By Graham Vanbergen: There is something really quite worrying happening to Britain. We now have the most draconian state surveillance powers
ever devised hanging over the entire population. Just six billionaires
now run over 80 percent of the media where true editorial independence
simply doesn’t exist and where corporate advertising revenue leads to
censorship of their awful behaviour. Internet service providers and
search engines now have the power to censor any information at will and
given the scale of complaints globally by independent media outlets,
they are using that capability to the full. In the meantime, the British
government continues its assault on press freedom and by implication –
democracy itself. There’s a reason.
We have known for years that the British intelligence services
manipulate the press. Roy Greenslade, who has been a media specialist
for both the Telegraph and the Guardian, said: “Most tabloid newspapers – or even newspapers in general – are the playthings of MI5.”
What is worse though than blatant propaganda is that press freedom in
the UK is plummeting and doing so by design. This is confirmed by the
fact that the UK has fallen two places to 40th out of 180 countries,
down 12 places in the past five years alone. We lag well behind
countries such as Ghana (26th), Namibia (24th) and Surinam (20th). At
this rate, Tonga and even Botswana will be ahead of Britain in just two
years time! In one example, the Botswana government stands accused of
conducting a vicious cyberattack last year against an independent
newspaper that destroyed more than a decade’s worth of its archived
data. Botswana also remains without access to information laws and press
freedom and neither is guaranteed in its constitution. But Botswana
will have more press freedom than Britain does soon.
