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(It’s not satire – it’s Kelvin Mackenzie!)
OK. I admit it. That headline might not actually be strictly true. In fact – I may have made it up.
But as ex-editor of the Sun Kelvin Mackenzie has been explaining recently – it can be so difficult for journalists to separate the truth from fiction these days.
In fact, his excuse for believing and printing the sick lies about Hillsborough under the front-page headline The Truth was that he was told them by a senior member of the government and officers from the top ranks of the police.
In Mackenzie’s own words:
I had absolutely no reason to believe that these authority figures would lie
But just read that again. He said he had no reason to believe authority figures would lie.
That’s an amazingly bizarre thing for a so-called journalist to say – outside of somewhere like North Korea.
What kind of reporter worth his or her salt unquestioningly believes anything a politician from the ruling party says? Or a senior police officer for that matter?
Obviously, if Mackenzie had been working for an instrument of state propaganda under a dictatorship such as there was in Soviet Russia or there is in North Korea today, we wouldn’t be at all surprised by his admission. After all – automatically believing everything the top echelons of the establishment feed to you is a condition of employment for journalists in places like those.
But he wasn’t working for a newspaper in North Korea or Soviet Russia. He was working for a newspaper in Britain. The Sun.
In fact, it’s not all that surprising if you think about it. Mackenzie describes himself as a conservative. And conservatives are people who want to preserve the establishment, not kick against it.
If Mackenzie had been born in North Korea , he would be one of those state ‘journalists’ who reads the news on television in tears – overcome with emotion while talking about the latest farming output figures or what the ‘Dear Leader’ ate for breakfast this morning.
So it’s entirely appropriate the headline for his establishment cover-up story about Hillsborough was ‘The Truth‘. After all, the Soviet Communist Party’s propaganda newspaper was called Pravda.
Which as you probably know, translates into English as …… ‘The Truth‘.
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Related articles by Tom Pride:
The Sun on its refusal to print pictures of Kate topless – “we believe official boobs should be covered up at all costs”
Name the guilty. The Sun’s ‘source’ for its Hillsborough story was ….. Tory MP Sir Irvine Patnick.
Don’t think Chief Constable Bettison should resign over Hillsborough? You will when you read this
Hillsborough: MacKenzie offers ‘profuse apologies’ for being a slimy bastard
MP Louise Mensch quits to spend more time with the Murdoch family
Hillsborough – cock-up or conspiracy? (PS – anyone know if Rupert Murdoch’s a freemason?)
The Sun Prints Blatant Bollocks Shock!
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For the real truth about the Hillsborough tragedy – have a look here:
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“He was working for a newspaper in Britain. The Sun.”
Really Tom, your ability to satirise has gone too far this time. Calling the Sun a newspaper is just too unbelievable to work as satire….
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Good point. There has to be at least some grain of truth in satire for it to work.
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Another verbal misuse or newspeak … ‘reason’. The idea that Mackenzie thought that the ‘truth’ was in anyway relevant is beyond belief. His record speaks for itself 😦
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