Tuesday, May 23, 2017

After the terrible events in Manchester yesterday, we have sadly seen some horrific behaviour from parts of the media trying to dig up “stories” on those who were there:

This kind of behaviour is abhorrent and should be illegal, but sadly, it isn’t, and it isn’t new. Just click through and read this whole Twitter thread.

The way that large parts of our media behaves is absolutely grotesque and immoral, and yet there’s no sign at all that the government has any intention of reining them in. The Leveson Inquiry‘s report into media behaviour and suggestions for appropriate actions was, on the whole, excellent, and yet little to none of it has been implemented because the government simply does not want to upset the media and the media does not want to be restricted. It’s no surprise that Leveson’s recommendations were portrayed as censorship, even though they were nothing of the sort, given that the people reporting on them were the very people who would be restrained by them.

We can’t depend on the government, neither this nor any other, to protect normal people from the depredations of the vile predators that produce the hateful and repulsive rags that pass for newspapers in the UK. So what can we do? Protesting makes no difference. The press regulator, IPSO, is a sham. Your MP likely doesn’t give a shit, and even if they do they’re in a minority in Parliament. And the kinds of people who would boycott the loathsome rags aren’t the sort of people who are buying them in the first place.

But there two things we can do:

  1. Be very careful what links you share on social media. Don’t link to the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Express or any of the other immoral, degenerate rags, with or without red tops. If you see a story you want to share and it’s in one of them, find another source. A quick search of Google News should turn something up, and if it doesn’t you might want to reconsider sharing the link at all as it’s probably bullshit if no other outlet is covering it.
  2. Support Stop Funding Hate, who are working on hitting these vile rags where it hurts by targeting advertisers and asking them to stop giving their money to immoral hate-mongers.

No one else is going to protect us from these leeches, these scum. So we’re going to have to do the only things we can: don’t send the fuckers traffic, and help cut off their ad revenue. It is our duty to our fellow humans to do those two things at the very least.

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