Rumours.

Rumours.

Mathew 24:6-8.

 ^“6And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

⁷ For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places.

⁸ All these are the beginning of sorrows”.

Unless one is an avid reader and watcher of news it will have by passed the consideration of many with their myopic attention, that the way external affairs of reality is laid before them via different media, has changed. It requires a much more attentive concentration to discern if what one is being presented with is a fair representation of an issue with evidential facts to support what is being offered. Without such diligent attention to the presentation of news it is uncertain that it can no longer can be relied on for its accuracy or overall impartiality in the reporting of serious news worthy events.

There has always been, since news became news for disseminating to a mass audience, a tendency for inferred bias leading one facet over another to offer a scripted interpretation of the events that make up the news being laid out. At its sometimes obvious, this could be construed as deliberate delivery of what is patently propaganda as it intentionally ignores any opposing facets that may have been observed in other media or indeed the actual personal experiences of those in the event that constituted ‘the news’ or more definitely news seen as it is offered up as the ‘official’ stance solely expressed by just one vested interested fraction. At its most disguised evasiveness, a news item may be observed portraying a ‘gloss’ or ‘spin’ on a certain element of the news for a particular advantageous purpose while underplaying or denigrating any contra facets.

There is now no news media that is wholly reliable. Those responsible for looking to report on stories and issues of the time, mainly journalist; in the main have carried out their role with some consideration and honesty albeit constrain within the scope of their particular expertise and the latitude allowed by the owners of the media for whom they may work for. However just reporting facts without an analysis of the influencing substance to the facts, would be, for many, very boring and uninformative as the onus is on the recipient to have some grasp of the subject or substance under report. In the main this accumulated attention to the ‘background’ of the events being reported is unlikely now as it  requires a rolling awareness and active participation to maintain the interest span that allows an individual to assemble their knowledge or assessment based on verifiable facts within the spread of a news worthy item. In some way, due to the speed at which news can be broadcasted and the range and volume of output, most people understand news now only as ‘strap line’ bites with little attention to any substance. Here news outlets perform the individual’s time saving function effort of filtering and interpretation of events with journalist doing their best to offer a consumable digests focusing of the salient points to make the news item, interesting. None can report just facts anymore without interjecting an interpretation as to their own view of the facts and in doing so, dependent on the veracity of the journalist, may lose the essential truth of reporting the actual complicit facts, such as they are. This interpretation being offered, one assumes is after an analysis of the whole range of facets that do make up news items and for easy assimilation it may be necessary to minimise the content within a limited presentational time frame or script.

In watching a variety of news reporting media one can hear the interpretation being played out in the use of words to describe events and the way a certain placed contextual word in a sentence can form the overall perspective of delivery. Given the constraint of news deliver time there is an obvious  tendency to be succinct with the news worthy item but at the same time to offer a good truthful factual ‘report’ on what is the subject matter. Yet the change of a word by different reporters on the same issue, although superficially of similar in meaning, with cursory reading, changes the whole tone of the report delivery and the emphasis of the report is placed in a different perceptive milieu particularly when some descriptive wording is weakened or given much higher preference or indeed some element of the actual facts of what should be reported are quite clearly ignored or ‘played down’. In many ways this is not such a difficulty depended on the nature / seriousness of the issues being reported on. The main particulars should remain the same but can often be deliberately or potentially misleading with selectivity and with loaded ‘strap line’ news promotion as the introduction to the subject matter it is uninformative in overall meaning or context but it is ‘headline grabbing, for casual attention.      

With the advent of internet driven information output and the vehicles on it, apps: like twitter, face book, reddit and individual created presentations; the ‘normal’ methods of pushing news out with the assimilation of it to a consuming public, it has become very hard for papers, radio and TV to maintain competitive influence; they have the traditional means to hold onto the mantel of information provider (papers, radio, TV) and these established providers are still looked on as a reliable source but in an effort to be readable and economically viable they have become much more selective in the range of ‘news’ that is deemed to be of interest to their ‘readers’. In some cases it is noticeable that just like popular soap mediums; plays, films, dramas etc there is a degree social / cultural / PC ‘creativeness’ to avoid or limit exposure on some topics of contention if in reporting on them would raise a fierce backlash and be accused of bias or of not being balanced (this particularly applies to the BBC) but also to a less extent the Guardian, or even RT and al jazeera. As an example, the lack of critical under-reporting of news; the Jewish/Israeli Palestinian problem, the rise in crime activity by migrants throughout Europe, the disguised Russia insurgent activity in Ukraine to destabilise it after the forced annexation of Crimea, the mess caused and ensued by the west in Libya, Iraq and Syria. If reports cause affront to the responsible state authority, a quiet word will be had.          

So what has rumours got to do with the portent? It is disputable but most people of the world do not have access to good quality truthful news. Most people do not give any concentrated effort to be a regular reading / listeners to news to gain an informed insight to what is being reported, there is generally no continuity to their attention span and no self created historical awareness to be able to discern a trend in a variety of reported news, vis a vie vested interest, bias, or comparability of news reporting styles. They are at the mercy of strap line news and do not know that there is a measure of manipulation taken place to form their opinion and there is ample evidence to see that there is some deliberate direction of injecting miss-directive contra facts, creating false news and a play to be consistent in the deniability to the truth in issues. Some media have become much more elastic with the actuality of truthful reporting driven by the need to pander to the pressure of its editorial and directive ownership and to influence the readers’ assumptions.

One might expect misinformation to be an acknowledging purveyed tool of dictatorships and countries of unsophisticated news distribution but it is particularly unacceptable and distastefully dangerous in developed ones. This avoidance of a truth for an alternative created reality is also notably matched by the adoption, by  ‘key note’ speaker, on some issues to filibuster any question, dissemble, be economical with the actuality of facts or as is currently seen in parliament and the white house, being mendacious, actually lying (miss reporting - “inadvertently misled”) and finding some mechanism to deflect blame / responsibility. There have of recent times been some good examples of such outright deceit; of course we have the outrageous Trumpism effect, pronouncement and action which in some cases are obvious reconstruction of a fancied reality but in the UK, a country with a parliament that one may have assumed held itself to high representational ingenuous standard, has fallen into the same disingenuous roles seen in the antics of people like Johnson, Gove, Rudd, IDS, Patel, Davis, Fox. Mogg, McVey and an assembled host of other mp’s who live and lie on a different hard brexit planet.  

State management of news in countries such as Israel, Poland, US, China, Russia and now the UK has become dangerously accepted as a game of confounding truth; obscuration, miss direction, and direct denial in the face reliable fact, it is designed to create a perplexity upon a topic so that only an ardent follower of diverse media will be able to extract salient fact from artifice fiction. For the vast majority that don’t examine news detail and gain only the strap line intent, then where is their truth to be had!

This slide into deliberate under-reporting has been noted by some journalist and to their credit they have been attempting to raise the alarm to it but for now it seems the whole world is in a trap of being enmeshed in a range of expanding false news and no obvious way of challenging the lying purveyors with consequences.

So Rumour can be taken as a warning; fool enough people to believe lies, mistrust a truth, allow manipulative mendacious acts on democracy; do nothing about it and perhaps enough will engender a conflict.  

© Renot

315182015