by Martin Jay,Strategic Culture:

The Alexei Navalny story presented to western journalists at Munich might as well have been a James Bond movie script for its lack of facts and romantic folly.

In recent pieces, I have thrown a spotlight on the demise of journalism – on what journalism actually is, or was, and how it has transformed its own core identity into something completely different today. We previously witnessed thehead of CBC news recently admittingthat old-school journalism which produced “scoops” that were lapped up by a broad public base which wanted media to hold elites to account, is no longer popular. She claimed that there just aren’t the numbers out there who are glued to their sets watching 60 Minutes investigative journalism shows of previous times, watching today. I personally find this claim hard to believe as, in the same breath, the same media boss justifies a new style of journalism which aligns itself much more to the narrative of the government of the day. Hard to imagine people prefer the latter. In reality, what she is probably trying to say is that for big media to survive and to cling on to the few remaining advertisers who will keep it from being wiped out altogether, it needs to get into bed with the deep state and forget about the truth altogether. Who needs the truth, after all? It’ll only bring you stress, make you angry and probably crash your car on the way home from the grocery store, creating a huge fight with your wife and ruining the weekend.

TRUTH LIVES on athttps://sgtreport.tv/

The truth is so old-fashioned, so out of touch with modern foibles and is practically considered a South American poison which can kill you within seconds. Hardly surprising that anew UK government department which censors journalists’ pieceshas a whole new lexicon of nasty words to label fringe, independent journalists sticking to the old working methods of journalism.

The truth was always the starting point for journalism. It was always easier to remember and was always an excellent grounding agent for journalists who had lost the plot of the story they were working on. It can sometimes be terrifyingly awkward and often is just a plain son of a bitch for governments, media, watchdogs, the deep state and anyone who gives a damn about democracy.

Yet these days we are working in a new environment entirely and journalists are under enormous pressure to simply get words out there. Any words. Words might as well be tins of baked beans stacked up in crates loaded onto containers destined for consumption. The truth is simply no longer part of any interest or working consciousness of mainstream media operators.

And of course, this works as a new support mechanism for sloppier, lazier and increasingly inept government officials, elected or otherwise. Never before have we been ruled by such underperforming, lame government ministers than today, who need a servile media to manipulate to get the perceived truth out there unchallenged by the actual truth.

In this new world media order, anything is possible. Any story can be manufactured as the mechanism of fact-checking has been long abandoned. I personally gave up trying to write international news stories decades ago when the biggest hurdle I had to face in getting those investigations published was the hilarious demand from younger editors to get the thrust of the piece checked by the UK Foreign Office press department! This demand was always given without irony whatsoever by a 25-year-old desk editor who was simply not programmed to be told by a journalist of my experience that “this would be a total waste of time as those c—-s at the Foreign Office just lie through their teeth and will deny it all”. Many stories just got blocked by the fact that the official denial from the press office of the Foreign Office was enough to scare the editor of the day into not publishing it and not wasting any time on it from that point onwards. This practice started in the late 90s and was intensified in recent years by the Foreign Office when they realised how effective it was in simply blocking all good stories about Syria, Iraq, and Libya.

And so in this environment, the journalist who phones in the story in 2015 that the US government is funding about a dozen Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria, or that in fact Assad is not dropping chlorine on his own people but rather that the terror groups that the West is backing are doing it so as to fake the news, is laughed at. At best he is told to send his allegations to the Foreign Office press department who, of course, issue a gobbledygook statement dismissing it as lies or propaganda.

Source: SGT Report