READER, forgive me. I confess to having been a media studies teacher in a former life. In those days students did lots of analysis and undertook practical work only as a means to understanding the media. Rather like an art historian undertaking painting better to comprehend a work of art. The field was broad, encompassing film, the press, television and photography, as well as propaganda, communication and politics. Students were tasked with the critical study of the media, to expose its vested interests and bias. Sound familiar? You bet.
Not trusting ‘mainstream’ media with its nefarious funding and its overt bias, it is the modestly (if not barely) funded ‘outsider’ sources to which we now turn. I refer to sites such as TCW Defending Freedom, the Daily Sceptic, the Daily Wire, Exposé, UK Column, Children’s Health Defense and the many other outsider blogs and podcasts. The struggle for authentic news and debate persists with much energy spent on censorship and accusations of misinformation. I now see ‘media studies’ embedded in so many of these posts and ensuing discussions. Yet few would recognise that they’re doing what amounts to media studies. Ironically, today’s students probably would not recognise this either, preferring instead to categorise challenges to the mainstream as ‘bigotry’. Furthermore, I anticipate that the subject’s erstwhile critics would be equally loath to appreciate this.
The renowned historian David Starkey excoriated media studies in a 1995 article for the Sunday Times. At the time, I felt he did not understand the subject. Given his recent ‘cancellation’ experience, and the development of his own media channel, David Starkey Talks, I rather think he will have developed a tightly honed media studies skillset. What an image, Dr Starkey, a master of the art of media studies. Unthinkable.
Dr Starkey’s own discipline, history, is a fully respected, proper academic subject. Yet, no longer should we see history and media studies as being at odds with one another. These days, school subjects compete for a share of a shrinking curriculum space. In 2012 Tristram Hunt complained about the endless focus upon ‘Henry VIII’ and ‘Hitler’ in the squeezed curriculum. What is the likelihood that children will learn about Dr Starkey’s observation that Britain’s first ‘Brexit’ took place as a result of the actions of Henry VIII? Given Dr Starkey’s ‘cancellation’ by the ‘woke’ and their stance on Brexit, it is unlikely.
Furthermore, in all of those lessons on WWII, what chance is there that students will learn about Klaus Schwab’s pet project as one that carries echoes of Hitler’s anti-capitalist totalising project? The elites are not even trying to hide it. What Schwab refers to as the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ feels more like the Fourth Reich. ‘You will own nothing’ is a vision which does not merely refer to property or possessions, it includes your own body. Hence the addition of the clause ‘and you will be happy’. It seems as though, far from preventing a future totalitarian takeover, some history lessons have merely taught some people how to do it.
The Fourth Reich (aka the ‘Great Reset’) sets out to destroy, Maoist style, the four ‘olds’: ideas, customs, culture and habits. I can envisage Schwab and his ilk dispensing with the inconvenience of human societies vibrantly connecting with their pasts. The very real danger is that the subject of history will become one of the many ‘olds’ that must be overcome in globalists’ eyes.
Which brings me back to our (now) old friend, media studies. So much of what we’ve experienced over the past two years or so has been centred around how information has been highly controlled. Laura Dodsworth’s book A State of Fear is a superlative account of the many psychological techniques used in this respect. We need not stop there. Hector Drummond’s The Face Mask Cult, Robert Kennedy Jr’s The Real Anthony Fauci, Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others and many more testify in their own ways to the manner in which the media has been harnessed as a political weapon by governments and elites against their own people. Never before has media studies been as important as it is right now.
When I taught the subject, Bill Gates ran the firm which made our computers and desktop publishing software. Gates now funds much of the media under the cloak of his ‘charitable’ foundations. His obsession with injecting the world’s population underscores that transhumanist (or dehumanising) vision of Schwab’s Fourth Reich Reset.
For many, it is the alternative media ‘outliers’ which have brought into sharp view the immense power and influence of the mainstream media, the role of governments in its disseminating of propaganda and the use of social media tools to push drugs, censor and to silence. Investigative journalism belongs within the realm of these outliers whilst the mainstream media deals in the promotion of fear and the silencing of dissent.
All of these points were and are grist to the media studies mill. They are the beating heart of many present-day conversations and reader comments. Let’s call this practice ‘neo-media studies’, where the distinction is made between what appears and what is, between what is politically correct and actually true. Neo-media studies must be a ruthless exercise in deconstruction and exposure, especially concerning all that funding and influence.
Dr Starkey, can we call a truce and concede that the outliers’ practice of media studies is playing an important role in preserving the subject and scholarly practice of history from the destructive reach of the globalists? And that both subjects play an important part in a civilised, democratic and knowledgeable society? I believe so.
Let’s all do media studies now, before it’s too late.
