Even some corporate media have turned on Ed Sheeran over his hand-wringing cowardice in dropping Macklemore. “Ed Sheeran’s blandness has finally come back to bite him“, writes Emily Bootle in The i-Paper, while for her part the Guardian’s deputy music editor has penned a decent piece saying, well, this …
… its kicker adding that:
By standing behind support act Macklemore, who was removed from the tour for his vocal support of Palestine, these artists are demonstrating the self-sacrifice necessary to stand against those crushing free speech.
The Guardian is itself no stranger, for reasons enshrined in its business model as set out here, to hand-wringing cowardice. But it ran the Laura Snapes piece yesterday, alongside a report on Macklemore donating his $1m tour salary to Palestine …
Of course, there are more accurate and withering critics out there, and souls less generous than mine might take issue with Laura Snapes. They might for example seize on her use – the context being Zionist billionaire Robert Kraft’s instigation of Macklemore’s axing – of a freshly coined meme, “corporate overreach”, with its implication that this is some egregiously new development when Western ‘democracy’ was captured long ago by corporate oligarchy. The words of Chris Hedges, directed four years ago at his own USA, are scarcely less applicable to the West at large:
Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.
Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.
Chris Hedges (abridged) – Let’s stop pretending America is a meaningful democracy
*
I have written elsewhere – here and here for instance – on the role of Israel as a beachhead in the Middle East within a US empire of which the British state is a junior but eager partner.
Those less generous souls I referred to might also note that only after the heart lifting solidarity of Macklemore’s fellow support acts on the Sheeran tour did the Guardian dip a cautious toe in the waters of protesting, on ground of eroding free speech – one of many ways, another being the proscription of Palestine Action, in which Zionism impacts on Western freedoms – Kraft’s meddling. Their flint-hearted lack of charity might lead them to suspect the Guardian of having noted a turning of the tide, and sensing brand advantage in said toe immersion. 1
All the same, I welcome it regardless both of the paper’s motives and of Laura Snapes’ naivity (me being generous again) for the same reason I welcome the pendulum swing in the States which appears to be making AIPAC funding more electoral liability than asset. On this front at least, the times may be a-changing for the better.
* * *
- Six years ago Jonathan Cook noted, in the context of its betrayal of Julian Assange, the calibrated game a paper like the Guardian is playing:
On the one hand, Assange needed the manpower and expertise provided by big-hitting newspapers like the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel to help Wikileaks sift through vast trove to find important, hidden disclosures. He also needed the mass audiences those papers could secure for the revelations, as well as those outlets’ ability to set the news agenda in other media.
Liberal media, on the other hand, needed to court Assange and Wikileaks to avoid being left behind in the media war for big, Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, for audience share and for revenues. Each worried that, were it not to do a deal with Wikileaks, a rival would publish those world-shattering exclusives instead and erode its market share.
For a brief while, this mutual dependency just about worked. But only for a short time. In truth, the liberal corporate media is far from committed to a model of unmediated, whole-truth journalism. The Wikileaks model undermined the corporate media’s relationship to the power establishment and threatened its access. It introduced a tension and division between the functions of the political elite and the media elite.
The US is using the Guardian to justify jailing Julian Assange for life. Why is the paper so silent?
One small step for a man, but one big step for ‘man’kind – but poor Ed couldn’t make it. More credit to the ones who did, at financial cost, too. Let’s hope this is part of the beginning of the end for that pathological, greedy and genocidal colonial state.
Yes, let’s. But I’ll be posting soon on the dangers of assuming empire’s plans for the region have been stopped in their tracks by Iran and Ansar Allah. Yes, the criminals who launched Gulf War 3 wanted Iran’s downfall but that was always secondary to sowing energy chaos whose primary target was and remains China.