In a new regular feature Dave Watt’s media diary will cast a consciously bilious look at how our factually orientated and completely balanced media feed us our daily diet of ‘manufactured consensus’.

26/08/09

Edward Kennedy dies age 77 and the media immediately launch into predictable knee-jerk 'life marred by scandal mode'. Presumably had our trashy tabloids & TV been around when Ghandi kicked the bucket in 1948 we'd have had a 'life marred by scandal' on the grounds that he was alleged to have put it about a bit in the 1930s & 40s.

27/08/09

The tabloids, which have been heaping bucketfuls of scorn on Gordon Brown since he succeeded the odious B-liar, suddenly start quoting the fat sponge monkey as if he were God Almighty as he gets wired into the Libyans for welcoming the dying [and probably innocent] al Megrahi to Tripoli. Presumably, this sudden distaste for the Libyans won't extend to cancelling any lucrative contracts that the corporations who pay New Labour & Tory election expenses are profiting from.

28/08/09

The media go absolutely ape after a young girl kept as a sex slave in the US is released after 18 years. 3 Palestinians are killed by Israeli jets in Gaza, a further dozen are killed by US jets in Iraq and the alleged road to Afghanistan democracy comes to a dead end as practically nobody votes but who cares when you’ve got an 18 year sex slave drama to be shocked about. It’s got something for everyone in the tabloid reading public -it’s prurient, it’s shocking and it gives our sad inadequates something to feel smug about. They may not have been laid in years and be able to get all their friends comfortably into a telephone box, but at least they haven’t kept a teenage girl in a cellar as a sex slave for 18 years.

29 &30/08/09

The media spend the weekend alternately shocking and re-shocking themselves over the 18 year sex slave using the usual epithets of the ‘sex beast caged’ variety. Ho hum.

31/08/09

US General Stanley McChrystal points out that the occupiers’ strategy in Afghanistan is the wrong one and resembles a mad bull repeatedly charging a matador, and picking up cuts with each attack. He suggests other strategies but misses out the most consistently successful strategy of not invading foreign countries which seems to have served Norway, Denmark & Sweden so well. The general, like many of his kind, seems to be astonished that indiscriminate bombing of their families and homes just hasn’t won the Afghanis’ hearts and minds and is obviously thinking that there’s just no pleasing some people.

1/09/09

15 activists stage a naked demo and climbed the roof of central London public relations and big business cheerleaders Edelman PR. This engenders the response from the chief Edelman flack that: “Everyone all around the world is concerned about a balanced energy policy but the fact remains that someone has to keep the lights on”. Whether Edelman and their clients Eon would be adopting this allegedly responsible role if money wasn’t going into their hip pockets is a matter of debate.

An embittered and unemployed BNP member is fined £250 for putting their membership list into the public domain. Given the large chunks of free publicity to that organisation geed up by the media before the Euro-elections it’s a wonder he doesn’t try for a job at the BBC.

2/09/09

The al Megrahi debate runs on and on generating a lot in the way of media - hot air but not much in the way of enlightenment. One how wonders many years the captain of the USS Vincennes would have had to serve if the US didn’t have carte blanche to murder anyone it chose on the planet. I notice Lt Calley of My Lai fame didn’t have too rigorous a time and there was no doubt about his guilt, but he finally had the grace to say sorry last week.