Wednesday 19 September 2018

Why on earth is the Guardian editor siding with The S*n over the people of Liverpool?


If you ever needed a demonstration of how far to the right the Guardian has shifted, consider the fact that their political editor Heather Stewart decided to insult the people of Liverpool, and insult the intelligence of the rest of us by presenting hacks from the S*n as poor innocent victims, solely in order to score ridiculously cheap political points against the Labour left.

The Tweet in question relates to a Momentum event in the city of Liverpool. It wasn't Momentum's choice to hold the Labour Party Conference in the city (it was the Labour leadership) but once it was settled that all the conference events were going to be in Liverpool it was obvious that anyone with any decency and respect for the victims of the Hillsborough disaster would avoid inviting hacks from The S*n to their events.

The reason is simple. When police negligence resulted in the deaths of 96 innocent Liverpool fans in 1989, The S*n produced a truly vile pack of lies on their front page to deliberately deflect blame from the police onto the victims of the tragedy. Worst of all, the headline above the extraordinary pack of front page lies read "The Truth".

For decades this grotesque fan-blaming narrative was used to deflect blame from the true culprits onto the victims of the disaster.

Just imagine how the families of the deceased felt to have their loved ones falsely blamed for their own deaths. Just imagine how the traumatised survivors of the tragedy felt to be smeared as drunks who pickpocketed the dead and urinated on the "brave cops" (you know the "brave cops" who actually caused the tragedy through their negligence).

Just imagine how it felt to suffer these lies for decades before the truth was finally admitted; that police negligence caused the disaster and the fan-blaming propaganda was all a pack of lies.


To their eternal credit the fans of Liverpool's rival club Everton FC put aside all their footballing differences and supported the Boycott the S*n campaign too out of solidarity for their friends, family members, neighbours, and work colleagues from the red half of the city.

So if you can't see why The S*n is still boycotted across Liverpool to this day, you really can't have much in the way of basic human empathy.

Despite this well-known and commonly understood history between The S*n and the city of Liverpool, Heather Stewart decided to use this show of respect for the Boycott The S*n campaign as a stick to beat Momentum with, publicly calling the decision "outrageous" and comparing it to Donald Trump's tactic of excluding journalists who criticise his Presidency or dare to ask him awkward questions.

After being called out on her misrepresentation, Heather's response was to feign ignorance with 'oh, I couldn't have imagined that not inviting a S*n hack to an event in Liverpool could have had anything to do with Hillsborough' type Tweets.

There's no way that the political editor of a British newspaper could have remained entirely ignorant of the reasons The S*n is boycotted in Liverpool. No way at all.

So dressing this respect for the Boycott The S*n campaign up as some kind of Trumpian press censorship, rather than respect for a Liverpool-specific boycott is clearly an attempt to deceive the reader.

And feigning ignorance in the aftermath is perhaps even worse. 


Not only is siding with hacks from The S*n to present them as the poor innocent victims of lefty oppression an gross insult to the people of Liverpool, it's an insult to the intelligence of everyone else that she expects us to believe it too.

It's a clear demonstration of the level of contempt Heather and many of her fellow Guardian hacks seem to have for ordinary people. 

They think we're crap-brained and gullible enough to fall for their politically partisan smears, even when they're as poorly crafted as Heather's.

Heather's smear also demonstrates something else about the media. Her decision to shit all over the people of Liverpool in a show of solidarity with hacks at The S*n, just in order to smear the left-leaning grassroots campaign group Momentum is evidence that the mainstream media is a clique where comfortably wealthy hacks from the hard-right Murdoch propaganda empire and from the supposedly left-leaning Guardian have way more in common with each other than they do with ordinary people.

In recent years The Guardian have run countless articles bitterly attacking left-wing independent media sites like mine, and decrying the fact that the traditional mainstream media hacks are having their role as gatekeepers of political discourse undermined, and Heather's S*n solidarity Tweet is about the best demonstration of why this is happening that you could ask for.

If the Guardian's political editor has more empathy towards hacks from the Murdoch propaganda empire than she does for the people of Liverpool and the victims of the Hillsborough tragedy, then she's clearly living in an insulated bubble very far removed from the real world.

And if she's willing to distort the Liverpool Boycott The S*n campaign solely in order to score cheap political points against the Labour left, she's using the same kind of despicable and deceptive journalistic tricks as S*n hacks do, and displaying the same outright contempt for her audience too.

So it's absolutely no wonder at all that ever more people are cancelling their subscriptions to The Guardian and making donations to independent media sources instead.

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