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The NSO Group, for example, sells sophisticated surveillance technology it says is for fighting terrorism to governments around the world, several of which have turned around and deployed it against journalists. Its Pegasus spyware has been linked to government surveillance of journalists in India, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the United States, including associates of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Now the company is reportedly testing in a dozen countries a new technology that matches location data collected by national telecoms with two weeks of mobile-phone tracking information from an infected person to identify those vulnerable to contagion who were in the patient’s vicinity for more than 15 minutes.

implementing sunset clauses on any new surveillance powers is essential if we don’t want coronavirus to undermine our rights as well as our health

the increasing divide between informed citizens and news avoiders

mainstream media outlets offer the common ground where ideologically diverse audiences converge online

more than half of the US online population consumes no online news, underlining the risk of increased information inequality driven by self-selection along lines of interest

Our dataset traces news consumption across different devices and unveils important differences in news diets when multiplatform or desktop-only access is used.

trans people, like many minority groups, remain economically and socially disenfranchised in the UK. Excluding fraud, trans people are twice as likely to be a victim of crime in England and Wales in the year ending March 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics. They also face years-long waits to receive gender-affirming care at NHS gender identity clinics and are more likely to report healthcare discrimination, domestic violence and homelessness.

UK's government has leaned into the culture wars debate in a bid to appeal to its traditional Conservative Party base and new working-class voters in northern England

Similar to some US Republican Party lawmakers' critiques of critical race theory, "war on woke" has turned into a catchall to describe what Conservatives don't like: be it the perceived excesses of the left, conversations around racial equality, or social justice initiatives like trans rights.

While "there are perfectly reasonably concerns of what the implication of trans women might be for women's rights, a lot of that anxiety is based on wildly exaggerated theoretical positions rather than practical ones," Blunt told CNN. "While [trans people] have to cope with the practical reality that it is bloody tough being trans."

Despite those supportive words, the trans-critical dial in the media is up at full blast.

A 2019 study by linguist Paul Baker, a professor at Lancaster University, found the British press wrote more than 6,000 articles about trans people between 2018-19, many of them written "in order to be critical of trans people" and painted "trans people as unreasonable and aggressive," the report wrote.

Despite there never having been a "trans member of Parliament (MP)," and close to zero trans editors or staff writers at [British] newspapers an idea has stuck that there is an influential trans "lobby behind the scene ... and that is very much characteristic of a moral panic,"

At the end of September, the Council of Europe's Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination likened the UK's record on LGBTQ rights to Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Poland -- countries with appalling track records on minority issues. The report pointed out that in England and Wales "trans rights organisations have faced vitriolic media campaigns, in which trans women especially are vilified and misrepresented."

Problems can arise when supportive cisgender people, or corporate entities, make poor linguistic and aesthetic choices when attempting to use inclusive language for non-binary, transgender and intersex people, Faye said. This happened at the end of September, when British medical journal The Lancet featured the words "bodies with vaginas" on the cover of its latest issue. The journal later apologized for conveying "the impression that we have dehumanized and marginalized women," after the wording was widely criticized.

These constructions are instead blamed by trans-critical commentators on trans people

"Nick, you could be asking me about climate change. You could be asking me about mental health. You could be asking me about education. You could be asking me about health. You deliberately are asking me about an issue that you know does not come up on the doorstep," Lammy replied. "[You] are choosing to land on this subject that most British people are not talking about in a fuel crisis," Lammy added. "And spend minutes on this, because it keeps Labour talking about identity issues and not about the substantive policies."

Even the cable news panels that purport to express opposing views are part of the damaging both-sides syndrome. A view from the left, a view from the right, and repeat. But take the average, and you’re right back in the comfortable, unilluminating middle.

Impartiality is still a value worth defending in mainstream news coverage. But you don’t get there by walking down the center line with a blindfold on.

they want to appear fair without taking any chances

Mostly, we have the irresistible pull to the center: centripetal journalism. It’s safe. It will never cause a consumer boycott. It feels fair without really being fair. And it’s boringly predictable. In the end, the media’s center-lane fixation puts us all to sleep. And that’s no way to drive a democracy.

