John Ward Internet news needs a firmer business model

MEDIA CRISIS: The State Press gangs versus the Pirate Volunteers

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A volunteer is worth a thousand pressed men

 

In yesterday’s Times, Daniel Finkelstein offered the view that the police need to take fraud more seriously. I’m sure he wasn’t expecting much in the way of opposition to that, and the piece itself is truthful – albeit using facts we already know.

What Dan didn’t do is raise questions about the élites’ attitude to scams. Like Finkelstein, I have been the victim of a massive mis-selling crime (for which I wasn’t reimbursed) and the only thing I can say for certain about it is that nobody at Scottish Widows went to jail, but £50,000 of my money went up the swanny.

Equally, Dan failed to even approach the subject of a civil police force now so politicised, it would rather accuse citizens of homophobia (which is not an offence) than put more than 5% of its resources into the biggest crime sector of all in 2020.

This is the problem that the old media (and their incestuous vested interests) have: they scratch the surface with lots of “Isn’t it awful?” vapours, but nothing about the culture Britain has created is questioned. 

The object almost seems, at times, to signal maximum virtue while giving minimal offence.

However, it is primarily about sidestepping the guilt for what the MSM have themselves helped to inflict upon us. It was a process begun by the evil Murdoch at The Sun and The Times, compounded by the ideological nonsense at The Guardian, and then more or less completed by the Gordian Knot at The Mail, whose sole purpose at times seems to be a formulation one might call “tits ‘n’ death”. And naturally, for those who like their news at the limbo-level of Alastair Campbell, there is always The Independent.

Today, for example, some titles are running the story that Keir Starmer is now 1/4 on to win the Labour leadership, ahead of his nearest rival – Rebecca Long-Bailey – at 4/1. Missing from the “news” however, is a single credible analysis of what the constitutional consequences of either person would be, viz:

  • Whoever wins, the Labour Party will tear itself apart
  • Neither candidate is any more electable than the back markers
  • A neutered Opposition will be a real and present danger to democracy, given the escalating popularity (today at 49%) of Borisonian Conservatism.

That popularity is itself due to further self-censoring omissions by the media:

  • A cursory skip through the EU Withdrawal Agreement reveals Britain to be at the mercy of Commission gangsters who would not hesitate to humiliate us
  • Nobody in the circle around Johnson is factoring in the now obvious signs of a global financial bourse-quoted valuation and debt crisis we’ve been putting off since Greenbaum’s gross moral turpitude in 2003.

2,500 years ago, Plato asserted that there could only be liberty and democracy if the electorate was “fully informed”. That has never been the case; but the degree to which our societies today fail that test has never been greater.

Nobody beyond the blogosphere and the independent online news providers is even discussing that conclusion – let alone what it means.

It means dumping dictatorial thought systems – neoliberalism, globalism, collectivism and Islamism – in favour of pragmatically empirical creative minds. And it means accepting that the sole objective of such minds should be to maximise human individual potential in the context of maintaining a healthy planet.

The most striking media development of recent years has been the ability of hand-to-mouth online news sites (along with, here and there, the upper end of blogs) to do an astonishing job in outclassing the MSM when it comes to contrarian and investigative/critical journalism.

I long ago gave up any expectation of “a splash” – as we used to call it – on the TV Channels or in the papers: when they occur, they are so obviously inflated by political spin and biased ideology as to evoke in me an urgent desire to open another window on the pc.

But this is not true of sites like Spiked!, Wall Street on Parade, Off Guardian, Craig Murray, The Conservative Woman and Unherd. All of the foregoing have, at one time or another, moved me to promote their output on social media….whether or not I generally agree with them politically.

The problem they all face – as indeed do I – is how to construct a viable business model without sugar-daddy donors and advertisers diluting their independence.

Just as political Parties in the 1950s subsisted largely on the basis of huge membership fees and activist volunteers, so too the BBC had its licence fee and the press had habituated markets buying their product for small change on a daily basis. Satellite television, the explosion in TV channels and then the internet changed all that. The markets began to decide what did or didn’t get published….and that was the end of unfettered journalism.

The inability of the average citizen to join up the dots on this is hardly surprising: in 2020, we have a fully-fledged generation of forty-somethings who have never known the media as anything other than airheads on sofas in the morning, silly headline puns about Soap stars in the tabloids, and Polly Toynbee knitting alien life-forms in The Guardian.

Compare and contrast this with independent online news this morning.

At Unherd, Jesse Singal has penned a superb piece called Journalism is being eaten alive by opinion. 

On Craig Murray’s site, the indefatigable Scot unveils damning evidence covered up by the the FBI on the Seth Rich murder – a subject that asks all kinds of uncomfortable questions about the nastier underbelly elements in the Hillary-supporting DNC of 2016.

At Spiked!, Fraser Myers offers yet another dimension of the Green tendency’s inability to square sensationalism with Third World consequences.

In a genuinely unique look much further than the end of a journo nose at post-Brino life, Rolf Norfolk at The Conservative Woman brings an enlightening sobriety to what lies ahead for the UK.

Off Guardian features an Andre Vltchek piece, How Washington “Liberates” Free Countries which (while giving far too many excuses to developing world dictators) nevertheless contains this compelling passage: ‘To date, people of great nations with thousands of years of culture, are treated like infants; humiliated, and as if they were still in kindergarten, told how to behave, and how to think”.

Citibank used an alias to foreclose on homeowners, and then denied it was foreclosing on anyone. You didn’t know that because the MSM ignored it. But at Wall Street on Parade, the $30 million fine plus all the evidence is presented. Get real: if WSOP was wrong, Citibank would nuke them. They haven’t.

There is a richesse online that is fighting for its own and our survival. But it is severely threatened by pernicious powers and commercial dictates.

Sad monsters like Rupert Murdoch led the charge to place making money ahead of making news. Some of those who who followed (like Alastair Campbell) made the news up. Now others still keep the news behind the facts secret, while collecting information that wise citizens would rather remained secret.

In half a generation, the media have gone from informing people to providing the means of informing on people. That has to be one of the most profound and wicked role perversions in human history. Just like the politicians, the police and the judiciary, the megamedia combines have changed sides.

The task now is to ensure that the voices of resistance cannot be sidelined. It behoves every sane entrepreneur on the planet to dream up a business model that can turn those scattered voices into a choir of revitalised reality.