British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has followed President Trump’s lead and has made the decision to speak directly to the nation through Facebook and YouTube on the day that the UK officially leaves the European Union.
He will pre-record his message at 10 Downing Street and will then publish it at 10pm on 31 January (UK time, which is 11am New Zealand time today). An hour after that the UK will have officially left the EU.
This is a critical moment in history, and the fact that Boris has cut out the middle man and gone directly to the public is a huge deal. It is another nail in the coffin of the legacy media.
He is not allowing the BBC to come and record his speech and then share it with other stations. The BBC are so furious that they have indicated that in protest they may not play it on their channel. This could be because of a scheduling issue but it equally could be a serious case of sour grapes.
President Trump constantly uses Twitter to speak directly to the public, effectively cutting out the legacy media, so why have these two powerful conservative leaders both made a conscious decision to cut out the middle man?
President Trump has had nothing but negative press from the legacy media since before he became President, but it is not just about negativity; it is much more than that. The legacy media no longer present just the facts. They now see their role as shaping public opinion, which makes them a Media Party not an objective purveyor of the facts.
Neither Boris nor Trump can count on the Media Party to deliver an honest and objective report of what they say in a speech or anywhere else for that matter. The BBC, which used to be famous for its quality journalism, is now a shadow of its former self.
Tommy Robinson last year exposed the BBC not once but twice for their dirty, so-called investigative journalism, where they deliberately cut and pasted excerpts from video interviews to give viewers a completely false view of what he had said. It also included their framing an argument between Tommy and an ex-employee as being sexual harassment even though the ex-employee had made it very clear to the BBC that it wasn’t. It was the complete opposite of what true investigative journalism should be. It was nothing more than a complete frame-up, and if the ex-employee hadn’t helped Tommy turn the tables on the BBC they would have been free to destroy his reputation and his marriage. Instead, Tommy exposed the BBC for their malicious fake news. The journalist, instead of destroying Tommy’s life, found himself thrown under the bus by the BBC. They no longer had any use for him once he was exposed for doing what he had no doubt been doing for most of his long journalistic career.
This is the kind of legacy media that both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are having to deal with. Why would any conservative leader these days allow them to frame an interview or a speech when they have the ability to provide the entire interview and speech in full and unedited to the world for the public to make up their own minds?
Bypassing the legacy media just makes sense. I expect to see it happening more and more often, as it is the only way that conservative leaders can be sure that their message is not distorted.
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