The British media is a boneyard

You have to remember that Phillip Schofield’s shame is ‘good’ content and an easy hit for all kinds of bastards.

Previously: Mizzy and the game
Bacari-Bronze O’Garro aka 'Mizzy' knows more about how the media works than the so-called professionals at Newsnight.

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There’s an old maxim in British journalism — please tell me who coined it if you know — that left-wing papers talk a good game, but right-wing titles actually pay their invoices while the comrades in the accounts department of The Guardian give you a desperately polite public school-adjacent runaround. The truth is there is no such thing as a major left-wing paper in Britain. Those who cling on to their past laurels as leftist bastions — The Guardian and New Statesman particularly — stare through the same Overton cat flap as all the other publications with the added grotesquery of constantly trading on old glories; the media equivalent of stolen valour — taking credit for battles they never fought.

A lot of high moral cant is thrown around by editors, columnists, presenters, and other media creatures in Britain. And behind the scenes? Many are monsters or people who enable monsters to preserve their own position. Right now, I’m working on several stories about that topic that I simply can’t talk about yet but… it’s worth saying that The Guardian, BBC News, The Independent, The Sun, The Times etc are in no position to stand in judgment over Phillip Schofield — whose case is one of grotesque abuse of power — because they are turning blind eyes to their own skeletons. The British media is a crowded ossuary; there is not a single cupboard free from bones.

From wank rags to broadsheets, high-minded speech radio to down-and-dirty talk shows, the press and wider media are slobbering with delight over the Phillip Schofield story, while simultaneously turning away from the Nick Cohen case — a situation that many people in the media were complicit in.

To be an industry that can truly be proud of its demands for justice and of its reporting into abuse and exploitation in other industries, the media has to stare at its own failings and speak clearly about them. As I write this there is a troll — anonymous but whose identity I’m pretty sure I know — in the mentions of every person who has ever said anything nice about me or worked with me accusing me of being an abuser and a danger. I’m neither thing and to tell the stories I’m going to report in the coming months, I have to make that abundantly clear.

It’s all very well to say “just block the trolls” or “just ignore them” but silence is not a good defense and, in the world as we live in it now, that silence is often taken as admission. In the case of media silence, it is collusion, self-protection, and a self-serving sort of shame. And that has to end. Time to throw all of the bones out of the dusty cupboards. Redemption only happens when there is a reckoning first and the British media is doing everything it can to avoid that.

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