"transmission." This is the dominant view. It models communication as the movement of messages across space

In contrast to a transmission model, where messages are sent and information is delivered across space — physical or social space— Carey inscribes a "ritual" view. Here, the point of communication is not to "send a message," but to create a shared world in which we can dwell.

A good sermon reminds people of what they believe, draws them together in fellowship, creates community. This is the ritual view in action

James Carey's most famous essay is "A Cultural Approach to Communication."

what fails to make sense as information may make sense as ritual.

the CNN panel o' pundits. Information-wise, there is almost nothing there for the intelligent viewer. No news, no revelations. Instead, an opportunity to identify — and share a belief system – with one or another speaker. Or to "hate watch," also a ritual

Do not under-estimate the power of ritual communication. We have many derisive names for it. Entertainment is one, "echo chamber" another. They are apt at times, but just as often the people who pride themselves on being information transmitters think their way is THE way.

It's harder than it looks to inform people. Delivering reliable information is not enough. You also have to deliver some sense of a shared world. News consumption is itself a ritual. The user of the news system learns what is new, but also affirms what always been true.

Whenever you cannot make sense of media as the transmission of information or "news," switch frames and ask if instead this makes sense as ritual.

German journalists proved to be significantly more rigid in their general ethical stance whereas their British colleagues felt freer to follow their own personal judgements

What we found was that – despite an eye-catchingly partisan press in Britain – the country’s journalists are not more determined than their German colleagues to set the political agenda or influence public opinion. But they do consider it significantly more important than German journalists to confront those in power and hold them to account.

journalists such as Amelia Gentleman, who unearthed the Windrush scandal, or Carole Cadwalladr, who doggedly investigated the role Cambridge Analytica played in the Brexit vote, appear to be more typical of what British journalists think they should do: scrutinising and standing up to those in power.

Versi helped to launch the Muslim Council of Britain’s new dedicated centre for media monitoring after his success in campaigning for better representation of Muslims in the British media. He has repeatedly won substantial corrections from newspapers over their reporting of Islam.

“This is not about censorship, this is about transparency.”

Although the methodology has been vetted by external academics, the organisation admits that the classification of exactly what counts as an anti-Muslim story will ultimately be a subjective decision

A turning point for the media came in January 2016 when Polish President Andrzej Duda signed controversial laws enabling the government to appoint the heads of public TV and radio, as well as civil service directors. 

More than 200 people were fired as a result, and their roles were taken over by people who support the government

the EU said it jeopardised the bloc's values.

There is greater trust in private independent media compared with public service broadcasters; only 20 percent of Poles believe the media is free from political influence, according to a study published last year.

Private media groups that have supported the opposition complain that they are losing advertising contracts from state-owned companies, which are increasing their spending to pro-government outlets

Since Gazeta Wyborcza published a series of stories that revealed corruption at the Financial Supervision Authority, forcing its chairman Marek Chrzanowski to resign, the ruling party and other state bodies have filed some 50 legal challenges against the newspaper and the lead reporter, Wojciech Czuchnowski.

Another major outlet that has come under pressure is TVN, a private television station owned by Discovery, Inc., a US media company.  In 2018, the government accused a TVN of promoting fascism, referring to photos taken during an undercover assignment that infiltrated Polish neo-Nazis and broadcast footage of its members holding a birthday party for Adolf Hitler.

Poland's media regulator issued a 1.5 million zloty ($389,000) fine to TVN for its coverage of anti-government protests outside Parliament, on the basis that it "propagated illegal activities and encouraged behaviour threatening security."

State media described the July anti-government protests as a "street revolt" that aimed to "bring Islamic immigrants to Poland".

waging a destructive war on the British system of government

This government is not simply un-conservative. It is an explicit repudiation of everything that it means to be a Conservative.

