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Newspaper talk

unhinched

🚑 Steve Hooper
Apr 16, 2016
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Not really. While the UK's Middle Eastern population is growing, it is proportionately small (only 0.6% of the total is Arab, for example). There is a very rich cluster with properties and funds, mostly in central London. The main factors are inward investment from the fossil fuel industry and geopolitics, with the West keen for obvious reasons to keep countries like the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar on side. Rishi Sunak is on his way to the UAE this week for COP28, so some tricky diplomacy there over the Telegraph sale.
I think the percentage that would potentially hold a more ' middle eastern / southern Asian / Arabic' moral and political view of the world is the UK is much bigger though, and growing if you consider three quarters of a million new nationals last year.
Having said that, I also realise that English may well not be the first language of a sizeable percentage of them and so many would likely prefer to read news in their native tongue online than, through, say a printed Telegraph, however it reinvented itself.
In that sense newspapers , even online, will not likely bridge any chasms in society and will likely simply allow people to encamp further, by reading the news at they like it presented. Personally I find all the press, with very rare exception, sickeningly narrative driven in how they report certain ' incidents'.
That, sadly drives me towards youtube and twitter for independent footage and comment , not bankrolled by Saudi or Murdoch or whoever. The danger with that, of course, is that those people may also be very agenda driven combined with strong money making motives and little accountability. The only answer for me is to hear what lots of different groups / outlets say and try and make an assessment, reading between the lines.
The big mystery, for me, is how current bedfellows in newspaper biasses are not simultaneously in complete collision and that makes me slightly, I stress, more open to conspiracy theory than I ever was.
 
Mar 11, 2018
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Except, unhinched, there is no such thing as a 'middle eastern / southern Asian / Arabic' moral and political view of the world. Trying to line up, for example, India's billion plus diverse peoples with the less than 10 million in the UAE is a fruitless exercise. And last year's net migration was greatly affected by humanitarian visas for Ukrainians and people from Hongkong, as well as non-EU work visas for people from India and Africa. Lots of international students too.
'Chasms in society' are caused by multiple factors (e.g., class structure) and the media have a significant but limited role there. The splintering of media habits is, as you note, happening across the whole UK population. And when you go to YouTube and X (formerly Twitter), you are also feeding the algorithms and raising income for, respectively, Alphabet (Google) and Elon Musk.
As for conspiracy theories, it's no big secret that large corporations tend to support the right to make as much money as possible, but are also very happy to nobble each other in the process.
 

unhinched

🚑 Steve Hooper
Apr 16, 2016
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1,090
Except, unhinched, there is no such thing as a 'middle eastern / southern Asian / Arabic' moral and political view of the world.
There is to a degree, although I accept that most Indians have a very different worldview to the Islamic nations around them. Again I accept there are splinters and groups within Islam , broadly Sunni & Shiite, but that the general morality and worldview will have a lot of cohesion.
So from a press point of view a British broadsheet full of a British relatively liberal view of diversity equality and inclusion may be completely alien to what many inhabitants of this country will want to digest.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but I am hugely disappointed by the lack of regard for the pursuit of truth in the majority of newspapers today. You are no doubt right in that it's always happened to some degree.
A new development , though, in recent years is people projecting a ' post truth ' society and almost celebrating that, even being critical of the concept of absolute truth.
But what we have then is a subjective ' my truth' and 'your truth' morrass, that the papers seemingly have bought in to, or simply reflect.
I believe that different journalists can bring different angles of the truth, and bring different, but equally valid, opinions but the way many things are reported now in supposedly respectable papers shows way too little regard for what is actually true i.e what actually happened etc.
Just my view Antipodean, but I appreciate your views.