The world’s free Press is, by using Bible-black ink and disturbed airwaves, chronicling Europe’s new horrors of war.
And we journalists are doing it well.
On the other hand, presidents and generals, tech Goliaths and Davids are playing fast and loose with the truth.
Rarely has the reality of the world’s free media been more important to us all as the internet becomes infested with spiders that might as well be from Mars as far as truth and reality are concerned.
Ukraine turns to ashes before our eyes as we are left peering through the smokescreen of war rhetoric and deadly make-believe, propaganda, and ‘false flags’ that lead us away from the blood in the ruins of cities, towns and farms.
All is phoney and someone needs to be allowed to tell the truth.
Russians have closed down their own media and so many cybernauts across the world spend their days demanding that all countries do the same.
And Zelensky’s own media-savvy heart turns to his mobile to stridently – and with immediacy – tell his own version of what is happening.
Then there are of course the stoic contorted faces of big city dwellers and country folk who face the enemy with Molotov cocktails, old rifles and rusty pitchforks.
There is the truth. In those faces.
But there can be little truth from the Orange Man from Mar-a-Lago who only a few days ago praised Putin’s campaign to attack the Ukraine.
Trump said: “Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.”
Power mad? Or just mad?
Trump – worth at least 5bn in recent counts – and Putin – oft said to be the world’s richest man – appear to have an element of respect fizzing like an an old electric fire between them.
And they both tell lies … Dear presidents, why waste the truth when a good lie will do eh?
And Trump keeps thumb-tapping his lies into cyberspace as Putin holds his own finger over The Button.
Oh and don’t forget our Boris, he’s caught on that war means the party isn’t over for him at all … in fact he is likely to survive it all by becoming a humanitarian peace maker.
Or a Blair-esque warmonger. Survival is what matters, not the way you do it.
Yes, Vlad the Bad has thrown up an Iron Curtain of fake news between his regime and the rest of us and still denies his barbaric war is his fault.
And while Western journalists try to tell the real story about Putin they are daily facing death by bullet, shell and crashing buildings
Last year 46 journalists died in pursuit of exposing real life.
The heroism of these writers, photographers and broadcasters show us that freedom of knowledge is no longer a given.
And so many of the smug bedroom-bound cybernauts don’t care about it. They want to believe their own lies.
But freedom of knowledge and expression must sometimes be earned with blood.
It is the whinging Lefties, the bombastic Rightists, the inhuman Nazis, the twitter-ati. It is the bloated social media conspiracy theorists who get more believers than David Icke ever did…
It’s the scandalous bedroom hackers of Anonymous too, it is the War Gods, the politicians, the self-seeking Oligarchs and big businesses that are happy to risk the world to make a fortune out of rebuilding devastated countries.
(Asia’s largest economies for instance went from poverty to industrialised nations in a few decades following the most brutal of wars. Japan and Korea’s economies grew after World War II and the Korean War).
It is all of those above who went to war on the media while the world begins to burn.
I have been to war as a reporter, I have been shot at in Northern Ireland, I spent a long time with squaddies. And the squaddies mainly told the truth, despite the fact their officers only told the Press – and them – what they wanted us to hear.
So, apart from the armed forces who risk their lives, all those luminaries, conmen, liars and cheats who don’t risk anything in reality have an agenda, an ambition and a disregard for any truth that might hinder them.
And that’s what journalists do … hinder and expose the corrupt. And that is why politicians, the Big Orange One, Mad Vlad and the likes of urbane string bean Hugh Grant – pants up or pants down – want to stop us reading the truth.
It embarrasses them. And threatens their hidden bank balances.
The Defamation Act 2013 was intended to protect free speech, the cornerstone of democratic society: The Act introduced a serious harm test and a statutory public interest defence for the first time.
But in reality it has failed to give publishers a shield against claims brought by wealthy litigants who are desperate to stifle media investigations.
And it gives no real help for people with good arguments who go to court and are exposed to the wrath of the powerful.
Right now, as a journalist of decades of experience, I have an expose on a very rich man indeed. He hails from an oft war-ravaged part of the Western world. But he is litigious and dangerous and vicious, so I am afraid to publish or even sell my story.
His great wealth may well ultimately allow him to escape the scrutiny of the UK Press.
This Rich Man like so many others could easily fiddle while Europe burns and not give the Poor Writer or his family a second thought as he potentially takes away our money and home.
The public interest defence in the Act, rather than providing a shield for important investigations, is in practice a personal attack on journalists who are not the object of the investigation.
It really is now a publish and be damned world.
And the revised Online Safety Bill doesn’t help either. It is designed to make social media firms responsible for tackling illegal content and protecting children from online harms.
But it has a flaw.
Algorithms used by tech giants to remove harmful material also blocks the online output of bona fide news gatherers. For example, legitimate stories about terrorism or child abuse could be blocked by the Spiders who might as well be from Mars.
And it is Press freedom which will die in this relatively new tangled web of deceit.
The brave Ukranians and their brilliant leader President Zelensky, are fighting for their lives, their families, their homes and their freedom to be who they’ve become over the last 30 years.
Meanwhile, the cyber world Googles the likes of the Kardashians.
This is the consequence of a society which puts egotistical monsters with lots of money on a pedestal so high that we automatically look up to them … the social media stars are our new influencers whose only desire is to persuade us to buy things, like a false arse and trout lips.
The world is in darkness because of plastic-bound emptiness and an obsession with non-reality posing as New Reality.
And right there in front of us all is the ‘world’s richest man’ obliterating a country and threatening to turn the bubbling churning wreck of Chernobyl into a bomb.
Who is going to expose people like this – and the shallowness and callousness of New Reality – other than the real McCoy hard working journalists who are willing to risk their lives to expose the truth about what is really going on.
We sell 536 million newspapers a day to believers and non-believers alike.
Who are you going to trust in the future?
#putin #trump #zelensky #ukraine #kardashians #boris #vlad
