The Judge RANTS!
Date: 02/02/22
It Couldn't Happen Today...
Reading this interesting piece in the Guardian on Tuesday, I was struck by how appallingly badly journalists and their owners behaved eighty-odd years ago compared to our present Golden Age of high-minded media conduct.
I mean really m'dears, can you imagine our press' finest today basing things entirely on hearsay from a single unauthoritative source...
...then having it published under a bizarre and scary headline...
...even though the accuracy of it couldn't be vouchsafed, either then or later...
...how the story was then amplified by a report written off his own bat by a State functionary...
...how the nation's most trusted public service news outlet automatically believed that report (along with what it had read in the papers) before broadcasting it to some 48 million people in the 'home country' (and countless millions more worldwide), thereby changing the whole attitude of the population at large towards those who had fled tyranny......
...and how the press in general responded to the story in such unbalanced terms that the Great British Public™, bamboozled by skewed reporting which just so happened to mirror all of their deepest-lying prejudices about foreigners, were wrong by a ratio of up to fifty-to-one about how many refugees had actually been given shelter in their land...?
How very lucky we are that such awful derelictions of journalistic standards couldn't occur today.
