paul Mason and others immense outreach to draw 100,000s of progressives back to a filtered, corporate version of the world that favours established power and stifles progressive change. Above all, as Jonathan Cook says, the unwritten rule is that they will not speak out on the inherent structural corruption of a corporate media system reporting on a world dominated by corporations. This is crucial, because, as last week confirms, and as we have been arguing for 16 years, if change begins anywhere, it begins with the public challenging, exposing and rejecting, not just the right-wing press, but the corporate media as a whole, the ‘liberal-left’ very much included. In the last month, we witnessed astonishing numbers of people challenging all media, all the time on every bias – we have never seen anything like it. The young, in particular, are learning that they do not need highly-paid, privileged corporate employees to tell them what to think. We don’t need to tolerate a corporate-filtered view of the world. We can inform ourselves and each other, and we can do so with very much more honesty, courage and compassion than any corporate journalist. If there is one message from last week, it’s a simple one – dump the corporate media; all of it. http://clubof.info/

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