To be fair to the Guardian they quite often do good journalism. They didn’t gloss the ‘genocide’ in Gaza. They sometimes do investigative journalism, which goes beyond the standard PR for corporate-government structures which is what much of modern journalism is reduced to. At the same time, for whatever reason you do come across the most amazing inversions of reality. Here are two examples:
It comes as the country’s [Iran’s] foreign minister made a visit to Russia he said was an opportunity to consult with Moscow regarding the war against Israel and the United States. [1]
They don’t exactly say “Iran’s war” but since it is “against” the US and Israel that is implied. Amazing; more or less the whole world, including EU leaders and most of mainstream media regards this war as having been started by the US and Israel and, generally, as being “unprovoked”. Not “Iran’s war” then.
This was in an article about how with the change of leadership in Hungary, the EU loan to Ukraine, blocked by Orban, has been approved:
Ukraine is not expected to pay the money back from its own funds, with the capital only due when Russia starts paying reparations once the war is over – potentially using the estimated €210bn of its central bank assets frozen in the EU. [2]
“Beyond delusional” is overused, of course, but what can we say about Jon Henley’s apparent self-assured belief that Russia is, indeed, going to pay reparations? Doesn’t he know that what you dream about and reality are two separate things?
These are little snippets, but you can find plenty of similar ones. I don’t suppose it is deliberate ‘propaganda’. I think it is just the journalists being so imbued by the phantasy PR releases from the EU Commission and the US State Department that they have been programmed into believing these preposterous ideas. But – if they treated the press releases with skepticism as the default position, it wouldn’t happen. And that is what is lacking in much of modern journalism; skepticism towards the utterances of power.
Notes