“We can be astounded by the alacrity with which the British news media—the owners, not the frustrated reporters whose urgent dispatches were willfully buried or ignored—stifled what should have been alarming news, necessitating, in the interests of national self-preservation, a powerful response. The news giants, one and all, mocked and belittled anyone who tried to alert the nation to its peril. In the course of their labors, they invented fake news. That was when it started.”
(Lee Duigon – News With Views) Imagine you’re all of 22 years old, and you already have your own reality show on British television, you’re famous—and you’re what they call an “influencer.”
Wow. What’s that? Well, you have scads of followers on social media: people who look up to you, and take you for some kind of oracle. If you tell them something’s cool, they’ll think it’s cool (maybe “think” is the wrong word here; but let it stand). They watch you on TV and breathlessly await your next utterance.
And the beauty of it is, you don’t have to know squat! It’s not your wisdom that influences people—good grief, no. It’s your fame. You’re on TV! What you say must be important! They’re even calling you an influencer, so there must be something to it.
And what do you do with your position of influence?
You stare goggle-eyed into the TV camera and tell all the folks out there that British schools shouldn’t teach their students about World War II anymore… because it’s “too intense” for them.
Research