The Meejah...

[johnny9fingers]

I may have mentioned from time to time that it is my opinion that all of the UK's media (with maybe a handful of honourable exceptions) has been suborned. I offer further proof.

On the day the UK government was found to be in breach of the law regarding the secrecy of government PPE contracts:

www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/19/matt-hancock-acted-unlawfully-failing-publish-covid-contracts-high-court

Such news was absent from all the main media in the UK. Instead we got Harry and Meghan and confirmation of a story that is a year old, with right-wing types frothing at the mouth about how awful the black lady must be. But the news coverage of the government's law-breaking?

Guardian - main headline
Independent - sub heading
BBC - half there; buried on the inner pages, so to speak.
Daily Mail - nothing
Sky News - nothing
Telegraph - nothing
Express - nothing
Mirror - nothing
Sun - nothing

Nowt on the Beeb's main telly news. Little on ITN.

Props to Channel 4, Byline Times, Private Eye, The Good Law Project, and occasionally the Grauniad.

I live in a nation where the (right wing) government breaks the law, and most of the popular media ignore it. And the law was broken to hide the levels of corruption which abound, and in which the media now seem compromised co-conspirators.

BTW the Government spent millions on lawyers trying to suppress the publication of the contracts in question. Public money used by the government to protect the publication of misuse of public money by the government; it's all so very meta, my dears.

But just to let folk know; the Beeb's news service has fallen. In fact there are few UK media outlets that aren't compromised. Pravda and Izvestia are the models you need to look at when discussing British media henceforth. There is no truth in news and no news in truth.

Alas.

Comments

[mikeyxw]

I hate defending Boris and Co, but I'd say there is a bit more to this story. This story has been around for quite a while and was broadly covered late last year. For example, in the Daily Mail:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8959887/DAVID-ROSE-Report-revealing-18bn-coronavirus-PPE-farce-cynical-brazen-cronyism.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8961343/Fury-18bn-PPE-scandal.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8959889/The-18bn-coronavirus-PPE-fiasco.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9045103/PPE-Covidarchs-awash-tax-millions-writes-GUY-ADAMS.html

Not covering every update to the story is a lot different than not covering the story. This is of course very political, I'm sure if it was a Labor government, the Mail and Sun would be giving headlines to every update to the story no matter how minor while the Guardian would have covered the initial story and left it with that. However, this is very different than not covering the story at all.

[johnny9fingers]

Not really.

Yes, it has been mentioned as a story.

But on the day the court judgement was handed down, the day the illegality was made plain for the world (and the electorate) to see... [crickets]

It's one of the reasons the Tories are still heading the polls and folk like Peter Oborne are becoming revolutionaries.

[johnny9fingers]

A barrister by the name of David Allen Green put it most succinctly:

The UK government that has said it should not be held to strict legal obligations because of the pandemic emergency is the same government that has imposed strict legal obligations on the rest of us because of the pandemic emergency.

[dewline]

A notable quotation, that one.