Media and Politics in Europe

As a Marxist, Benjamin was alert to the political implications of patrician disdain, and suggested that what he called “reception in distraction” might actually help in understanding the kaleidoscopic bustle of modern urban life. However, the association of new media with crises of attention goes back much further. In Distraction: Problems of Attention in Eighteenth-Century Literature, the literary scholar Natalie Phillips describes how the proliferation of early print publications changed reading habits. Instead of devoting one’s attention to a small library of precious books, it was now possible to dip into things, to divert oneself with articles in gossipy magazines such as The Tatler and The Spectator, even—horror of horrors—to skim. In the introduction to Alexander Pope’s mock epic The Dunciad, the pseudonymous Martinus Scriblerus (writing from the future) explains that the poet lived at a time when “paper also became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of authors covered the land.” The result was information overload. Samuel Johnson complained that readers were so distracted that they “looked into the first pages” before moving on to other options. One of the lasting monuments to this new print culture, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, makes a comedy of its narrator’s distraction, which he attributes to his mother having interrupted his father at the crucial moment of conception to ask whether he’d remembered to wind the clock.

In 1754, the encyclopedist Denis Diderot wrote that distraction arises from an excellent quality of the understanding, which allows the ideas to strike against, or reawaken one another. It is the opposite of that stupor of attention, which merely rests on, or recycles, the same idea.

Distraction is certainly bad when driving a car or reading philosophy, but in other contexts, toggling between activities and juxtaposing different registers of information can be fertile and productive. Indeed, it’s key to creativity—at least this is what I (and my ninety-five open browser tabs) will maintain if you ask. It isn’t that the distracted writer is unable to focus on anything at all; his attention is captured, fleetingly, by various things, and whether that’s useful or not depends very much on context.

My colleagues in the media are serving as accessories to the murder of democracy.

We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.

Trump got roughly twice as much coverage in 2020 as Biden has received in 2021. And the coverage of Biden is noticeably more negative than the tone of news coverage overall. Predictably, Breitbart and the New York Post are among the most negative outlets, but even liberal ones such as HuffPost and Salon have been negative. (The Post was the closest to neutral, at 0.0006.)

GCs/TERFs are an organised, funded movement that is spreading propaganda that could truly cause harm

“I refuse to stand down because of the actions of bigots, but they are still able to cause me pain.”

“I just think, ‘Why are you so angry?’” they say. “Grow up.”

"I became a journalist in 2013, and for two or three years, everything was just normal," McConnell tells Insider. "I could be a trans person working at a major national newspaper and my transness never felt particularly relevant, except for when I might be asked to write the 'Trans Guide 101' style piece."But now, he says there's a "fear-mongering moral panic" against the trans community in the press, which is a "campaign of misinformation" stopping trans people from being safe in the hands of UK media. 

"The intensity of the hate has been ratcheted up so highly by mainstream media that it's rendered [trans people] unemployable."

"You have organizations like the BBC and The Times, these are places that everybody believes and trusts are now publishing rhetoric daily that trans people are bad, trans people are dangerous, don't help trans people,"

Often referred to as “the father of public relations,” Bernays in 1928 published his seminal work, Propaganda, in which he argued that public relations is not a gimmick but a necessity:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

helping the Woodrow Wilson Administration promote the idea that US efforts in World War I were intended to bring democracy to Europe

Arabpop the magazine found a home in the Neapolitan indie publishing house Tamu — the Italian South has always been more ready to embrace its Arab culture, often being mocked by right-wing Italian politicians and their supporters, who openly dream about dividing Italy into North and South and often refer to the South as ‘Africa’, ‘Morocco’ or something along those lines.

While the team of editors is fully Italian, some contributing journalists are Italians with an Arab background while most of the writers are Arabs.

By curating and translating the work of contemporary Arab poets, writers, visual artists and journalists based around a specific theme, Arabpop aims to fill a gap in accessibility to Arab stories specifically catering to people who are interested in what goes on in the Arab world beyond the daily headlines.

