Distinct Voices

Continuing with the media:

Sir David Attenborough has said the coronavirus pandemic has swept the problem of climate change from the front pages.

The broadcaster and naturalist, who celebrated his 94th birthday in May, said the outbreak has made the issue feel as if it is in “the distant future”.

“… we have to make sure that this issue, which was coming to the boil with the next COP meeting in Glasgow, has suddenly been swept off the front pages. And we’ve got to get it back there.”

All these things only have any currency if they’re being pushed in the media. Would anyone have any interest in climate change/Global Warming if this wasn’t happening? After all, it only amounts at present to a 1ºC rise in air temperature, if that. If it looks like a problem in the distant future, it’s because it actually is a problem in the distant future.

The same is true with the War on Tobacco, which has been running for far longer than the Global Warming scare, thanks to organisations like ASH which keep on pushing them.

The natural tendency must be for all these scares to gradually lose their force over time. And maybc that’s what happens anyway. People know that they’re supposed to be worried about Climate Change and Smoking, but quietly ceased to care about either. They have their own priorities, even if they play lip service to the reigning scares promoted by the media.

In fact even the new coronavirus looks like it’s really just another media-driven scare story too. It’s treated like it’s the Black Death, but it’s not. It’s actually a fairly mild infection. Its current primacy is probably more a reflection of the need for new scares to replace tired old scares which nobody is  scared of any more. And that’s because nobody trusts the mainstream media any more. Everything has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Everyone wonders who they can trust. And increasingly they trust a few individuals who have gained a track record of getting things half right.

We know what we’re supposed to think, but nevertheless we don’t think it.

Sir David Attenborough has probably been one of the most trusted voices in Britain for the past 50 years. But how long will such trust last when he’s started openly advocating pushing climate change back onto the front pages? Clearly he has his own agenda. And now he’s even quite open about it. Perhaps he thinks that, at the age of 94, his reputation still largely intact, he no longer needs to seem impartial?

But many of the new people don’t pretend to be impartial. What’s impartial about Alex Jones?

The odd thing about the new people is that many of them seem to have their own distinct voice. Alex Jones has his own distinct gruff voice. Michael Savage has a beautiful, melodic voice, almost like a musical instrument. Their voices have their own separate message.

One distinctive voice that I happen to like is that of Lionel Nation. I’m not sure if that’s his real name. But it’s a voice from New York City that seems to speak for New York City.

Who are these people, and where did they come from? They come out of nowhere. Why do thousands of people tune in to listen to them? Perhaps because they just want to hear distinctive new voices.

There are more and more of them, now that nobody listens to the mainstream media any more. There are thousands of them.

Once there were only one or two voices: now there are thousands, all competing with each other for authenticity. And that’s a new thing.

They’re all like pop singers on some new Hit Parade. Only they just talk rather than sing. All they need is a microphone and an internet connection. Their one shared ability is to be able to talk for hours. And they do it every day, some better than others.

And they make money out of it somehow, just like pop singers. Perhaps it’s dependent on how many listeners they manage to attract. I don’t know how it works.

But now YouTube are starting to censor some of them.  Some of their videos are deleted. And that’s probably why Joe Rogan is moving to some other platform: to escape censorship.