When I was political correspondent at The Spectator magazine under Boris Johnson’s editorship at the start of this century, we mercilessly analysed and exposed the constitutional vandalism of Labour’s Prime Minister Tony Blair. Now Johnson, counselled by his amoral, dangerous ‘senior adviser’ Dominic Cummings, has been doing exactly the same.

Cummings and Johnson are both creatures of big money – a point persistently missed by Britain’s client political press.

There is no more Conservative figure than Dominic Grieve, the former attorney general. His offence? Standing up for parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. These are, it seems, hanging offences in Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party.

Big cheques from obscure private sources are an important part of the explanation of how the Johnson clique seized control of the Tory party late last July.

What do these rich and unaccountable people want in return for this munificence? Nobody in Fleet Street asks. Britain’s supposedly independent and fearless press don’t want to ask, let alone know.

consistently place the end before the means – which means neglect of due process; readiness to mislead; and Leninist obsession with ideological rectitude. In particular, political lying has reached epidemic proportions in the few short months since Johnson and Cummings entered Downing Street.

We Conservatives are careful students of history. We know that men and women are frail, imperfect, corruptible and sometimes capable of great evil. That explains why we have always paid such attention to the importance of institutions which, as Burke explained, embody wisdoms and truths which are beyond the comprehension of individual minds.

Michael Oakeshott, the greatest Conservative thinker of the twentieth century, noted that there was no Conservative ideology. Instead, there is a Conservative disposition which “understands it to be the business of government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed on, but to inject into the activities of already passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile”.

Brexit has mutated from a virtuous and even admirable attempt to reassert British sovereignty into a brutal assault on everything we stand for.

there is no way that I can as a lifelong Conservative vote for Boris Johnson’s revolutionary clique this week. Decent, middle-of-the-road Conservatives have no choice but to oppose this unremitting war on everything the party has fought to save and protect over the last 200 years. History will judge us accordingly.

When comparing the size of this negative association with other predictors of cognitive decline, watching television for >3.5 hours a day had a greater sized negative association (standardised beta = −0.034) than being in the lowest wealth quintile (as compared with the median quintile: standardised beta −0.027), while watching television for >7 hours a day had a greater sized association (standardized beta = −0.048) as being in the highest wealth quintile (compared with the median quintile: standardised beta = 0.043) or having no educational qualifications (standardized beta = −0.058).

associations between television viewing and verbal memory remained even when considering a range of variables relating to sedentary behaviours, suggesting that it is not just the sedentary nature of television watching that is responsible for its relationship with cognition.

Television involves fast-paced changes in images, sounds and action and, unlike other screen-based activities such as internet use and gaming, television is the most passive way of receiving such stimuli

television leads to a more alert but less focused brain

In addition to any potential cognitive stress created through the alert-passive interaction while watching television, the content of the programme itself can be stressful, such as through the depiction of graphic scenes, violence or the creation of suspense. Analyses of UK television from 2001–2013 (covering the country and much of the period of the data collection for the study reported here) have shown between 2.1 and 11.5 violent scenes per hour in UK soap operas, with 40% of these being categorised as moderate or strong violence22. It has even been proposed that the vividness of such experiences is greater than real-world experiences of events such as violence, conflict or disasters, as the drama is enhanced for entertainment purposes23. Chronic stress is known to lead to increased levels of glucocorticoids, which can have a direct effect on the hippocampus due to the presence of glucocorticoid receptors in that region of the brain. Consequently, stress has been shown to lead to atrophy of the hippocampus and impaired neurogenesis24, alongside impairments in cognition25.

excessive television could be linked with verbal memory through displacing other, cognitively beneficial activities such as playing board games, reading and engaging with cultural activities11,26. This theory implies that the relationship between television viewing and memory is not entirely down to television having negative effects per se, but rather television reducing the amount of time that people spend on more activities that could contribute to cognitive preservation

