Thump, the news paper drops in through the letterbox.

 Subject: Thump, the news paper drops in through the letterbox.



I have always, from being a young man thrived on the discourse of news in the newspapers. My dad was an avid quality newspaper reader abet he prejudiced this with his political leaning as a socialist. He was also somewhat prudish in that the more solicitous papers were never taken and I wonder what he would have made of the free- for-all market place we see today, never mind the strange turn of events on Eurovision. In those days your home was truly your castle, what came in was what you wanted to come in, in other words you didn’t have much but you had the choice to say no.

The political flavour of a paper was what many people chose as they settled back to have their views reinforced by the columnist and above all by the editor. These editors and owners of print were often the movers and shakers of political thought as they sort to persuade you of the rightness and wrongness of political debate. Parliament was the arbiter but the dissemination was the job of the newspaper.

As with so many things in those days class determined your interest and finance and the spoils of taxation determined the way you thought. On the one hand if you were a Tory you had sufficient disposable income to decide where and on what you spent your money if you were a socialist you simply leant your ear to hopes and promises.

There was always a sense of the irreconcilable difference but at least ‘hypocrisy’ was treated with disdain. That is until Rupert Murdock came on the scene and started the mass manipulation of minds and where truth and falsehood became blended into a saleable commodity and eventually we, the public, ended up where we are today in a totally confused world of media confliction. People are confused with the brash denial by government ministers of what we believe is the truth and then, reinforced with a ministerial round of contradiction in the full glare of the headlights, black becomes white.

Our minds are not built to cope with this dystopian nightmare, the Orwellian concept of sowing fear by misrepresenting reality is not only by the Chinese or the Russian but by our own people, each morning as we eat our Kellogg’s.