Delingpole: Boris Should Learn from Trump to Shun the Vile, Leftist MSM

boris trump
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James Delingpole

Boris Johnson has spent this election treating Donald Trump’s friendly overtures with about as much enthusiasm as Prince Andrew fending off a cheery call from his old mate Jeffrey Epstein.

Big mistake. Boris has a lot to learn from his would-be friend and ally Donald, not least in the way Trump handles the media.

Trump understands that the MSM is almost entirely toxic, hostile and counterproductive — and that therefore the best way to deal with it is to bypass it altogether, apart from occasionally goading it, usually via his personal Twitter account.

Perhaps after his experiences today with Channel 4 News, Boris might be persuaded to move in a more Trumpian direction.

Channel 4 News attempted to smear Boris by misrepresenting something he had said to make it sound “racist”.

Though Channel 4 has since withdrawn the tweet and apologised, the damage has been done.

A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got his boots on. The paranoid, mendacious left which doesn’t care about facts, only about their “narrative”, will continue to use it to smear the Conservatives:

It’s unlikely we’ll ever get to the bottom of whether or not this was a deliberate stitch-up. But even if it was just an accident, it was most certainly a product of Channel 4’s relentless left-wing bias. Can you imagine Channel 4 broadcasting a clip in which it claimed to have caught Jeremy Corbyn saying something rude about Jews? Of course you can’t. Channel 4 is only interested in shafting politicians on the right, not the left. And the same goes for Sky News. And for the BBC. That’s three out of four of Britain’s mainstream broadcasters incapable of giving any Conservative (or UKIP or Brexit Party) politician, indeed any vaguely right-wing cause, a fair hearing. And the other one, the ITV network, is scarcely much better.

Boris was wise to avoid participating the other day in Channel 4’s ludicrous Climate Change “debate”, in which various party leaders competed to see who could spout the most extravagantly stupid green drivel.

He’s also very sensible, I think, to steer clear of an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil. Neil is by some margin Britain’s most trenchant, best prepared, and unbiased heavyweight political interviewer and it would indeed be a tremendous scalp if he could claim Boris Johnson’s.

But that, of course, is why Boris should say “no”.

Any advantage he might gain by proving to bloviators on social media that he is not frit would be more than offset by the killer moment — or moments — somewhere in the interview where Neil pinned down Boris on some embarrassing detail which showed him not at his best. This would then be tweeted out, ad nauseam, by the BBC’s huge number of staffers and also re-broadcast, at intervals, throughout the final run-up to the election. Neil may not be biased but the BBC most certainly is. These ‘gotcha’ clips would do nothing but harm to the Conservatives’ chance of defeating Corbyn.

I used to think that we on the conservative side of the argument could work with the mainstream broadcast media. In the past we’ve had no option but to do so because it was one of the few ways of getting our message across to a large audience, albeit in an environment invariably contrived to make our job as hard as possible.

Not any more, though. President Trump is way ahead of the game here. He is the first major political leader to have grasped the point that in the digital age, the MSM needs you far more than you need it. If the MSM and everyone who works for it wants to depict you as an uncouth, stupid, dangerous, misogynistic, heartless right-wing moron, then why give them the time of day when instead you can speak directly to your base via Twitter — or in internet long-form interviews like Joe Rogan’s — where you are going to get a much fairer hearing?

British conservatives like Boris still worry far, far too much about courting the good opinion of the legacy media and far too little about the needs and desires of real people in the world beyond the metropolitan elite bubble which the legacy media mainly represents.

That’s why this election is so depressing for anyone who is not a dripping wet liberal Remainer type: none of the main conservative contenders, not even the Brexit Party, let’s be honest, is offering us much red meat because they’re so afraid someone on Channel 4 or the BBC might accuse them of being horrid.

This combination of colourlessness and dreary centrism is proving a real turn off to many voters who, while obviously keen to avoid a Corbyn victory, are asking themselves: “What have these cucks done to deserve my support?”

As someone put it in the comments below another of my rants on this subject:

That the Conservatives can only manage a 10 point lead over a communist who’s never met an enemy of this country he wouldn’t call ‘comrade’ is a national disgrace. And it’s 100% their fault.

I totally agree. And I think their failure to learn the lesson from Donald Trump is a major part of it. In Britain, as in the U.S. , the mainstream media is the implacable enemy of free markets, free speech, fiscal responsibility, limited government, controlled immigration, sensible policies on energy and the environment, or anything else that smacks remotely of conservative values. Therefore, it needs either to kept at a distance or better still ignored altogether.

However angry the Conservative party Establishment is today about this disgusting smear job by Channel 4, it won’t nearly be angry enough. Come the new Boris administration, there will still be no talk of killing the BBC licence fee or selling off Channel 4; Conservative MPs will still be gagging to whore themselves for a bit of attention on all the usual BBC TV and radio programmes; Conservative policy will still be decided on the basis: “But how will it play on the BBC’s Today programme?”

It ought to be the final straw, really it should, that a publicly-owned broadcaster is able, so close to an election, to manufacture and promote such shamelessly left-wing propaganda.

But nothing will change. And that’s the problem.

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