To be a Franco

Subject: To be a Franco.

News has gained a reputation for being anything than just that. Fake news has gathered a following where people, for a whole range of reasons deliberately create so called fake news which in fact is nothing more than, propaganda to deceive.
This of course is nothing new Joseph Gobbles was a well known fake news expert in Germany and no doubt Churchill was not above the twisting of facts to suite his need. Of course before all the Churchill acolytes tell me there is all the difference in the world between a ministry of propaganda and a politicians penchant to tell pokies, I would agree but deceit is deceit non the less.

The latest instance is in the announcement that in Catalonia the people who voted to leave Spain and set up their own independent state were only 40% of the Catalan population. This salient fact excludes what we saw with our very eyes  leaving out the violence of the bully boy Spanish police preventing the voters from voting. Even those who had voted had their ballot boxes ripped from the voting station and the contents presumably destroyed. 40% seems to me to be an astoundingly high vote given the atrocious conditions the people were confronted with and yet our media make no mention of this in their reports when discussing the vote share. The bulk of the Catalans were baulked in their legitimate right to vote. 

The news is coiffured news, its news which is sanitised and made palatable by cheery presenters, usually a man and a woman sitting on a couch chatting as if they were guests in your living room. Their demeanour is happy with flip comments thrown around like confetti at a wedding. The news is part of a show, its main ingredient is the personality of the presenter, highly aid actors who we have become used to in our constant attempt to keep up with events outside our home. 

By the time the editorial staff have chosen what we shall know and the presenters have removed the sting, all we have left is bromide which for the uninitiated was the stuff they used to put in the tea of the soldiers to keep their minds on killing and not the Mrs at home (although the both could be comparable).
Fake news, propaganda, mind washing it's all the same, as our political masters feel the need for us to know what they wish us to know. Of course swilling around in all this is the news we get from the ubiquitous mobile phone camera which is uncensored, unabridged and maybe unreliable but at least it places us where the action is. We  see the Spanish police dragging women by the hair and kicking old men whilst they lie on the ground in a fever to respond to their political masters in Madrid hatred of this upstart state. 

Of course Spain has a history of heavy handed state intervention. The Inquisition and the Spanish Civil War were two events when authoritarian vigour got out of hand and destroyed for a time a sense of fair play. Perhaps there lies, close beneath the surface of every Spanish Prime Minister a Fascist yearning to be Franco.
But getting down to news and who presents it. Think of the day perhaps sooner than we think when these highly paid robots, the news team, will be replaced with proper robots. When the chance is missed to question what news the reader is being asked to read out to a gullible public. To raise our hand and say "please sir that is simply not true".