Do we really have a free media? That's the myth, which is often propagated, a courageous

media, speaking truth to power, telling it as it is, no fear or favour. Now in the sense,

in a country like Britain, the government doesn't directly run media organisations which service

partners and interests, or not North Korea, not an ambitious place to start, I'll have a review.

But in much of the media, in much of the West, the media does act as the playthings of a tiny

elite of wealthy oligarchs, who defend a status quo from which they directly profit, like the

Rubit Murdoch, the Michael Bloomberg, the Silvio, Bill Skoneys, the Barclay Brothers,

in the US alone, just 8 media corporations and 788 TV stations. Now owning a newspaper has

long been a means of wielding political influence, and you know what, one guy was pretty honest

about this. He was a guy called Lord Brewerbuck, he was, he ran the Daily Express newspaper,

and he told the Royal Commission on the Press in 1848 that he ran it purely for the purpose of

making propaganda with no other object. I look at it as a purely propagandist project. That's the

sort of honesty I commend it in public life. Now in Britain, almost all newspapers have an

overtly right wing editorial line, so in the 2019 election, researched by Loughborough University,

found the press hostility towards Labour was more than double that identified in the election

two years earlier, and that itself was marked by a brutal and relentless newspaper campaign

against the Labour Party. In fact, they found in the final week of the election campaign

there were net 133 negative newspaper items about Labour compared to just net 22 about the

Conservatives. That shows that the British press in large part are there to inform the citizens

of the country, which is what newspapers should be doing. Letting people know the facts,

making them aware of the world and society around them so they can make informed decisions

in a democracy. In that sense, a newspaper is supposed to play a pivotal role in a democracy.

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