Thread: world-wide scandal thanks to the internet: MSM suicide

It is a world-wide scandal thanks to the internet

The ailing ‘mainstream’ media are committing suicide by ignoring the scoop of the century

By Gerald Warner UK Last updated: December 15th, 2009
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Climategate is a global household name. No cat has ever emancipated itself more completely from the bag. It is a world-wide scandal – thanks to the internet. Yet, as its ramifications proliferate and dominoes continue to fall, the most repeatedly asked question online is: how can the mainstream media ignore this? Well, we know the answer to that: the MSM are in thrall to the leftist consensus. End of story. But let me pose a follow-up question that may be becoming more imminently relevant.

Are the mainstream media capable of surviving their sidelining of the number one global scoop? Are they finally committing suicide? Are they, in fact, any longer mainstream? Every historian knows that any significant trend in society will show warning symptoms over a long period; but the final catastrophe will usually be triggered by a single event. For the moribund MSM that decisive blunder may well be Climategate.

Another feature of any doomed institution is that it signals its imminent demise by behaving in a manner that is contrary to its nature and purpose. Every city in the developed world contains news rooms in which cringing journalists struggle to satisfy the imperative demands of editors for a scoop. Yet the obvious scoop – the BIG ONE of journalistic mythology – is consigned to the waste basket. This is the journalism of Isvestia and Pravda, with all the commercial viability that attached to that school of news reporting.

The dead-tree press is already on the critical list. In the United States, in the six months to 31 March this year, newspaper circulation slumped by 7 per cent, according to the US Audit Bureau of Circulations. This was a steeper decline than in the two previous recorded periods (you can reasonably attribute that to the vomit-inducing idolatry of Barack Obama that permeated the American press at that time). In the UK the comparable figure was 5 per cent. How many businesses do you know that record such declines, in an unreversed trend, and survive?

The BBC – or, to give the Corporation its proper name, British state television – is on a multi-billion pound life support system, thanks to the licence fee extortion racket by which it acts as gatekeeper to 200 other television channels by charging £142.50 a year to viewers, the majority of whom do not want to watch its programmes. The BBC’s own report to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in 2005 revealed that, if the licence fee were abolished, 58 per cent of viewers (14 million households) would opt out of all BBC television, leaving the Corporation with a paltry £1.2bn in revenue.

That is the despised organisation that relentlessly inflicts climate alarmist propaganda, fairy tales, “bedtime storiesâ€

The Copenhagen Summit is a power-grab. A coup d’etat – a World dictatorship in the making.

They took over America in the same fasion