‘Trans-exclusionary radical feminists’ (TERFs) may be a minority, but they are more vocal and influential in the UK than anywhere else in western Europe. Their influence is felt not only at home, but also here across the pond and, I’m sure, in much of the world.And the major British media outlets are only making matters worse.

the podcast is a transparent attempt to undermine the influence of Stonewall, thereby dividing trans people from the rest of the LGBTQ community and making all queer people in the UK – but especially trans people – more vulnerable.Divide and conquer is a classic authoritarian strategy, and right-wingers hope to weaken the LGBTQ community by scapegoating trans individuals in order to turn cisgender lesbians, gay men, and bisexual people against us. Unfortunately, some supposed leftists, many of them queer, are willing to play this game.

Stonewall, admirably, refuses to bow to the pressure to dump the trans community.

When it comes to trans rights "polling shows that the public isn't necessarily as hostile as the media, but the media [continues] to lead the conversation," Shon Faye, trans advocate and author of "The Transgender Issue," told CNN. According to her analysis, in 2020 the Times and the Sunday Times published "over 300 articles, almost one a day, and they were all negative."

Similar to dog-whistle racism, where coded pejorative phrases, such as "inner city" or the term "woke," are used as synonyms for Black and Brown people, constructions such as "woke mobs," "trans lobby," and "gender ideology" are uncritically used by columnists in print and reporters on live air as the British press parrots talking points by influential anti-trans grassroots campaigners, say trans advocates.

The British media has created an environment where "male violence is also displaced from the real culprits onto vulnerable transgender people, who are demonized collectively as abusers, rather than more accurately represented as victims and survivors of abuse,"

what would later be claimed, by those who led it, as one of the most successful propaganda operations in postwar British history. A top secret operation that helped overthrow the leader of the fourth most populous country in the world and contributed to the mass murder of more than half a million of its citizens.

Recently released in Britain’s National Archives are pamphlets purporting to be written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact written by British propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.

The outcome of the turmoil was a brutal and corrupt 32-year military dictatorship whose legacy shapes Indonesia to this day

a new Pew Research Center survey finds that views about national identity in the U.S., France, Germany and the UK have become less restrictive and more inclusive in recent years. Compared with 2016 – when a wave of immigration to Europe and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the U.S. made immigration and diversity a major issue on both sides of the Atlantic – fewer now believe that to truly be American, French, German or British, a person must be born in the country, must be a Christian, has to embrace national customs, or has to speak the dominant language

Outside of France, more people say it’s a bigger problem for their country today to not see discrimination where it really does exist than for people to see discrimination where it really is not present.

a large majority think Muslims face discrimination.

what can we do to combat the misinformation that much of the British media seems hellbent on perpetuating? Well, the Gender Inclusion Network (GIN) is a new global movement which launched this week and is on a mission to rise to the occasion

“The reality is that there is a broad consensus in favour of the inclusion of trans people in society, coupled with a richness of work exploring the complex meanings of gender and sex the 21st century. Yet this is hardly ever reported in the UK media. Instead, we have simplistic narratives of ‘conflicting rights’. The very existence of trans people is represented as supposedly at odds with women or feminism.”

The EU and UN recently condemned the UK, comparing it to Hungary and Poland, both countries well known for their anti-LGBTQI agendas. Transphobia within the UK press and political establishment were specified as being big contributors towards the problem

the consensus from the staffers I spoke to, all of whom needed anonymity due to NDAs and fears of reprisal

a newsroom dominated by transphobes who use a plethora of tactics, including using the company’s UK union to insulate their bigotry from accountability, in order to maintain control over The Guardian’s editorial direction on gender

In 2018, the UK newsroom published a transphobic attack on trans rights as a paper editorial. The unsigned piece, according to sources at The Guardian, was written by lead opinion columnist Susanna Rustin, who was described to me as a “militant and obsessive anti-trans activist.”