This study is not suggesting that watching television in older adulthood confers no benefits. Indeed, research with adults has suggested that TV dramas in comparison with TV documentaries can increase performance in tests of theory of mind, suggesting that television can enhance understanding of others27. Educational television can be an efficient way of learning when programmes are designed appropriately28. Television has also been shown to be a form of escapism from difficult life circumstances29. Further, research investing the effects of television viewing in the context of people’s daily lives has found that adults routinely report television as a means of relaxing30 (although this should be considered in relation to the potentially stress-inducing effects of television viewing discussed earlier). Nevertheless, this study suggests that watching substantial amounts of television is longitudinally associated with poorer verbal memory in older adults.

it remains unclear whether television viewing might affect other components of executive function

a kleptocracy

the first openly kleptocratic president moving into the White House marked the consummation of its decay, not its initial conception

Born from theft, built on slavery, held together by self-deception, the United States has grown to become the richest poor country

The only industrialised nation on the planet without universal healthcare, any real social welfare system or decent retirement provisions. The only free nation where 1 in 40 adults are behind bars

Nearly half of eligible voters do not take part in the elections. This isn’t just because of political apathy; it is also caused by deliberate voter suppression.

a country without a social contract

the Republican party is no longer a political party at all – it’s become a sectarian movement

It takes millions and millions of dollars to even run for president in the first place, and candidates need at least half a billion dollars

almost nowhere in the world is the gap between the political preferences of ordinary voters and the priorities of the elite

he only western economy where the richest three inhabitants hold more wealth than the poorest half of the entire population.

the US lacks nearly all the elements of a functioning democracy: a social contract, a representative electoral system, free and fair elections, political parties that follow democratic practices, and universal suffrage.

A country without any sense of the common good, grown fat on exploitation, held together by fundamental falsehoods will ultimately get a leader who suits that setting perfectly: a leader without a coherent ideology, driven by greed and self-enrichment, owing no fealty to fact.

Meanwhile, Trump cut $6bn from the federal budget

The US justice department is currently moving to shield the president from prosecution for rape, a level of political intervention in the judicial process that is unprecedented even by US standards.

signals point in only one direction: the US is rapidly becoming an authoritarian state.

Those who warn of the impending autocracy can only ever be alarmist. Either we’re proven wrong, or our warnings are already too late. For a democracy doesn’t fall, it slides into decline. Its demise cannot be predicted, only revealed in retrospect.

left-wing and right-wing media are talking differently about the same things. Crazy, sensational, unusual, bad things that happened today. Current affairs plus absurdity times outrage.

Masha Gessen, Russian-American journalist and one of the world’s leading experts on how authoritarian regimes work, argues in Surviving Autocracy that the media should cover “Trumpism not as news, but as a system.”

Many news media outlets are still operating on default settings, covering a democracy rather than reporting on an emergent authoritarian regime. Even now, they’re still attending the daily White House press briefings as if they were normal press conferences rather than a vehicle for systematically disseminating lies and misinformation

they are still broadcasting Trump’s campaign rallies live, although they know full well those rallies will contain incitements to violence, showcase conspiracy theories and pose a genuine hazard to public health.

An emergent autocracy demands fundamentally different journalistic standards and practices.

we need a journalism in which news media are united not in their shared obsession with breaking news, but in their joint defence of democracy

in 2020, 338 Guardian staffers signed a letter to Guardian Editor-in-Chief Kath Viner complaining about the paper’s ongoing “pattern of publishing transphobic content.”

The letter, which was organized over the last few days in response to a column by Suzanne Moore that has been widely criticized as anti-trans, said the staff were “deeply distressed” by the resignation of a transgender member of staff who said they’d received anti-trans comments from “influential editorial staff” and who criticized the publication of the Moore’s column at the editorial morning conference.

transphobes are the “dominant faction” in the UK newsroom’s leadership and have used that institutional power in the “long running dispute” over trans rights at the paper

With all the controversy over trans rights at the paper, and the most recent flare up over her article, Gleeson told me she hopes that The Guardian US won’t bear the brunt of the heat from the so-called “editorial failure” the paper blamed the retraction on.“This seems like it might be part of pinning all the blame on the US team, when really the redaction (censorship) has clearly caused far more ‘readership backlash’ than any other possible option,” Gleeson said. “In other words, the British editorial staff need to own up to their own mistake, and change course.”

