Don’t you know this is a ‘war situation’ so will all you people working from home – still on full pay – be quiet and listen to what we the media are telling you.  “Don’t you know that this is crisis?” they cry, feeding the Breakfast and Talk Show hosts, who are, apparently, national treasures and intellectual giants (in their own minds that is) along with all the ‘expert guests’ found, presumably by a researcher, after a google search and pleased to get their few minutes of fame.  This is something they will never experience again, as most of the population will never have heard of them.  We are told that these scientists are experts in their field and ‘know’ that what the government’s scientific and medical advisors are doing is wrong.  Only they, along with their media hosts sitting comfortably at the regulation five feet apart on the sofa, have all the answers. So experienced and knowledgeable are they that one may wonder why they are not volunteering to assist in other countries.

Global media has seen difficult times in the last 20 years; growth is around 1% for a long period and the same story is mirrored in broadcast media.  In the UK, much of the print media is a shadow of its former self, when ministers and the Prime Minister would have some editors’ private number on fast dial and when events were announced to coincide with the main news broadcast of the day. Now much of the public is sceptical of supposed factual news reports and the denials that reporting in the UK is unbiased and has lost, not only here but in the USA, the credibility it once had.  Could it be that this virus is a heaven-sent opportunity to create division and generational infighting and pandemonium similar to that was created during Brexit?

Losing the trust of much of the population, the media has now created a new World War, the war on the virus. No-one seems to be asking how and why the same panic is being reported across the world by newspapers and the media which is often owned by huge international companies and has a political agenda all of its own. Why is it that stores in small towns in various countries – some who have had no reported cases of the virus – are seeing panic-stricken residents stripping the markets of lavatory paper? The same story in any western country you care to name.

Or is it the effect of fake news on social media?  Judging by the comment sections and facebook pages it would seem – and not for the first time – that there are people out there who either need help with controlling their thoughts, or are driven by some social media group-think, which of course could never have been manipulated by ‘influencers’ – could it? The tabloid press loves a war, especially if they can spin it as a fight for democracy or against Putin. We’ve had so many in the last few years I’ve lost count and, to be honest, I’m getting irritated and tired of it all.

We’ve had the war on crime, the war on drugs, the war in Afghanistan, the war against terror, the war on poverty, the list goes on and on and now we have the same click-bait formula being tried again by the global media elite across their empires as they run the same media attacks against governments in various countries and the action taken by Trump or Johnson and any other government that these lefty globalists don’t like. Although they are having trouble with their friends in the EU as their ‘collective’ coronavirus response turns into a complete shambles, not that you would notice if you listened to politically-correct woke millennium print and broadcast media which have only just reported that regrettable as it is, 99% of the deaths in Italy have been of patients with additional health problems.

In the one corner we have the politicians trying to calm a population that, for the first time in generations, is having to face and deal with an emergency that the media, in the other corner, would have you believe, is ‘deadly, catastrophic, life changing, dangerous’. The 24-hour media circus roles on reporting the virus as if it were a review of a particularly poor movie starring Tom Hanks or a sporting event where the pundits, sitting in comfort in the studio far from any action, can have a field day while sycophantic presenters pretend to have knowledge and insights that only they could possibly know.

Never admitting that their information is leaked, nudged or reported as fact by their friends in the press departments of health departments or talked about in the corridors of government and are so secret that you and I would react with unbridled terror or hysteria unless we have the facts reported to us by some presenter talking to an ‘independent expert’ (often anything but independent) and proclaiming that they knew all along that this ‘black swan’ event was going to happen, the emergency and health services would not cope, supply chains will fail, stores will run out of essential food supplies, schools must close and social life must cease.

Goodness know why an increasingly concerned and nervous population, being systematically fed a daily diet of contagion and death watch this spectacle, but they do and are surprised when they visit the supermarket to find crowds jostling for position to buy the last bag of crisps (where is Linneker this time?) or loo rolls, emergency lamps, thermometers or some other must-have item that has been featured in a ‘How to prepare for Armageddon’ TV special or ‘Ten things we know about Armageddon so far’ in a popular tabloid.

Breakfast TV programmes seem to be designed to disturb the elderly, infirm or housebound who may already be worried about how they will cope in this out-of-control mayhem while hearing social media experts and influencers telling their followers that it’s all the fault of the elderly who, as you know, have failed the millennial generation by spending all the money, buying all the houses, destroying the planet and wrecking their futures by voting Brexit.  Now, to cap it all, they are taking up all the hospital places when they may need them, because as we all know ‘only young lives’ matter – how dare they?!

Carefully crafted ‘nudge articles’ appear in the press as click-bait or scare headlines, supposedly by respected journalists who are often the partners of somebody in the media or government circles.  In their totally elitist and paternalistic way they think that they can lecture the great unwashed who do some sort of menial job and are too thick to think for themselves and must be cajoled into accepting all sorts of disruptions and restrictions, being unable to take a sensible common sense approach to their own welfare, particularly if they are healthy and over 70 for some reason but must be locked away out of sight and out of mind because, well, ‘they must be protected’.

Part 2 will be published here tomorrow.

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