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Thursday 14 September 2023

The media did the spiralling



Laura Perrins has an excellent TCW hit piece on the Captain Tom phenomenon.


Captain Tom – all part of the great Covid con

I tell you what, that Captain Tom saga is a real humdinger. That Captain Tom debacle is a gift that keeps giving, unless you actually gave a gift to the Captain Tom Foundation, in which case I would say, more fool you and do you require some time in the Hannah Ingram-Moore family pool and spa complex to calm down?


The whole piece is well worth reading as a yet another reminder of how cynically and ruthlessly we are manipulated. It is also a reminder of how the media are tightly integrated into the manipulation. It's what they do - manipulation. They appear to enjoy it too, or possibly they find it amusing.  

It seemed to him that these men, who wrote the words and proclaimed the truths which had turned his life and reformed his soul, were themselves but playing with what they taught. Were they only actors — or amusing themselves?

Anthony Hope - A Change of Air (1893)


Three years in, the media are running a kind of, oh well that was then and this is now, we are back to doing our jobs. A columnist in the Times explains the propaganda war that was Captain Tom as follows: ‘This small, sweet story swiftly spiralled into one of national importance. This is partly because it happened in the early days of lockdown, when the national mood was completely bananas.’

Just pause there one moment: this is all a bit too passive. The reason why it ‘spiralled’ was because the media did the spiralling. The reason why the ‘national mood was completely bananas’ was because the entire mainstream media whipped everyone up into a state of fear, where most people did indeed go bananas. These things didn’t just happen by accident. It was intended to be that way. It was designed that way.

Today, three years too late, we have got to ‘Captain Sir Tom Moore’s daughter received more than £150,000 from charity. Payments were made to Hannah Ingram-Moore and companies she controls with her husband.’

Even the NHS is not so wonderful any more: it has taken a bit of a hit with the baby killer on the ward. Never good for one’s reputation, that.

2 comments:

Sam Vega said...

We need to remember the fact of loads of people being conned, and then direct the suspicion towards whatever is in front of us. Anything that is presented sentimentally, that invites us to marvel at the extraordinary goodness of something, is doubly suspect. Batmangelidjh, Savile, Thunberg, and now this bunch of crooks.

A K Haart said...

Sam - yes, anything presented sentimentally is suspect. Yet being conned almost seems popular when it is presented this way. Even the EU often seems to be presented in a sentimental sense, as a kind of wider homeland where we belong. It boggles the mind.