How many articles on the mainstream media websites today about Dodgy Dave King? How many of them say he’s nothing but a bad joke and a liar who’s openly defying a court, who’s told his manager fibs about the kind of resources he’d have to spend, who is stirring up the most vicious elements of his fan base with conspiracy theories and nonsense?
Oh wait, none of them? Are you sure?
And of course you are correct. King is doing what King does best, and the media is writing everything that comes out of his mouth as if it was gospel truth from an unimpeachable source instead of flagrant nonsense from someone who wouldn’t know facts if he tripped over them running from the Fraud Squad. And this is part of what’s wrong with the media.
I remain a bit of a politics geek, and I never cease to be amazed at the press lamenting the rise of “populist” leaders like Nigel Farage and the way utter charlatans like Jacob Reece Mogg can go from complete obscurity to the point where they are thought of as national figures.
And always the press asks the same question; how does this happen?
Easy. The media itself gives them the profile to build a following. They let these people talk their absolute tripe in newspaper columns, on radio shows, they give them all the Question Time appearances they can book and they print their every word as if it was Holy Scripture. We would never have heard of these people otherwise.
If you have the slightest doubt that the media has, to some extent, legitimised these people and thereby the stuff that comes out of their mouths you only have to look at the hatchet-job the same outlets have been doing on Jeremy Corbyn since the minute, hour and day he was elected as leader of the Labour Party. His legitimacy is attacked, his personal views distorted, his political philosophy sneered at and when all that didn’t kill him the media now brands him an anti-Semite at every opportunity, never letting up, demanding the impossible from him – that he, personally, wipes anti-Semitism out of left-wing politics or be forever tainted by it.
How hard do you think it would be to find examples of Mogg or Farage or Johnson merrily whistling the tunes of the far-right? You could do it on a coffee break, but it never gets the wall-to-wall coverage attacks on Corbyn do. And in delegitimising him and not treating them the same way the media has helped create the conditions that brought us Brexit, Trump and a Tory government that just won’t die, like a fly you’ve hit with a swatter five times but keeps on twitching.
Treat these people as they are – extremists, shilling bullshit – and this country wouldn’t be on the brink of a “no deal” exit from the EU. We might even have a government that wasn’t comprised of the kind of people who’d drown puppies whilst sweetly smiling.
All of this is to say that the media treats King the same way that it does these toe-rags. It prints his every utterance without once qualifying his remarks with reminders that we’re not dealing with a straight shooter but a guy who’s lied about everything but the colour of his piss. King might not be an out-and-out psychopath but he ticks a lot of the boxes in the clinical definition of one, and I never cease being amazed by how the press is able to ignore that.
This is why so many of us are contemptuous of the mainstream press. They run King’s comments without placing them in their proper context. Maybe it’s laziness and maybe it’s not, but it completely lacks balance as a result. Today’s articles are full of assertions about how the Takeover Panel has been hard on him … the guy is full of it, as anyone who’s followed the story knows. He lost the case against them two years ago and has been stalling and messing them about ever since. His last available appeal was lost when this was still out-with the legal system … everything that followed has been to force him to comply.
When King blames South African exchange controls for his delaying tactics he is indulging in his favourite pastime; he is lying through his teeth. Did you notice how STV didn’t contradict him when he said he had the money, when his brief told the court that he was skint?
Does that even count as journalism?
The Scottish media act as enablers for this geezer, and especially those who, today, must have had to swallow their own professional pride to run the details of somebody else’s interview with him, without once pointing out that it was a puff piece designed to push King’s own agenda and not a serious attempt to get answers to tough questions.
Being a stenographer is bad enough … but to be cutting and pasting someone else’s stenography? Jesus, do these people have no standards at all or what?