Remember when a very rich man, humiliated by a leading tabloid newspaper, set about putting it out of business, and in the process we discovered that much of the media were operating as a criminal syndicate, and then it all went away again? Fun times.
We have no means to discuss public business as discursive equals. Every now and then a foreign news outlet - Al Jazeera, the New York Times - will document how hilariously bent our media-political institutions are. But at the moment there’s not much we can do.
This is why it is such a disaster that the trade unions haven’t invested in building their own communicative forms. Working people will have absolutely no chance against the Monster until they can make sense of what is happening on their own terms.
People are pretty shrewd about what is happening in their family and work life. But as soon as they turn to matters outside their direct experience they are at the mercy of paid liars. That is what has to change, if anything at all is to change for the better.
Not everyone involved in systematically important media organisations is a paid liar, to be fair. Quite a few of them are privilege-drunk dunces who can't even be bothered to wonder aloud why they keep being wrong about things they are paid to understand.
Tagging @johnharris1969 and @Anoosh_C and into this, to ask if you plan to discuss the @AJEnglish #labourleaks documentaries on your podcasts next week. If your listeners wrongly believe that Labour under Corbyn was racist and thuggish, you must want to correct the record.
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