WESTERN MAINSTREAM NEWS: IT’S JINGOISM, NOT JOURNALISM

When Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s top war correspondent tweets an image showing Ukrainians the best places to throw Molotov Cocktails onto Russian tanks to incapacitate them and kill their occupants you know that journalism has died within him and been replaced by jingoism.

‘Jingoism: an attitude of belligerent nationalism, or a blind adherence to the rightness or virtue of one's own nation, society, or group, simply because it is one's own.’

We see the entire collective west now in jingoistic uproar. The Kiev-supporting Ukrainians are depicted as either virtual saints, including of course their “hero” leader and the rest (except for those in eastern Ukraine of course) are poor innocents suffering from the Russian Demon King and heartless minions.

The BBC in particular has entirely lost any trace of objectivity and could easily be mistaken for an arm of the British Army, Air Force or MI5/6. Its editors and commentators (I won’t call them journalists) appear to lust after Russian deaths and carve every possible article into a paean of praise for one side and a witch’s curse on the other.

It’s not journalism folks. It’s not the kind of material that famed British war correspondent Robert Fisk used to produce which readers could trust was the nearest he could get to the truth on whatever war he covered. Fisk was meticulous in his accuracy, whereas the BBC now is murderous in its total bias.

Not that this is a sudden change for the BBC. For over a decade, well over a decade on the subject of Vladimir Putin and Russia the BBC has never lived up to its self-awarded epithet of being impartial. The very idea that they could claim this in this context is of course laughable. Instead the BBC set itself up as judge, jury and executioner by the “pen” (the pen being mightier than the sword, or so they say). The BBC in this respect mirrors the self-awarded status of the West in granting itself the “right” to be arbiter of all right and wrong and self-appointed punisher of wrongdoers as seen through their eyes.

This is the abiding attitude that permeates BBC news (if we can still call it news and not state-sponsored propaganda). It absolutely cannot be called journalism that they do with all that power and influence they wield.

So, what is it if it is not journalism?

Isn’t it obvious presuming the full meaning of the word is known and understood.

It is clearly jingoism, and about as far from journalism as it is possible to be.