The Era When Respectable Media Could Control a Story Is Over, and They Need to Come to Terms With That Soon

We need a functioning mainstream, but can they let go of old ways?

The New Year is traditionally a time for beginnings; but one could be forgiven for thinking that the main thing January 2025 was ushering in was an End, namely the total collapse of the liberal world order as propagandised by the respectable legacy media. The first blow was story about the historic mass sexual abuse of girls in northern English towns breaking containment. The second came this week with Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta would be ending the censorship of politically inconvenient posts on Instagram and Facebook. To compound the insult he directly noted the political vibe shift as inspiration for this move, and named pressure by legacy media as the central factor in the approach to date. Everything is collapsing and the people who took pride in micromanaging what we said and how are having a hard time coping with that.

The UK abuse scandal is particularly pathetic because it feels as though the respectable media speedrunning their entire bag of tricks in the most frantic fashion possible, and finding them suddenly useless. I described these tactics here and they were all on display: they had tried simply minimising coverage and that didn’t work; the next step is trying to make opponents toxic by calling them racist, sexist and so on (Rory Stewart here describing Elon Musk as “a genuine fascist”), after that they employed both the “teach the controversy” method (headlines like this reflecting the early take that the story was about conflict between Musk and Starmer rather than state-enabled systemic abuse), and the “Republicans pounce” approach (hence this headline in the guardian noting that talking about the story is weaponising it).