It's a kind of magic

A magician, earlier today

Every magician knows the importance of the art of distraction. When I say 'magician', I mean someone who practices magic for the entertainment of others, not Aleister Crowley. I know whereof I speak because my brother actually is a magician, specializing in sleight-of-hand tricks involving cards and coins, and a member of the magicians' professional guild the Magic Circle. In Sweden. That's my brother for you. Which brings us back to distraction, which he describes as the use of one hand to gesticulate and carve arabesques in the air, thus distracting the audience, while the other hand holds the glittering coin, about to appear or disappear.

The media use exactly the same technique. Stories are used to lure people away from topics or events which do not square away with the accepted narrative. A perfect example is the current brouhaha in Britain concerning what has been termed 'Partygate'. Quite apart from the fact that the obsession with echoing the infamous Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon is one of the media's more irritating habits, this is as flimsy a non-story as a local cub reporter could come up with, and yet it has dominated the news cycle for weeks, taking  a lot of what used to be called (in the days when the print media was unchallenged by its online version) 'column inches'.

The details are tedious and have been so ubiquitous the only people who don't know the story of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's party (birthday rather than political party), which broke COVID lockdown rules imposed on the rest of the populace are perhaps Polynesian islanders or tribesmen in pakol hats squatting in caves in the hills of Afghanistan.

The object of the story is not journalism, it is meta-journalism. The two main crises in the United Kingdom - and England in particular in the case of the second crisis - are without question inflation and the arrival each day of hundreds of illegal immigrants on the Kent coast of England. Rather than focus on these twin evils - the latter preventable, the former unfortunately not - the British media ('Fleet Street' as it is known after its traditional London home) is instead trying to turn a birthday party into the Suez Crisis or Chamberlain's meeting with Hitler. This tawdry gathering of the political class - who was it that so accurately said that politics is pop music for ugly people? - at worst shows the contempt the ruling elites have for the peons, and at best makes you think that Nero and Caligula wouldn't have taken this kind of backchat from the media.

This is not to say that all major stories are distractions from other journalism equally deserving of attention for the benefit of the public, who are after all the people that the media are supposed to inform, even if it often seems that the media is a mutual appreciation society for which every day is the Grammys.

Putin didn't invade Ukraine because he wanted to give the Western media something to chew on while he carried on doing his usual round of dirty deeds done dirt cheap. Putin invaded Ukraine because he wants it back, his view being that it is and has always been a part of 'Greater Russia' just as China sees Taiwan as a runaway toddler in a supermarket who needs a tug on the reins to come back to Mommy.

But the Western media went full steam ahead for Ukraine. The story has become the magician's waving hand, keeping the audience's attention away from the coin or playing card. The narrative was constructed quicker than a stage set, which it essentially is. Ukraine became a sort of sovereign nation version of George Floyd and, in much the same way as the career criminal whose clumsy death effectively started America Civil War 2.0, a lot of faults were overlooked for the sake of the narrative. Just as Floyd was an unpleasant man who has been beatified, so too is Ukraine an unpleasant country which has been sanctified.

Distraction is not simply the boosting or promotion of one story to keep the public gaze away from something counter-narrative, but also simple omission. The BBC is notorious for this. A demonstration in favour of some faddish cause of which the corporation approves and attracting a few hundred people with purple hair and nose-rings will get generous coverage, while a demonstration a few blocks away drawing tens of thousands but being in support of something of which the BBC disapproves - free speech, say - and there will be no coverage. If it were not for the dissident media, the citizen journalists, the rogue YouTubers, the media would control public opinion as tightly as Pravda (which laughably means 'the truth' in Russian) once did in the Soviet Union.

I say 'Soviet Union' and not 'former Soviet Union', as is the style in the mainstream media. The Soviet Union is not former, it simply changed addresses, moving further West, to better weather and dental care. But I digress.

There is, and has been for some time, a graduate degree across the West called 'Media Studies'. By all accounts it is as steeped in Left-wing propaganda as a cookie in a coffee-cup. It is also wholly unnecessary. Media studies is simply studying the media. But beware, don't look where the media are pointing, don't direct your gaze to where they want it directed. Watch the magician's other hand.