Alternative media an essential part of a balanced news diet

Once again, Eric Bahrt, that master of misinterpretation, distorts what I had to say. I never said we should “rely on alternative news”, I said, “in order to understand what’s going on in these days of fake news and fake non-news, it is essential to read as widely as possible, and not remain a slave to the MSM” (Have Your Say, June 18).
Putting shades of political opinion to one side, it is fake non-news that I find most troubling. The UK’s mainstream media will simply not report events that have actually happened, that might prove the lie to their liberal-socialist agenda. One has to go to Ruptly or Russia Today to find actual footage of massive street protests in London or migrant crime, for example. In his stirring speeches on the threat to European civilisation, Hungary’s Victor Orban has decried the fact that his words will never be heard in the Western European mainstream media. But as well as muzzling him, the western MSM do not hesitate to brand him far-right, racist, and even anti-Semitic, without the right of reply. Fact: Budapest has become a destination of choice for French and German Jews fleeing anti-Semitic migrant attacks in France and Germany, earning Orban praise from Israel’s PM Netanhayu last July.
With regard to Bahrt’s vaunted MSM “standards”, those standards include inserting such adjectives as “racist”, “far-right” and “neo-nazi” before the names of individuals and organisations that are simply conservative, and referring to the UK’s Pakistani, Somali and Eritrean rape gangs as “Asian” which is a bit of a geographical stretch, let alone an insult to Thais and the rest of Asia. But I shall leave Bahrt with the words of Graham Johnson, a British MSM journalist hauled before the Leveson press standards inquiry: “You can’t get through the day on a tabloid newspaper if you don’t lie, if you don’t deceive, if you’re not prepared to use forms of blackmail or extortion or lean on people, you know, make people’s lives a misery. You just have to deliver the story on time and on budget, and if you didn’t then you’d get told off.”
With standards like these, perhaps we should “rely” on the alternative media after all.
Nigel Pike
Phang Nga