The journalist and media critic Mic Wright loves good journalism. As he’s quick to point out in the prologue to Breaking: How the Media Works, When It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters, he has nothing but the utmost respect for the many people within his industry who practise their craft with due diligence and integrity. This book is not about those people.
It focuses instead on the small group of powerful moguls who own the news, the journalists who do their bidding, and the numerous underhand techniques they use.
Wright, a freelancer with 20 years of experience, doesn’t overlook the obvious failings of nominally liberal outlets such as The Guardian and the maddeningly ‘balanced’ BBC, but he naturally zones in on the right-wing organs that dominate our media landscape.
Read more:
- Want to end misogyny? Bring back Page 3
- Britain’s Tory-sympathising press is ‘terrible’ for democracy, experts warn
- How political cartoonists influenced both Churchill and Sunak’s crushing election defeats
With laser-sharp precision, he traces the ‘nothing ever changes’ history of grubby tabloid journalism while deconstructing the tricks of its trade – the manipulative language, the coded insinuations, the telltale signs of a story moulded to fit an egregious agenda. It is, in essence, an authoritative guide to improving your media literacy.
Yes, we’re all aware that the right-wing media is committed to creating false narratives based around scaremongering moral panics, prurient sensationalism and blatant bigotry thinly disguised as righteous concern, but Wright exposes their unethical bad-faith bullshit with commendable depth and frankness.
