Our media system has been captured by political and corporate interests. This system spreads disinformation, protects vested power, and obstructs the urgent change needed for a just and survivable future.
Despite calls from figures like UN rapporteur Elisa Morgera to criminalise fossil fuel disinformation, media outlets – often owned by billionaires or neoliberal think tanks – continue to deny climate science and downplay injustice. Supposedly objective platforms rarely call out these bad actors, allowing false narratives to thrive.
Despite calls from special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, for an intervention to prevent new atrocities that will further scar human history, media outlets in thrall to lobbyists for the Israeli government disingenuously platform those who ignore or underplay the tragedy and portray her as in the pay of Hamas.
Although Orwell’s declaration – “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” – is boldly displayed at the entrance of Broadcasting House, the BBC today seems no longer willing to set the news agenda. Instead, as Robert Peston, former BBC economics editor, admitted the BBC more often than not defers to the right-wing press, particularly the Mail and the Telegraph, blurring the distinction between news in the public interest and news of interest to the public.
This is what Gail Bradbrook of Extinction Rebellion describes as “a pathology of divide and rule alongside infantilising distraction”.
Sensationalism over substance
This shift toward click-driven content was evident during the Restore Nature Now march in June 2024 – the largest environmental protest in UK history. It brought together mainstream NGOs like the RSPB and more radical groups such as Just Stop Oil. According to a BBC insider, producers made it clear there would be no coverage unless the event involved disruption or disorder. Of course, there was none.
Ironically what did appear online that day was an item on Newswatch asking the question: “Should live broadcasts of football matches from Euro 2024 disrupt the timing and duration of news bulletins?”
Zoe Williams, writing in The Guardian, captured the irony:
“When you prioritise [reporting] the destructive over the peaceful – even just to heap noisy shame upon it – you’re proving what you decry: that orange flour is the only way to get noticed.”
Misinformation can also come in the form of omission.
Press regulation: failing the public
Regulatory failure is at the heart of the crisis of trust in the media. After the Leveson Inquiry, The Independent Monitor for the Press (IMPRESS) was established. Its protocols fulfilled all the requirements of the Royal Charter set up to ensure that a regulator to replace the discredited Press Complaints Commission should be autonomous: free from the influence of politicians and journalists themselves.
However, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), was established by newspaper editors themselves, effectively allowing the industry to mark its own homework. Since its inception in 2014, IPSO has never issued fines or serious sanctions for disinformation. Journalists have been able to bypass accuracy standards by exploiting loopholes in the IPSO code that exempt so-called “opinion” pieces, enabling the spread of science denial and fueling culture war narratives without accountability.
Brian Cathcart of the Byline Times said of IPSO:
“It is a fig leaf, a trick perpetrated on the public by the leading UK papers, with the active support of the Conservative Party. In reality it is designed, not to curb unethical journalistic conduct, but to enable it.”
The public impact of rampant disinformation
When she resigned, commercial finance manager for the Murdoch press, Emily Townsend, said she could no longer work for an organisation that had run a “misinformation campaign […] that has tried to divert attention away from the real issue which is climate change […] including misrepresenting facts.”
Equally, Ofcom remains toothless in the face of brazen breaches of its broadcasting protocols.
When castigated for its platforming of politicians as pundits, GB news merely moved those presenters to online streaming, thus bypassing Ofcom oversight.
Accountability, in this landscape, is a façade.
In the end, all this rampant disinformation gives people an all-too-human excuse to tune out existential threats and the moral irresponsibility of some sections of the media. As University of Waterloo Chair in Social and Political Philosophy Jennifer Saul says:
“ideas that would never have garnered mainstream attention in the past come to seem like normal parts of public discourse. And, with repetition and normalisation, they can seem increasingly plausible.”
Media Revolution: reclaiming the media
However, a paradigm shift is underway. Media Revolution is a new initiative aiming to unite and amplify voices often excluded from mainstream discourse, by bringing together four key responses for combatting a malignant media: resist, radicalise, replace, and regulate. Supported by organisations such as the Independent Media Association (a partner organisation of IMPRESS), the movement seeks to coordinate grassroots media efforts, push for policy reform, and promote media literacy. Its goal: to build a credible counterweight to a corrupt billionaire-owned media, driven not by profit, but by principles of truth and social justice.
Media Revolution launches on 28 July, with a 100-day countdown to Media Liberation Day on 5 November, 2025. It is a global call to reclaim our media and re-establish it as a fourth pillar of democracy.
