Mainstream media line up to produce identikit war propaganda

Usually when we refer disparagingly to British journalists as ‘stenographers‘, we don’t mean it completely literally. We’re just saying they tend to approvingly parrot what powerful people say. However, when it comes to selling the illegal Iran assault to the British public, it appears client hacks are literally all just writing down the words fed to them by the Ministry of Defence. The mainstream media is manufacturing consent for overseas war all over again.

Matt Kennard highlights the case of a Royal Air Force (RAF) pilot shooting down Iranian drones:

As he points out, you don’t need the gulags of an authoritarian state to force pseudo-journalists in our pseudo-democracy to all conform with the party line. You just need a billionaire-owned press, and advertisers who won’t pay up unless you print what they want to hear. A large phalanx of privately educated ‘journalists’ indoctrinated into a power-worshipping mode of thought helps too.

Mainstream media glorify instruments of death

Kennard found examples from The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Mail and The Express, but The Mirror and The London Standard are at it too. It’s reminiscent of the famous case where the US Sinclair Broadcast Group ordered dozens of its ‘news’ stations to read the same speech. The supposedly left-wing Mirror also found time to salivate over the details of a machine assisting in the murder of children, as if reading the specifications of a new car:

The F-35B, a STOVL warplane, or Short Take Off Vertical Landing, warplane is one of the deadliest in the world takes off quickly and lands vertically like a helicopter. A killer stealth fighter the F-35B Lightning has a 25mm cannon and precision weapons such as the AIM-120 AMRAAM, AIM-132 ASRAAM, and Meteor air-to-air missiles.

All the British pieces in question uniformly glorify the actions of an unnamed pilot participating in an illegal war by preventing Iran from defending itself from the latest US-Zionist torrent of atrocities. His actions don’t even appear particularly remarkable. He simply:

…became the first pilot of the Royal Air Force’s stealth fighter jet to destroy a target in combat.

In other words, he shot down an automated, slow-moving object that flies along a more or less linear path. In terms of war propaganda, Top Gun this ain’t. He destroyed the two drones as they were apparently headed towards Jordan. The nation bordering Palestine participated heavily in the defence of so-called ‘Israel’ during the 2024 illegal assault on Iran by the settler-colony and its mafia ally, the US.

The Mirror remarks, without further comment, on how:

A day before he flew, RAF Akrotiri had been struck by a drone, creating a hole in a hangar home to two US U2 spy planes. He knew the stakes were high if either he or his fellow airmen and women let any drones slip through.

Pilot based at RAF base used for aiding Gaza genocide

RAF Akrotiri, located on Cypriot land stolen by Britain, has been a key surveillance platform for assisting the Zionist genocide in Palestine. That alone would make it a legitimate target for anyone, at any time, while the genocide continues. Doing so would be a means of upholding the Genocide Convention, which requires all signatories to prevent and punish the worst of all crimes.

Rather than cheering on this hired goon in a jumpsuit, we should be lionising Iran’s efforts to destroy a holocaust-enabling facility. The fact that it is now assisting the assault on Iran gives us even more reason to hope that the entire thing is obliterated.

Others have been highlighting the mainstream media’s characteristic obedience in manufacturing consent for mass murder in Iran:

Of course, the pilot whose role is centred isn’t the primary villain here. That slot is instead filled by vampiric politicians like defence secretary John Healey, who feed off the death of innocents in West Asia. His visit to Akrotiri coincided with these identikit ‘stories’, and he was pictured with the pilot.

The puff pieces about supposedly heroic air aces are there to smear a gloss over his criminality, and that of the British government as a whole. Their actions, though labelled as defensive, are supporting the US-Zionist aggression and thereby lowering the cost for mass killing of innocents.

As long as they have a brain-dead press ready to pump out this sort of shit, the war criminals and paedophiles of the Epstein class that fill London, Washington and Tel Aviv will continue to get away with it.

Featured image via Blitz