Thank Goodness For Amazon Prime (Other Non-State Media Is Available)

A very old bloke has died.  From all accounts a bit of a racist and colonialist.  The capitalist state's propaganda arm, the BBC, has done its normal job of giving an impression of North Korean media, with wall to wall coverage of paint drying, and avoidance of any critical views.   As with the media's coverage of COVID, and compliance with Game Theory, all the other main terrestrial channels followed its lead.  Thank goodness for non-mainstream terrestrial channels, and Youtube.

Freesat and Freeview at least allowed viewers to escape all of this nonsense, by watching old dramas, comedies, detective series and so on, or the exploits of salvage hunters, car restorers, or documentaries.  Amazon, Netflix and others have provided a range of films and other programmes for a small subscription.  Thank goodness for them over the last year, as we have been locked up in our homes, and locked out of workplaces and venues for leisure and entertainment.  They at least enabled us to avoid wall to wall state COVID propaganda, now supplemented by state Monarchist propaganda.

As the development of herd immunity starts to fade COVID into the distance, the media must have thought their prayers were answered.  What would they do when they could not fill the screens and column inches with hysterical stories about COVID?  Then along come two answers at once.  First, violence returned to the streets of Northern Ireland courtesy of the inevitable results of Brexit, and for good measure, a prominent royal personage pops his clogs.  The latter will be a news story for longer than you might think possible, as all the period of mourning, then funerals, then memorials and so on are stretched out, but even the media and the state can only stretch it out so long.  A return of violence in Ireland offers the media a much more viable cornucopia.

"The Troubles", were a font for the media back in the 1970's, 80's and 90's, when it was not as large as it is today, and when 24 hour news channels did not require constant feeding with sensationalism.  Having fed off and fed into the cesspool of nationalism that created media figures such as Nigel Farage, or Baroness Fox, the media created a continued feeding ground for itself with Brexit.  Its role was very much like that of the press tycoon in the Bond film, "Tomorrow never Dies", which itself borrows from the idea presented in Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane", about press baron Randolph Hearst.  The violence in Northern Ireland is direct consequence of the Brexit that the media fostered with all of their fawning over nonentities like Farage and Fox, in the previous ten years, and more.  No wonder there was a sparkle in Jon Snow's eyes when he interviewed a pundit from Ireland, on Channel 4 News, and asked expectantly, whether, with the Summer coming, and with all of the frustrations  of a year of lockdowns and lockouts, we could expect a much greater level of communal violence in the province?

Did someone mention bread and circuses?  Well Brexit is making the bread supplies more difficult, and increasing its price considerably, but circuses there are aplenty.