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Date: 02/02/22

It Couldn't Happen Today...

Reading this interesting piece in the Guardian on Tuesday, I was struck by how appallingly badly journalists and their owners behaved eighty-odd years ago compared to our present Golden Age of high-minded media conduct.

I mean really m'dears, can you imagine our press' finest today basing things entirely on hearsay from a single unauthoritative source...

screenshot from the Guardian about how a Daily Express hack heard a story from a sailor...

...then having it published under a bizarre and scary headline...

screenshot from the Guardian about how the Daily Express published the story...

...even though the accuracy of it couldn't be vouchsafed, either then or later...

screenshot from the Guardian about how the Daily Express story proved to be an exaggeration...

...how the story was then amplified by a report written off his own bat by a State functionary...

screenshot from the Guardian about how a diplomat wrote a private report on it...

...how the nation's most trusted public service news outlet automatically believed that report (along with what it had read in the papers) before broadcasting it to some 48 million people in the 'home country' (and countless millions more worldwide), thereby changing the whole attitude of the population at large towards those who had fled tyranny......

screenshot from the Guardian about how the BBC broadcast the story and changed public attitudes to refugees from Nazism ...

...and how the press in general responded to the story in such unbalanced terms that the Great British Public™, bamboozled by skewed reporting which just so happened to mirror all of their deepest-lying prejudices about foreigners, were wrong by a ratio of up to fifty-to-one about how many refugees had actually been given shelter in their land...?

screenshot from the Guardian about how the Daily Mail and others caused the public to massively overestimate the number of those refugees

How very lucky we are that such awful derelictions of journalistic standards couldn't occur today.