THE AMERICAN JOURNALISM COMMUNITY fancies itself a completely neutral estate, the poster child for objectivity. But this conceit is, at best, ahistorical. Like all things, the modern press corps was born into an inequitable society, and its strictures show up in the industry everywhere from hiring practices to how certain communities are covered, if they get coverage at all.
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ON FEBRUARY 11, NEWS BROKE that Millennium Films was delaying Bryan Singer’s Red Sonja, which was to begin production this year. This was, on the face of it, a remarkable turn of events. Singer’s Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, had just been nominated for five Oscars. It performed exceedingly well at the box office, as is usually the case with Singer’s movies; all told, they’ve grossed more than a billion dollars.
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There were promising signs at the beginning of this year that BBC News and Current Affairs were preparing to rescue their reputation after a torrid time during the EU referendum. Their coverage in 2016 was widely panned by senior insiders like John Simpson and Justin Webb for not checking the factual claims made during Brexit debates, and putting too much weight on 'balancing' opinions rather than some more objective test of accuracy and truth.
But behind the scenes something big was stirring. For nearly two months in early 2018 BBC One's flagship documentary programme, Panorama, was looking at a stunning set of revelations from two whistle-blowers.
There were promising signs at the beginning of this year that the BBC News and Current Affairs were preparing to rescue their reputation.
The first was the testimony of Chris Wylie, the former head of research at Cambridge Analytica. Founded by Alexander Nix, Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon in 2013, the data-based electioneering company would deploy military-grade propaganda tools and weaponise the hacked information of 170 million Facebook users, both in the 2016 UK EU referendum and the US presidential election of Donald Trump.
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