Tories Threaten the BBC - 17 February 2020

The strategic reasoning behind the Tory threats to shut down the BBC, and to give away the pieces to their profiteering corporate mates is obvious.

They're absolutely furious that the BBC are not allowing them to hand pick the new Director General, so they're threatening to tear the whole organisation down in retaliation if the new appointee isn't the kind of radically right-wing Tory they want running the state broadcaster.

It's also a stark shot across the bows to warn the BBC News and Politics team that if they ever attempt to properly hold the Johnson-Cummings regime to account in their coverage, it won't just be them who lose their jobs, but thousands of other BBC staff in drama, radio, entertainment, online, sports coverage ... who all get the boot too.

The economic pressure to conform to the Tory narrative is strong enough on its own that virtually nobody in the mainstream media has dared to properly hold them to account over anything, from economically ruinous nonsense like austerity extremism, to racist 'Hostile Environment' deportations, from their sickening campaign of persecution against sick and disabled people, to their unprecedented decade of attacking our workers' rights and catastrophically repressing UK workers wages.

The threat to tear down the entire BBC in retaliation for holding the government to account adds a huge social pressure, because BBC sports and entertainment presenters, radio producers, drama actors, online editors and the like move in exactly the same social circles as the News and Politics people.

The social pressure to keep quiet and turn a blind eye to the horrors and extremism of the Johnson-Cummings regime (shut up you fool! you're not just risking your own career, you're risking ours too') will be impossible to under-estimate.

Another extraordinary factor in this politically motivated threat against the BBC is that Jeremy Corbyn was ridiculed, abused, and condemned by the mainstream media hack pack over his proposals to democratise the BBC board of directors, ban political interference in the selection of senior BBC staff, and direct more BBC investment towards local and investigative journalism, in order that politicians at all levels of the state are better held to account.

In fact, the very same people cheering Boris Johnson's threats against the BBC outright reversed reality last year to present Corbyn's BBC democratisation proposals as 'politically motivated interference' in BBC affairs!

This total reality reversal is somewhat Orwellian, but utilisation of the threat of impoverishment and social pariah status to quell media criticism of the ruling party goes well beyond Orwell's dystopian vision of an all-powerful state that uses terror and brute force to enforce subservience.

The threat of severe economic and social punishment to compel hard-right ideological conformity amongst the commentariat class is more like the kind of mind-bending dystopia scenarios the likes of Huxley, Kafka, and Philip K. Dick came up with.

After all, why expend vast amounts of energy and resources on brute force repression of dissent - and risk revolutionary pushback in the process - when you can simply use powerful economic and social pressures to manipulate the media class into policing ideological conformity amongst themselves?

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