The death of British head of state’s ninety-nine year old spouse was not a shock given his age and poor health.
A reasonable media response would have been reports on TV, radio and in newspapers, a TV programme or two on his long life, followed later by TV and radio coverage of his funeral. What the public were subjected to was the above multiplied a hundred-fold in volume and in tone with absence of substance and of balance.
Volume
On the day of the announcement of the royal death repeated reports and reaction were reasonable on Sky News and BBC News channels. A few extended news reports may have been acceptable on ITV1 but not cancellation of all programming for hours; ITV1 is not a ‘news channel.’
BBC went further than ridiculous volume: It cancelled the entirety of its programming on TV and radio. BBC1 and BBC2 were replaced by exactly the same output as BBC News, BBC4 was suspended, and all music radio stations were replaced by news channels that focussed on looped reports, faux documentaries and banal commentary.
Tone
Endless ultra-lightweight tone of presentation on TV, riddled with bizarre claims about the dead royal as if he was almost a superhuman or a deity, sought to induce catatonia in the intellect of the public. Broadcasters decided to treat viewers and listeners like three-year-olds; the latter receive more highly-developed cerebral challenge from Pengu and Teletubbies.
The broadcasters’ tone enforced an assumption that all viewers and listeners were in a stupor of grief mixed eclectically with giddiness. It did not match the identity of the deceased who was someone born into undeserved privilege, who lived within privilege and who never said or did anything not banal. The was a huge chasm between how he was depicted and what he actually was. Presenters, reporters and guests appeared to have removed the parts of their brains that operated normal adult analyses, communication and reason.
Propaganda, PR and marketing are designed to (mis)direct, distract, obfuscate and to fool their targets. Governments and their supportive bodies use those tools relentlessly without pause. The royal’s death gave broadcasters and newspapers a spurious opportunity to eschew any pretence of offering balance and totality of information and to focus maniacally on the severely blinkered sell.
Racism
The dead royal was known for “casual” racism. Rather than remind the public of his racist comments there was constant use in the media of the word “gaffe” accompanied by laughter.
Normalisation of racism was endemic on the day of his death.
Cult
One of the dictionary definitions of ‘cult’ is
Obsessive, especially faddish, devotion to or veneration for a person, principle, or thing.
There is no such cult in Britain devoted to the royal family but government, other politicians and media behaved as if everyone in the country was a member of such a cult. Every component of coverage of the royal deceased was constricted by assumption of unanimous veneration. Imposed ultra-childlike wonder infected exhaustively every conversation. It was extremely weird.
Stream of piss before the deluge
Suffocating weirdness of politicians’ and commentators’ eulogies of the deceased royal were a mere stream of piss compared to the torrential deluge that will rage when his wife passes on. The thought of that is horrifying: A concoction of Orwell’s ‘1984,’ Cronenberg’s ‘Shivers,’ Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ and Butlins.
The establishment response to a dead royal was a massive malodorous dump in the faces of the British people and on democracy. Reason, intelligence and adulthood were rejected and suppressed. Contempt for the public gushed everywhere.
ducksoap 