{"id":53115,"date":"2019-11-29T01:00:18","date_gmt":"2019-11-29T06:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=53115"},"modified":"2019-11-28T09:31:49","modified_gmt":"2019-11-28T14:31:49","slug":"qotd-the-progressive-belief-in-the-mind-controlling-power-of-the-press-and-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2019\/11\/29\/qotd-the-progressive-belief-in-the-mind-controlling-power-of-the-press-and-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The progressive belief in the mind-controlling power of the press (and Facebook)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>There’s a piece of graffiti that sums up the woke left’s view of ordinary people. It says: “When the British working class stop reading right-wing news, we will see progressive change.” There it is. In black and white. Scrawled on a wall somewhere but frequently shared on social media by supposed progressives. One sentence that captures why so many modern left-wingers, and in particular the Corbynistas, are so obsessed with the press \u2013 because they think it has hypnotised the fickle masses and polluted the plebs’ brains with horrible right-wing ideas. Make no mistake: when the left rages against the media, it is really raging against the masses.<\/p>\n

Media-bashing has resurfaced with a vengeance over the past couple of weeks. It isn’t hard to see why. The polls don’t look good for Labour. Some are predicting a wipeout, especially in Labour’s traditional working-class strongholds. And as has been the case for a good 30 years now, when political events don’t go the left’s way \u2013 or rather, when the dim public lets the left down \u2013 the knives come out for the media.<\/p>\n

Corbynista commentators are railing against the “billionaire media”. “Billionaires control the media, and it\u2019s undermining democracy”, say the middle-class left-wingers of Novara Media<\/em><\/a>. How? Because these billionaires are “tell[ing] you what to think”. You, the gullible, ill-educated throng, that is; not us, the well-educated, PhD-owning media leftists at Novara<\/em> who can see through the lies peddled by evil billionaires.<\/p>\n

Brendan O’Neill, “The woke elitism behind the left’s media-bashing”, Spiked<\/em><\/a>, 2019-11-25.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a piece of graffiti that sums up the woke left’s view of ordinary people. It says: “When the British working class stop reading right-wing news, we will see progressive change.” There it is. In black and white. Scrawled on a wall somewhere but frequently shared on social media by supposed progressives. One sentence that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,28,53,41],"tags":[391,143,213,1020,907],"class_list":["post-53115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-facebook","tag-labour","tag-newspapers","tag-progressives","tag-snobbery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-dOH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53115"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53150,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53115\/revisions\/53150"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}