In every country surveyed, those on the right are more likely than those on the left to prioritize sticking to traditions, to say people today are too easily offended by what others say, and to say the bigger societal problem is seeing discrimination where it does not exist.

while those on the left and right are equally likely to say they are proud most of the time in both France and Germany, in the U.S. and UK, those on the right are more than three times as likely to say they are proud most of the time than those on the left

issues of pride for some were often sources of shame for others. In the UK, one such issue was the concept of empire. Those on the ideological right praised the historic empire for its role in spreading English and Western culture overseas, while those on the ideological left discussed how the UK had disrupted local cultures and often left chaos in its wake in its former colonies.

whereas groups composed of Republicans discussed American history through the lens of opportunity, groups composed of Democrats stressed the inadequacy of how American history is taught – and how it often glosses over racism and inequitable treatment of minority groups. Republican participants, for their part, even brought up how political correctness itself makes them embarrassed to be American – while Democratic participants cited increased diversity as a point of pride

While Britons are as ideologically divided as Americans on issues of pride, when it comes to every other cultural issue asked about in this report, Americans stand out for being more ideologically divided than those in the Western European countries surveyed.

Younger people – those under 30 – are less likely to place requirements on Christianity, language, birth or adopting the country’s traditions to be part of their country than older age groups. They are also more likely to say their country will be better off if it is open to changes. The notable exception to this pattern is Germany, where opinion differs little by age.

only one side is taken seriously – the side that wants to restrict the rights of transgender individuals. The other side is represented as somehow being both an incompetent punching bag and a cunning threat – at the same time

Bullies always play the victim, and that’s exactly what Nolan Investigates has done here. A recent BBC article also paints trans women as sexually predatory “biological men,” attacks Stonewall, and gives undue deference to the LGB Alliance also illustrates this pattern.

what I really want is for the British media establishment to stop taking bad-faith transphobic arguments at face value and, instead, make more space for trans voices on trans issues

The Northman illustrates how cinema can be misappropriated in ways its makers never intended. In the past two decades, the entire cultural landscape – and films about European history in particular – has been weaponised and politicised by the far right.

if you are looking for a Hollywood movie to support white-supremacist beliefs, you don’t have to look very far

Neither JRR Tolkien nor Peter Jackson consciously framed the fantasy epic as white-nationalist propaganda, but, as with Nordic mythology, it harks back to an imaginary Eurocentric realm in which the heroes are considered to be white-skinned (and were cast as such in the movies) and the chief enemies, the orcs, are characterised as dark-skinned, ugly and uncivilised.

The contrast between these manly action heroes and the anonymous keyboard warriors who idolise them is difficult to ignore.

“The paradox of these kind of groups is that, on the one hand, they are claiming they’re deeply attached to western culture and civilisation, but they also hate western culture and civilisation, because it’s awful and decadent and liberal. So they’ve got to kind of maintain these two things at the same time.”

“If politics is the occupation of territory, metapolitics is the occupation of culture,” he says. “They are, at some level, creating a community. They comment upon films; they try to interpret them. That’s what they do together, at least publicly. And we could contrast that to more traditional forms of political organising that the far right for decades has not seen itself as able to do: marching in the streets or organising political parties. So, instead, they spend all this time on metapolitics.”

By and large, films – and the histories from which they draw – have been overwhelmingly controlled by people of white, European descent, whose own blind spots might well play into the far right’s hands. Especially when it comes to matters of race.

