Prints of darkness, godless of light and the madding clouds of internet liars…(click inside for video)

FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY SIX MILLION newspapers are sold across the world every day.

So, based on industry standards – and all industries are allowed to have them – there are about 1.5bn daily readers of what are considered to be the most heinous, lying, despoiling, misleading, exaggerating, click-baiting, sensationalising, scandalising, distorting, disingenuous, despicable, debasing, disgusting, sexist, hateful and hating form of any media known to man or beast since the world began turning in its own starry starry grave…

Well, we newspaper people must be doing something right then!

Yep, 536 million units sold every day to a world that hates us.

We are an industry worth billions despite the fact that for the past fifty years newspapers have been dismissed as flopping around in their own sickly dying beds.

But dying?

Really?

Think about it! What would the fish n chip shop industry have done without us for half a century if we’d died?

And what about Ink Inc (orporated)? That’d be blotted out wouldn’t it!

Where would all you celebs and sinners dip your quills then, then? (If I may be so bold).

In an octopus’s garden?

No… newspapers are not part of a dying industry. They’re not even sleepy.

And they could actually be the next big thing, if you think about it…

Look at it this way, apart from 536 million print copies, almost one in ten people in the UK in 2019 paid online services to get their news.

Then add to that, glossy magazines which supplement newspapers with such a rich and perfumy, fashionable blanket of security.

Do you know, that in 2018, 373.8 million glossies were sold in the UK alone?

And that figure helped the global entertainment and media market to reach a value of 2.6 trillion US dollars .. that is 1,995,461,000,000.00 pounds sterling.
The entertainment and media market encompasses newspapers, magazines, TV and radio and film, music and books.

Now let’s take a look at an industry that really IS ALL ABOUT DYING

Yep, the God industry, an industry that’s been getting us, by hook or by crook, to sell our souls to it almost before time began! (Depends what you think came first, God or the Universe).

Anyway, analysis from Georgetown University shows that religion in the US alone is worth $1.2 trillion – that’s more than the combined revenues of the top 10 technology companies in the country, including Apple, Amazon and Google.

So here, on Earth as it is in Heaven, God has got to be, well. the godhead of all industry – beating the news industry with far more than a proverbial wing and a prayer.

But which is more honest?

Now there’s a question of Biblical proportions surely.

Well, a claim that people of faith can somehow avoid disaster while at the same time enjoying material success and good health has to be a promise of miraculous proportions, surely.

And so is the claim that you can live happily ever after (life) on a big white fluffy cloud when you’ve fallen off the unfenced edge of this Flat Earth!

Oh, and talking of clouds – what about the internet?

How much is the internet worth in the great scheme of things?

Well, globally its market worth is about $1319.08 billion at any one time.

Right, now we’ve actually got our digits into the internet – the cyber land of the porn again – let’s ask a very big question indeed… which is the biggest liar?

The news industry, the church or the internet?

First, let’s have a look at some research about online honesty: Online deception is said to be the rule, not the exception.

Studies suggest that less than 60 percent of web traffic is actually human! The majority of it is actually a secret army of bots – yep, bots, ROBOTS in real terms.

Do any of you remember that massive scandal about ROBOTS in 2013? It was reported that half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people”.

The figure was so high that Youtube feared that their systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake.

In truth the “fakeness” of the internet is incalculable.

So, what about newspapers and their honesty then?

Do you know there were 49 reported defamation cases in the UK in the year ending June 2017.

And newspapers were the defendant in only 22 per cent of them – less than 10.

defamation cases, a fair barometer of who is telling the truth and who isn’t, in the UK were down 50 per cent compared to a decade ago.

Just 6 per cent of UK defamation cases last year were brought by celebrities.

And there have been less than 100 celebrity versus newspapers court cases in the last two decades.

And most of the celebrities lost!

Well, I ask you… let the facts speak for themselves, eh.

Let’s pick the bones out of this then … up until the year 2000 there was a telephone booth at a crossroads in the wastelands of the Mojave Desert.

A very famous writer indeed said that it had one free phone call on it for every gambler who had become a loser … they could call the next station on their losing streak. Or they could call their God.

When the internet discovered the phone booth’s existence by proxy, it went insane in its own gigantic dark box of a world. It blew one of the world’s best-kept secrets to millions and millions of people. And those millions and millions created a situation where the booth was removed forever.

Some years ago, as a travel journalist, I drove in to the Mojave Desert to see if I could find anything left of the telephone booth, supposedly used occasionally by cinder miners to order supplies.

When I arrived in the blistering sun at its location, even the concrete plinth it once stood on had been obliterated.

And yet its number still exists and sometimes somebody answers it … call 7607339969.

#covid #mojavephone #phonebooth #desert #newspapers #media #internet #church #god #cinderminers #heinous #lying #despoiling #misleading #exaggerating #click-baiting #sensationalising #scandalising #distorting #disingenuous #despicable #debasing #disgusting #sexist #hateful