Lies, misrepresentations, smears and falsehoods – mainstream media today

Thank you, Peter Oborne. Thank you very much. For my part, I have taken to sitting outside the BBC and soon the Guardian whenever I can with a placard pointing to the UK Media complicity in the torture of Julian Assange. It is all linked. The murkiness of MSM News is pernicious. We have experienced that in the last few years with their unprecedented attacks on Jeremy Corbyn especially with the catcalls of antisemitism. Time to get out there and make their lives uncomfortable.

in luxemburg the people there refer to our news media as the uk right wing press . We are getting a reputation in this country and it is not a nice one. Years ago a bbc interviewer asked David Cameron a perfectly reasonable question. Cameron responded with ” you would do well to remember who you work for …. ” I am not certain if Cameron said If you value your job. The tories have a stranglehold on the British news and assume they should always be in office and that it would be the worse thing if labour ever got into pwer. This is worrying and we were known to be a democratic country, alas that is not the case anymore

This is a timely challenge to prominent mainstream journalists.

The case of Robert Peston is particularly interesting, because Peston takes
considerable trouble to reply to the accusations against him, as referenced in the article. Peston is almost certainly an honest journalist in the sense that he genuinely believes that he is not an uncritical conduit for propaganda and mendacity. He is however capable of astonishing intellectual shallowness. An obvious example, unrelated to Peter Oborne’s specific critique, is Peston’s response to the controversy over Corbyn’s reluctance to adopt, unamended, the examples of the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Peston is quoted by the Jewish Chronicle (4/10/18) as saying:

“I have been profoundly uncomfortable with how long it took the Labour party to sign up to the standard IHRA definition and all its examples of antisemitism”

https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/peston-i-told-corbyn-i-feel-uncomfortable-with-labour-antisemitism-1.470662

To his credit Peston goes on to say that he does not believe that Corbyn is antisemitic. Instead he accuses him of being “naive”. However on the question of the IHRA definition, and indeed on the broader question of the supposed “Labour antisemitism crisis”, it is not Corbyn who was being naive, but Peston himself. Peston seems to have been unaware of, or simply chose to ignore, the multiple devastating critiques of the IHRA definition as being unfit for purpose by some of the most eminent academics and jurists, many of them Jewish. These critics pointed out that the definition was not only incoherent, but was deliberately being used to stifle legitimate free speech on Israel and Palestine. The critics of the IHRA’s use even include Kenneth Stern, the lawyer who originally drafted the iHRA definition. All this has been meticulously documented and referenced on the JVL website and other places such as the LRB. How could Peston ignore all this?

https://jewishvoiceforliberation.org.uk/search?s=IHRA

To be fair to Peston, part of the answer doubtless in the breakneck work schedule of his job, which hardly allows time for anything other than the most superficial analysis. Yet, beyond that, probably the most profound explanation for such blindness was given in 1996 by Noam Chomsky in his devastating reply to Andrew Marr when the latter questioned whether Chomsky was suggesting that mainstream journalists like himself were “self-censoring” information and analysis which infringed a permissible consensus. “How can you know I’m self-censoring – how can you know?” was Marr’s heartfelt plea. Chomsky replied:

“I’m not saying you’re self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

https://youtu.be/GjENnyQupow