There is a Socialist, national Daily newspaper in the United Kingdom
called the Morning Star. It was from its birth a Communist party
Publication, but later became and to this day is, a publically owned
newspaper run the People's Printing Press Society. Anybody can become
a part owner of the paper by joining the PPPS and there are Annual
General Meetings held.
However newspapers don’t make money of sales, they make money off
advertising. The reason why the Morning Star is always in a state of
financial difficulty is that advertisers refuse to place adverts in
the Star and only Trade Unions buy advertising space.
This has many knock on effects:
Firstly, because of the lack of money through poor advertising
revenue, it must remain small and limit its page size (although after
you sift through the garbage in most south African papers there
probably about the same amount of content) as well as only printing in
Black and red.
Secondly, the major media houses, such as the BBC who normally show
headlines during their news reports do not show the morning star, even
though it’s a daily national. This combined with the fact that major
supermarket retailers refuse to stock it means that it is not visible
on the shelves and suffers from not being able to generate new
readership.
Finally, recently only a year or so ago the distribution company that
delivered it to the four corners of Britain suddenly decide to stop.
This means dedicated readers have to travel down to England from
Scotland in order to take it back up to sell on the day. Now Although
the newspaper survives, it does so barley and if it was not for major
donations from its supporters it would not be able to financial stay
adrift. Applied in a south African context where the Working class has
substantially less expendable income and where distribution costs
would be significantly higher, it would be impossible for it to
survive.
Freedom of press does not exist as a tool for the poor in the the same
was as it does for the rich. A middle class white man from Parktown
North might be able to set up his own “Liberal Weekly” but that
‘freedom’ does not exist for his domestic worker who even if she had
enough money probably doesn’t have the time or the Materials to do so.
Now that we can clearly see that the press is not free and in fact
printing and publishing is the reserve of the upper strata of society
let us take a look at lie’s.
A lie does not consist solely in an attack on an individual or
organisation. It can be about ideology or a miss representation of the
truth (normally through not reporting all the facts). However the
media don’t have to acknowledge this type of lie, because the lack of
nuclear weapons in Iraq can’t exactly sue them can it. Or The fact
that Violence in Tibet before the Olympics was actually started by
some Tibetan Monks who decided to go into the street and burn a few
helpless Hun Chinese Alive because apparently the Hun shouldn’t be
allowed to live in Tibet and they are making the Tibetan race
“impure”.
I won’t even begin to discuss bias against left wing views because
it’s so obvious it’s like being smacked in the face by a bus
In Comradeship
Brendan
Rhodes Branch YCL
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