When a car ploughed into a crowd at a German Xmas Market, in Magdeburg, killing five people, including a young child, and injuring more than 200, the media immediately assumed the perpetrator was an Islamic terrorist, though they never openly claimed that to be the case. The various right-wing populists, were even more overt in their presumptions on social media, and that was amplified when the new came out that the driver was a Saudi doctor. But, they were all wrong, as Owen Jones has set out in this video.
Yet, even more than a day after the slaughter undertaken by this far-right fanatic, the mainstream media have failed to elaborate these details, despite extensive coverage. On the day of the attack, Sky News, maintained almost blanket coverage, even though nothing was happening, but, now, when its clear that the attacker was a far right, anti-Muslim extremist, who supports the likes of the AfD, Trump, Musk, Farage and co., they have suddenly reduced their coverage.
Yet, the coverage they and the BBC have provided, has not only failed to set out the political nature of the attacker, as a supporter of the far-right, but has positively hidden and obfuscated those facts, which flatly contradict the line it was pursuing initially. Now they talk about the aims and beliefs of this right-wing terrorist being "unclear", whilst they attach this to repeated statements about him being a Saudi, and being "unhappy with the treatment of Saudi migrants to Germany", again for the casual listener, suggesting some kind of Islamist pro-migrant basis for his actions, whereas the opposite is the case, as his repeated social media statements attest. To the extent they have noted that he is an ex-Muslim, they have also worded his views in terms of him being "Islamophobic", which in the welter of other comments and obfuscation, can be misheard, or misunderstood by the general viewer.
If this had actually been an attack by some Islamist terrorist, as they first assumed, then, we would have been treated to an endless stream of his previous social media comments in the most graphic detail. But, this is now symptomatic of the outright distortions and even lying of the mainstream media, in the West, when it comes to reporting on what is happening in the Middle-East, to an even greater extent than in relation to his biased reporting when it comes to the war in Ukraine and elsewhere, as western imperialism gears up for WWIII.
The extent of that in relation to the biased reporting of the BBC in relation to the Middle East, has again, been set out by Owen Jones. The existence of a "free press", in western societies, is still a benefit for workers and socialists compared to the lack of such rights in various authoritarian states in Eastern Europe, and in The Middle East. It means, for now, that we can write about these activities without the threat of a midnight knock from the secret police. But, a "free press" does not at all mean a truthful press, nor an accountable press, let alone any kind of equality. The mass media is owned by billionaires as a plaything, but they also own and control the platforms upon which social media exists. They can control the algorithms to direct readers to or away from certain ideas, or remove and ban content altogether.
In the analogue age socialists used to insist on using the freedom of the press to create our own workers press; we needed to have updated that with the demand for a workers broadcast media in the age of the TV, but, now, in the digital age, we have the opportunity to step over that and demand that we create our own workers digital platforms, our own search engines and so on, with algorithms designed to direct readers to socialist ideas that expose the reality of the exploitation of workers across the globe, of our common interests as a global working-class, and particularly, now, our interest in resisting the steady march to war that imperialism is, once more, engaged upon.
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