Its all down to belief

Subject: It's all down to belief.

Boris Johnson's success and the part the mainstream press played in it with lurid headlines propounding lies and deceit as if they we were compatible with reasoned debate and some semblance of truth, has provided me with an epiphany moment, a moment of change and reawakening. 

When I was growing up the newspapers represented virtually the only source of news and information as to what was going on outside my personal obit. My orbit, the people I came into contact with living in a Yorkshire village as a young boy was almost entirely village centric. Very few people in the village had a motorcar, the bus, the bicycle or simply walking was our only means of transport and largely our world was contained within the hills and valleys of a 20 mile radius.  The simplicity strikes me now as I type away on this iPad, the world a keystroke away.
TV had yet to be launched across the country and consisted of only one program, BBC 1 which came on 15.00 and went off at 22.00. the reports from the far flung outposts of Empire such as Australia were the result of journalists observing events and reporting what they saw. 'The Times' of that period, long before it was bought by the grasping Murdock empire, was a paper you could trust and look up to as a part of an established respect we had for certain institutions operating within the national fabric.
This trust and reverence for honesty had a profound effect on the population. People placed their faith in certain institutions to be the weather cocks of taste and probity.
Growing up with these fundamental images of news as a factual thing, not a commodity to be bought and sold or twisted to meet someone's agenda meant we could digest what was happening beyond the compass of our affairs and yet make the story part of our affair. News was an actuality not a speculation or a political football, not a propaganda tool to manipulate our minds or deliberately modify and distort the truth.
Speculation is largely an ephemeral phenomena lacking any sort of consistency, it spirits the mind around flitting on this or that, leaving a confused vision of what is true and what is not. It's opinion not fact and makes no attempt to get close to facts since facts can be checked. It functions on the precepts of the Mad Hatters Tea Party where disjointed statements made for conversation and conversation was, like the host, quite mad.
The press, or as it is described, the 'Fourth Estate', is immensely powerful in influencing people who take what they read as gospel or, find the thread they are looking for, much as a narcissist searches for praise, to substantiate their prejudice.
The evil done to man is as much by innuendo as by fact and the hatchet job done on Jeremy Corbyn whilst at the same time brushing over the unpleasant character traits of Boris Johnson as some sort of laddish behaviour, meant that Corbyn, the man, became toxic and unelectable by those very people he wished to protect from what he saw coming down the track of hard right conservatism.
Corbyn the back bencher who had resolutely followed a path, as he saw it, of fair play and some sort of equality for the common man, trying to ensure the workings of the political system, so distorted by Margret Thatchers neo liberalism, to include the community as a whole. 
Year in year out Corbyn had resolutely pointed out the inadequacy of letting 'the market' decide. His opposition to Thatcher and then to Blair was based on his humanity towards those very people who, at the continuous baiting of the press believed he was some sort of Marxist inspired devil. Parroting the slogans they read each day,, week in week out never taking the trouble to ask, 'where and from whom' this information was coming from, they simply repeated the phrases, "Corbyn was unfit to become prime minister". The fact that he was on their side pointing out the decline in everything which touched their lives and the opportunities they might have dreamt for their children was irrelevant.  His voice consistently searching for ways to improve their lot and yet they had been told he was evil and like the faithful in St Peters Square they believed.