‘Our news agenda is being driven by an increasingly deranged, obsessive and extremist Tory press’

Lowdown interview with recovering Tory journalist Tim Walker

The strange power of a small part of a declining news media to dominate the national conversation.

Listen on Apple

On Spotify

On Amazon here on any other podcast host here

I will accompany the broadcast by putting up a long piece on the power of propaganda. The issue needs exploring because the ability of newspapers or any form of media to influence an audience is a complicated and controversial topic. I certainly do not believe that the right-wing press brainwashes the masses into voting against their real interests.  It is a patronising delusion.

But there is no doubt that the Conservative press influences the broadcasters and – obviously! – the Conservative party. Indeed, the right’s spiral of radicalisation was powered by Conservative journalists looking for punchy headlines.

I hope to have it up in a couple of days.

Meanwhile below is a long read on the genuinely powerful propagandists – and I don’t mean the Telegraph comment desk but the supporters of Trump and Putin.

There’s a paywall and you can sign up if you want to support my journalism. Alternatively, you can take a free trial instead!

---

Sarcastic, sneering and sadistic: The voice of modern power

What Putin and Trump's propagandists have in common

n the US town of Springfield Ohio far-right terrorists are calling in bomb threats to schools. State troopers are guarding pupils and public officials because Donald Trump told a…

What?

A lie?

“Lie” is too weak a word for our time of demagogues and dictators. You and I tell lies, as do ordinary politicians. Most of the time, to paraphrase François de La Rochefoucauld, our lying “is the homage which vice renders to virtue” – we pretend to be better than we are.

We are not hearing white lies or self-serving fibs, however. We are witnessing a radical assault on truth and a crude assertion of unconstrained power.