Delingpole: The Mainstream Media Are Bought, Paid for – and Doomed!

Across the world, the mainstream media are dying a death. Here are the latest newspaper circulation figures from the United Kingdom.

Daily Mail: 944,981 (1.13million)

Express: 234,373 (289,393)

Mirror: 363,082 (442,610)

Star: 219,275 (276,453)

i paper: 134,553 (215,640)

Guardian: 106,003 (129,961)

Financial Times: 88,756 (146,373)

Neither the Telegraph nor the Times group will disclose their latest figures but we can safely assume they are grim. It’s the same story in the U.S. where, even a month ago, newspapers were reporting an “extinction-level crisis” as advertising began to dry up.

So why, having spent a large part of my journalistic career writing for national newspapers, am I so strangely reluctant to give a damn?

Simple. I believe the newspapers — and all those TV news channels suffering similar collapse — have brought about their own destruction. The mainstream media have failed in their most basic duty to report on the news. Instead, what they have served up increasingly is politically-driven advertorial and propaganda.

Never has this been more painfully obvious than during the coronavirus crisis.

One day, I believe, in the not too distant future, some very hard questions are going to be asked about the evidence on which governments across the world elected to shut down their economies and put their people under house arrest in what may well turn out to be the most catastrophic collective political misjudgement in history.

Traditionally, you might have hoped, the media would have been on hand to query those governments’ decisions at every stage of the process. But they have done nothing of the kind. On the contrary, instead of attempting to sift the available evidence with cool reason, the MSM have done little else but ramp up the hysteria; and instead of holding the political Establishment’s lockdown policies to account, the media have instead acted like its cheerleaders.

In the United Kingdom, the media’s performance has been dismal. There was a time, really not so long ago, when British newspapers — tabloids especially — were famed for their fearlessness, robustness, and cussed untameability. But throughout the pandemic, the entirety of Britain’s print media — both left-leaning and right-leaning — has not just pandered to Project Coronavirus Fear but stoked it with such demented enthusiasm it has managed to frighten almost the whole country into a state of abject, bed-wetting terror, spiked with a nasty hint of Stasi-style snitching, handwringing disapproval and nervy paranoia.

Sure, there’s a case to be made that lockdown policies are proportionate and sensible a response to an unfamiliar virus.

What has been all but absent from the MSM is the increasingly plausible counter-argument: that it has all been a massive overreaction which has done far more damage than the supposed problem.

Yes, sometimes, it’s true, various maverick commentators in the op-ed sections have been permitted to make the case for liberty, rationalism, and prosperity. But almost invariably the actual news stories — the main body of the paper, in other words — have a) relentlessly promoted the scare narrative that Covid-19 is an almost unprecedentedly serious threat, and b) relentlessly promoted the official government line that the lockdown is necessary, important and scientifically justified — and also a great national moral endeavour akin to World War II.

Stories that contradict the official narratives have either been played down, ignored, or reported very late in the day. Stories that promote the official narrative have been hammered home.

One example of this is hydroxychloroquine, which is invariably reported in the MSM as something scary, maverick, hazardous — and which President Trump was quite irresponsible to promote as a potential solution. There are few if any countervailing stories about medics who claim to be using it successfully, and if these run they are always heavily caveated.

The same is true of the reporting on Sweden. There’s an argument that Sweden’s laissez-faire policy towards lockdown — with people left largely free to make up their own minds whether they want to self-isolate or not — will ultimately prove the most sensible and least economically damaging.

Yet while you’ll read columnists saying this in the comment sections you’ll almost never see it reported in the news pages. Instead what you get is heavily biased reports like this recent one in the Telegraph:

Sweden has now overtaken the UK, Italy and Belgium to have the highest coronavirus per capita death rate in the world, throwing its decision to avoid a strict lockdown into further doubt.

According to figures collated by the Our World in Data website, Sweden had 6.08 deaths per million inhabitants per day on a rolling seven-day average between May 13 and May 20.

This is the highest in the world, above the UK, Belgium and the US, which have 5.57, 4.28 and 4.11 respectively.

However, Sweden has only had the highest death rate over the past week, with Belgium, Spain, Italy, the UK and France, still ahead over the entire course of the pandemic.

You’d almost think that the mainstream media do not want Sweden to be proved a success because then it would embarrass those governments which have adopted more draconian policies. And you’d be right, too.

The British MSM’s relentless propagandising on behalf to the official government line initially puzzled me. Normally, after all, as happened with Brexit, you might have expected a range of views — some newspapers pro-, some anti-. So why the unanimity on coronavirus?

Part of the answer can be found in this government strategy document from March 22nd. It was put together by the behaviour experts who advise the government on how to nudge the public in a particular direction.