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The Old Media and Webbloggs
Eurosoc has an interesting post Blogger Delight, apparently Terrence Blacker in the Independent has slated Bloggers, and fears that the fair and balanced professional media hacks are under threat from amateur ill informed right wing Blogger. Eurosoc

I have just been reading the Labours Government 1975 pamphlet sent out by Harold Wilson to every house in the country which painted a very rosy picture of our place in the “Common Market” back in those days all the media were solidly behind the yes vote, and there was no method of actually being able to see the treaty itself, we had to rely instead on the views of the likes of the BBC to get some idea of what being in the Common Market might mean for Britain. Of course what we did not know then, but do now is that each morning the major media outlets would convene for a breakfast conference with government representatives to decide on the output of that days news and decide how they were going to present it in a good light for the Common Market referendum (they did not use the word spin in those days). One young labour member a certain Roy Hattersley was invited to attend one of these meetings and was so disgusted at the manipulation of the daily news he witnessed at the meeting, that he refused to go to again. It might have been helpful if at the time he had made some comment to the British people about the tactics the Wilson government was using to hoodwink the people, but he choose to remain silent on the subject.

If we look at today’s crop of newspapers and media outlets, it seems that very little has really changed, I know that Europhiles are continually moaning about foreign press barons and underhanded methods they are using to question the veracity of the one sided view they would like us all to believe, but really when we look at the output, most of the media is pro or at least ambivalent towards the EU, we get the Euro myths which are opposed by the other sides Euro myths about the straightness or otherwise of a banana, but there is never a real discussion about the real problems of our continued membership of the EU. To a large extent the media has taken upon itself to sanitise the news we are fed and the news and views we are not shown. One of the biggest scandals is the fact that although every poll has shown at least 40% of the British people say they would like Britain to leave the EU, coverage of those who support this view, do not appear to be considered important to the main media, in fact it is very rare to see any thing at all on that issue, I received an e-mail today which shows the frustrations that many of us feel with the media in general.

“I have been in the habit of writing letters to my local paper which they have always published; until recently that is. They’ve got a new editor and now they won’t publish my letters! It brings to the forefront the kind of problem that UKIP encounters - without media attention (they) have a hard row to hoe”