Pressing Matters

I find myself struggling with a dilemma today. A battle between which I despise the most, enforced censorship, or journalists who refuse to control their own output via a sense of morality and truth. Surely journalists’ self monitoring is preferable to a society that is manoeuvred into a position where imposing stricter censorship laws on us all sadly becomes the consequence of the actions of these cretins. No longer, it would seem, can we rely on common decency to prevent false information, lies and total fabrications of ‘stories’ making their way into our mainstream media. We are heading towards, and in many cases have already arrived at, a new cultural juncture where morals fall by the wayside and every action is perfectly acceptable just so long as there isn’t a new law preventing it. Freedom of expression will be gone as we are forced to rely on the government to instruct us in the differences between right and wrong.

Already we are witnessing this change. People are making decisions based on whether they can legally get away with their actions rather than whether they feel that their behaviour is acceptable or justified. This may be an ongoing theme on this blog, journalists lie and the government steals our liberties. Yes, it’s very old hat and yes I’m sure you already knew all that, but today’s rant is more about the connection between the two. This social decline plays directly into the hands of the great oppressors the government, who gleefully place more restrictions on our freedoms under the false guise of protecting us from the actions of the unscrupulous few. And while the masses are whipped once more into a frenzied state of outrage, the rest of us have to suffer the inevitable knee jerk reaction from the government which will undoubtedly involve their increased control of our lives.

So how do we reverse this downward spiral? How do we prevent these parasitical ‘journalists’ from over stepping the mark without diving head first into complete censorship? The answer, my friends, is simple....we arm ourselves to the teeth! We make it known that the spreading of untruths and the misrepresentation of people by the media will be met with horrendous consequences for the offenders.

This, at first, may seem to be a somewhat harsh tactic, but it will definitely work. I know it will work because it is based entirely on this country’s nuclear policy. The government feels it is necessary for us to have a huge nuclear arsenal in order to encourage other governments to be more pliable through fear. This has been the policy of successive governments for many years, therefore it must be a brilliant idea and we should adopt its principles immediately. There is a small flaw in this plan though as several other countries also have their own nuclear arsenals, meaning that any arguments between governments could lead to a gigantic, human race ending war. This could easily transfer to our ‘war against censorship’ if journalists were to also arm themselves. But the government have already thought of that, they are, after all, not stupid. A gigantic human race ending war will not happen because of “mutual fear”. This is of course the same “mutual fear” that prevented the First World War from happening.

Now, the problem with that theory is of course that the First World War did happen, although I’m sure the government will find it easier to sweep that fact under the carpet now that ‘The Great War’ has passed from living memory save for people who at the time were too young to have been involved. Taking this into account I think this hitch is possibly a good enough reason to scrap the ‘let’s all arm ourselves in the name of freedom of speech’ plan.

This causes me some concern. Not only do I no longer have any means of forcing journalists out of the gutter, as my plan has turned out to be complete bullshit, but this also highlights that the inspiration for my plan, governments around the world having nuclear weapons, is a massively stupid idea! This should be a terrifying thought. This should be making people angry, and it does, but only a small proportion of our society. The rest are preoccupied with piss poor television such as Noel Edmond’s best of deal or no deal and Vernon Kay presiding over a couple of pricks making paper aeroplanes. The masses have no time to protest against or even think about the consequences of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Like the rest of us, these people do get angry, but unlike us, they need to be told what to be angry about. They save their outrage for whoever the press are misrepresenting this week. The thought of checking these ‘facts’ printed in the papers never even crosses their minds. This leads to people believing shit like Brian Logan’s piece in The Guardian where he callously takes things that comedian Richard Herring said out of context to give the impression that his stand up routine is racist, when it is in fact the complete opposite.

This is by no means as big a news story as the phone tapping allegations but it all amounts to the same thing. People are fed lies which cause them to be wrongly outraged, and the press get away with it because this behaviour puts the government in a win-win situation. Either they allow this bullshit reporting to continue distracting the masses from the important issues, or they put a stop to it by imposing draconian laws which eradicate our liberty.