In 1918 US Senator Hiram Warren Johnson is purported to have said: “The first casualty when war comes is truth.”
There may not be a war, but classifying the status of truth as a mere casualty may be insufficient and it now finds itself on life support in intensive care when the predominantly right-wing British press is reporting politics, particularly politics abroad.
Yesterday saw France go to the polls in the first round of the 2017 presidential election, with 11 candidates standing.
Under the French system, the 2 front runners in the first round of the election go forward to a straight winner takes all ballot in the second round.
In yesterday’s ballot the independent candidate Emmanuel Macron polled around 23.7% of vote with Marine Le Pen, leader of the fascist Front National coming in second on roughly 21.5%.
Early opinion polls also give Macron a lead of over 20 percentage points over Le Pen with regard to second round voting intentions and he’s currently predicted to garner 60% of second round votes, thus excluding Le Pen from the Elysée Palace.
However, looking at certain sections of the British press, anyone would think right-wing intolerance had triumphed in this first round.
Here’s The Times, formerly regarded as Britain’s newspaper of record, now reduced to a sad mouthpiece parroting the extreme right-wing agenda of the deeply unpleasant Rupert Murdoch.
Note the large photograph of Marine Le Pen. It’s also worth noting that despite the hype from right-wing media around the world, a $9.8m loan to the FN from a Russian bank with Kremlin links and alleged Russian social media support, Le Pen polled little better than in the 2012 presidential election when she finished third with nearly 18% of the vote.
However, The Times was not alone in its stilted coverage. Here’s the Daily Mail’s front page.
All that can be said is that editor Paul Dacre has presided over misinformation and distortion on a massive scale, but then again the Mail has decades of experience in promoting fascism dating right back to the 1930s and its founder Viscount Rothermere’s infamous “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” piece.
Comme on dit en France, plus ça change…