Spitting Out Lies

We’ve been bringing you daily coverage of Scottish and UK politics for seventeen years. We publish writing on Arts and Culture (with a ton of music, reviews, poetry and film). We publish daily Opinion, Media, Politics pieces (including uncovering the truth about Spycops, clandestine right-wing networks in Scotland, policy, issues of land ownership and ecology, and the protest movement). We also bring you International journalism from across the world (recently covering the atrocities in Palestine  and covering news from Rojava, Turkey and Iran).

See our amazing list of contributors here – from Amna Saleem to Vishwam Heckert.

The descent of the media in this country, and of wider public discourse has been a running theme of this publication for over a decade. The recent failure and flop of new far-right broadcasting projects, despite vast sums of money being poured into them is not the subject of celebration. Talk TV and GB News have been disasters, but some have argued this is not because their views are out of line, but because their views are everywhere.

Nesrine Malik has chartered the phenomenon of the failure of what she calls the rightwing media ‘swamp’. GB News has lost half its value since it launched. Ratings for Piers Morgan’s Talk TV are pitifully low. Malik explains why this is not a triumph:

“The repositioning away from ratings to views, despite the former securing advertising, suggests that the entire model of right-wing TV is adjusting its course from commercial viability to sustainable loss, with the payoff being prominence in the discourse. The bad news is that this model is floundering not because there’s no appetite for inflammatory, opinion-based news. It’s because there’s too much. In fact, the appetite is so huge that it feeds off, and is fed by, the very mainstream media that these channels thought they were differentiating themselves from. The rightwing media swamp isn’t any less fertile. It’s full.”

Malik’s analysis is essentially right, this is a monoculture, “a raging furnace of right-wing provocation, spitting out lies, fear and spite, shaping a political culture of miserliness and insularity”.

It’s why shaping alternatives, like this, under-resourced but determined outlet (and dozens elsewhere) is more important than ever.  It might feel like a pointless exercise in the face of such dark money and power, but an alternative media does exist.

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