Alan Rusbridger has this evening written a most extraordinary column on The Guardian’s website about the pressure exerted on the paper by British security services. We are now about 27 hours on from when the initial revelations about David Miranda’s detention first broke.
So how, at 0030 CET / 2330 BST, have the websites of the main newspapers in the UK been covering the story? All screenshots below are taken with a UK IP address, using the same size screenshot – from a 24″ screen iMac, i.e. with quite a lot of screen estate. Click each image to see the screenshot at higher resolution
The Times
Tiny headline in the beige sidebar.
The Telegraph
Nothing at all without scrolling. There is a story if you scroll down one whole screen.
The Independent
Better. The case is the third story.
Daily Mail
Story is middle, centre, in amongst celebrity gossip. Note the framing of the headline.
Daily Express
Nothing at all, not even if you scroll down.
BBC News Online
Top story. And has received considerable coverage on BBC Radio all day.
Spiegel
For comparison. Second story, beneath the election news.
And finally The Guardian
Jon, you have my full support in denouncing this, but to understand the reason you only have to read one of my latest posts onto your Gibraltar piece:
http://www.thecorner.eu/news-europe/anti-eu-media-poison-uk-public-opinion/23191/
“Anti-EU media poison UK public opinion”
“In the UK, four media owners are known to hold eurosceptic positions, Rupert Murdoch (The Times, The Sun), Richard Desmond (The Express, The Star), the Barclay brothers (The Daily Telegraph), and the Daily Mail and General Trust. In September 2012, these titles accounted for the circulation of 74.1%, about 6.4 million copies, of British daily newspapers.”
There is a cryptofascist system in the UK whereby a powerful lobby of four press barons, some of them foreign, peddle an Anglo-Saxon fundamentalist agenda, needless to say fully supported by the Tories, UKIP and large sections of the remaining two major parties.
This agenda is very simple: Everything the US and the UK (together with the rest of predominantly white English speaking countries) do is right. Everything non-English speaking people or institutions do (e.g. the EU) is usually – or always, in the case of the EU – wrong.
This agenda is so breathtakingly simple and obvious that I find it bemusing that you haven’t cottoned up to it.
Any of the endless lies peddled by the above powerful unelected press barons goes unchecked by the authorities, basically they are free to deliberately lie when it comes to throwing smear at the EU or any of the ‘enemies’ of their White Anglo-Saxon ‘alliance’.
When it comes to people who try to denounce abuses by the US and UK mass surveillance systems (another example here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7877182.stm , an example of the very reason why the UK is the only EU country to reject Schengen) then, they are given the full anti-terrorist treatment by the UK.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/david-miranda-detained-uk-nsa
Quite remarkable that an established UK news organisation has to “flee” to the US and Brazil to be able to do independent reporting.