Sadly, the clip of a BBC’s main news item that displayed an Indian street celebration as an anti-Gaddafi demo in Tripoli’s main square was par for the course these dark days.

One would have thought that modern technology, and the internet, would have ended such knavish behaviour by mainstream media.

The BBC has been at the forefront of news distortion for decades. I recall the apartheid period when BBC journalists superimposed pictures of tanks on Johannesburg parks and claimed Europeans needed military protection. 

Media journalists tossed handfuls of coins into waste bins to give the impression that street kids searching for them were scrounging for discarded food scraps.

It is said that the camera never lies. The camera is in fact the biggest liar in history. Jack Glenn was director of the popular news series March of Time. It is still shown on the History Channel.

In his obituary it was conceded that he often created world events with actors and movie sets. The news feature film, Inside Nazi Germany (1939) includes footage of a Nazi prison camp. The feature was actually filmed on New York’s Staten Island using actors.

The use of film and photography to distort history has created its own culture of aficionados who delight in finding the whoppers. Such behaviour really makes us no better than the Soviets.

When journalists deliberately censor or spin news information to mould the nation’s thinking to mirror its own model then society loses its moral compass.

It feeds cynicism until no one knows who are what to believe anymore. What we have is the nightmare world of George Orwell’s 1984 novel.

In his narrative, the gifted prophet George Orwell wrote: “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed   …   all this is indispensably necessary.”

Think about it. Could any statement better describe mainstream media manipulation today?

It is social engineering; I defy anyone to label it as different from the models used by past dictatorships; to do so can only be described as denial.

We deserve better and it is our weakness if our children grow up in a world in which all thought processes are orchestrated by mainstream media.

When the mind is manipulated before the polls open then democracy becomes a sham; a fig leaf behind which lurks another of Orwell’s predictions: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.”

Having spent much of my life as a media insider; I agree with many contemporaries; the small independent newspapers, whilst not political, do tend towards being balanced and fair.

Their ally today is the internet where ultimate media liberation flourishes. It threatens the news monopoly of the giant broadcasters and news magnates. This is the latter’s concern but a truly independent media and the internet could be our salvation.

Many columnists and journalists have seen the light. The great Daily Mail columnist Simon Heffer, with whom I had a few squabbles, wrote: “This is, in theory still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. 

‘Freedom of speech is thereby imperilled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths.” I second that.

TELEVISION LIES ‘Television lies.  All television lies.  It lies persistently, instinctively and by habit.  Everyone involved lies. A culture of mendacity surrounds the medium and those who work there live it, breathe it and prosper by it. 

I know of no area of public life – no, not even politics – more saturated by professional cynicism.  If you want a word that takes you to the core of it, I would offer ‘rigged’.

It is dishonest for the presenter to imply that the pundit in the chair is free to offer any opinion when the truth is that 50 pundits were telephoned but only the fellow prepared to offer the requisite opinion was invited?’ ~ Matthew Pariss. British Press Awards Columnist of the Year. Daily Mail, 21st April 1996

RETRIBUTION A Liverpool-based city-vigilante thriller more gripping than Death Wish by Michael Walsh award-winning novelist. ‘Retribution is the greatest movie never made’ ~ William Housman. ‘An excellent thriller written in the tense style of a John Le Carre spymaster novel’ ~ Brian Smyth. LINK TO BOOK   https://feji.us/rg214o

THE BEST BOOKS ARE JUST A CLICK AWAY