When propaganda goes wrong

[CurtainRaiser]

Last night the Tory culture minister Nadine Dorries posted an extraordinary Tweet chastising the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg for commentary that was critical of Boris Johnson's handling of the Tory corruption scandal, essentially telling her how to report the news!

 

There are a couple of extremely telling things about this incident.

 

First there's the way that Kuenssberg has been so brazen about her pro-establishment, anti-socialist, Tory biased agenda that she's become a living embodiment of BBC bias.

 

This is a woman whose commitment to the Tory cause is so extreme that she even created "fake news" to smear the leader of the opposition, by splicing the wrong answers onto different questions to damage Jeremy Corbyn (a display of astonishingly unethical journalism that she should clearly have been sacked for).

 

But apparently this level of complicity from Keuenssberg isn't even enough for Dorries. She want complete conformity and subservience to the Tory agenda, and nothing else will suffice.

 

Then there's the way Dorries whined about Kuenssberg's reliance on an unnamed source for the quotations that Boris Johnson "looked weak and sounded weak", and that his "authority is evaporating".

 

One of the most common complaints about Kuenssberg's journalistic approach over the last few years has been her relentlessly uncritical regurgitation of pro-government lines from unnamed Tory sources.

 

Interestingly Nadine Dorries never had a word of complaint about Kuenssberg's uncritical reliance upon unnamed sources in the Tory party ranks when they were feeding her pro-government lines, but suddenly she's outraged now that an unnamed Tory source is critical of Johnson's lamentable leadership.

 

Then there's the fact that as Culture Minister, Nadine Dorries has control of the BBC purse strings. If the minister responsible for setting the BBC's budget telling a BBC journalist how to report the news doesn't raise your concerns about government interference in the media, it's unlikely that anything ever will.

 

But this spat between a deranged Tory government minister and the BBC's political editor has wider ramifications, and one of the most important is the absurd way it's being reported by most of the corporate media.

 

Can you even imagine the crescendo of condemnation if a minister in a Corbyn-led government had instructed a high profile journalist on how to do their job after they quoted an unnamed source in the Labour ranks badmouthing Corbyn?

 

It would obviously have been framed as a sinister Stalinist crackdown on press freedom, and the calls for the minister's resignation would be deafening. But today there's been minimal coverage, and what there has been has either framed Dorries' interjection as a "gaffe", or been based on uncritical regurgitation of Dorries' own excuses and denials!

 

A Tory minister criticises a high profile journalist for not being obsequiously pro-Tory enough, and the reaction of the mainstream media has largely been to obsequiously make excuses for her, rather than call for her resignation!