After the Charlottesville rally in 2017, Dorothy Kim, an Asian American medieval literature lecturer at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, argued that “medieval studies is intimately entwined with white supremacy and has been so for a long time”. Academics had not done enough to counter myths that medieval Europe was a bastion of racial purity, said Kim, who was attacked by academics and the far right as a result. These myths were largely established by 19th-century historians with nationalist agendas, but more recent research reveals that societies such as those in Viking-era Scandinavia were in fact multicultural and multiracial.

They ranged far across Europe and the Arctic and they engaged and mixed with neighbouring cultures. While they were highly gendered societies, a recent Finnish study also found evidence of “gender-transgressing or gender-mixing practices, often of an openly sexual quality”, among such societies. Eggers himself pointed to recent DNA analysis of the remains of a high-ranking Viking warrior found in Sweden, which identified them as female. (Apparently, she is briefly included in The Northman, but viewers may struggle to spot her.)

“Invoking the medieval past has now become a more generalised sign of the alt-right,” she says, pointing to recent far-right terrorists and their scattershot allusions to Nordic lore. “The point is not the specifics of the historical detail or what certain medieval things may mean to certain subgroups. Instead, the point is to gather them all for the maximum amount of attention, to plant as many flags to say: ‘I am a white supremacist,’ and to activate other white-supremacist terrorists globally.”

Taika Waititi, who is of Māori and Jewish descent, took things even further with part three, Thor: Ragnarok. As well as casting Tessa Thompson, a woman of mixed African, Latino and European heritage as the ostensibly bisexual Norse warrior Valkyrie, Waititi’s film dealt with narratives of displacement, enslavement, colonialism and white-male fragility. Thor’s all-powerful hammer, Mjolnir, that beloved symbol of white supremacism, is casually disintegrated by Cate Blanchett’s Hela. She then proceeds to bring down the Norse realm of Asgard, figuratively and literally.“Look at these lies,” she says, stripping away a ceiling fresco to reveal an older one beneath, detailing how her father, Odin, built Asgard through violent conquest. “Proud to have it, ashamed of how he got it.”

In an ideal world, film-makers wouldn’t have to give a moment’s thought to how their films might be co-opted by these groups; we could simply enjoy a movie such as The Northman as a piece of rousing, skilfully made entertainment. The fact that it is no longer possible to do so could be seen as a victory of sorts for the far right, but failing to consider the stories we tell from first principles could be part of the problem that created them in the first place. By this stage, in fact, film-makers ought to have realised that if the far right doesn’t hate your film, you might be doing something wrong.

the latest in a long line of right-wingers raging about BBC bias that stretches back to the halcyon days of bombing, rationing, and government censorship for which she yearns

Priestley made his last Postscripts appearance on 20th October 1940. His dissection of his Conservative critics’ complaints could, like Orwell’s criticisms, come from 2022. In a letter to Harold Laski in December 1940, he wrote:[The Tories are] pretending that everything on their side is non-political and not tendentious, but anything on our side must be barred because it is political and tendentious.

The farcical idea that BBC is a nest of Marxist revolutionaries is one the Tory Party and its media outriders push whenever an “enemy within” is required. And the response from liberals, especially extraordinarily well-paid BBC stars, plays into their hands every time. Dan Walker — a presenter on £295,000 a year — tweeting that the BBC costs 43p a day is factual but it’s also easily framed as arrogant and out-of-touch.

Pretending not to understand the concepts of mutual benefit and cross-subsidisation is a common affliction among right-wing commentators.

Seeing the league of extraordinary arseholes ranged against the BBC makes it easy to take the simple centrist line of rushing to its defence unequivocally. But while the corporation does do many things well — children’s programmes, local news, niche music programming — BBC News has big problems and has had them for many years. Big names have let their viewers, listeners, and colleagues down, time and time again.

What centrists and the right have in common is a desire for a public broadcaster that looks and sounds like them. The BBC is a creature of the establishment and the licence fee structure means it is also beholden to the establishment. Its natural state is arguing for the status quo and that’s precisely the tendency that leaves it bureaucratic, slow-moving, and prone to shots from both sides.