💾 Archived View for subphase.xyz › users › flow › gemlog › 41-newsco.gmi captured on 2024-08-25 at 00:13:30. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-07-08)
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I'm writing amidst the background hum of nationalist cheering, jeering and booing from the TV in the room, as the England football team face Slovakia in the 2024 UEFA European football championship. For clarity: I'm not much a fan of football, and it goes without saying I'm certainly not a nationalist(!), though I do sometimes like to 'tune in' to major international sporting events as entertainment, and as a kind-of weather gauge of the major attention-grabbing stuff flowing through everyday life during these heightened moments.
It's an appropriate backing track for what I want to write about, and what I'm thinking about, regarding nationalism, the Far Right, and electoral activity in Europe at the moment. In France today, the first of a two-part vote is taking place in which the far-right party of Marine Le Pen could be - according to recent polling - edging far closer to French government than it has done in recent decades. The traction that has gained beneath the popularity of this shift to the right has been met with what I understand to be a broad but frayed alliance of leftwing organisations and candidates, which polling suggests will also gain ground against the centre party currently in government, but may not match what Le Pen is expected to gain.
But it's the UK that I'm more familiar with. And I've been waiting for, and anticipating this headline, to break for a while, as the past 12-months or so (maybe more) have seemed to cast the current Labour Party leader in a more favourable light in the mainstream than an opposition leader has been 'allowed' to be presented in the mainstream for coming up to 3 decades now. The headlines of various major outlets read variations on the following:
'Sunday Times newspaper endorses Labour Party' ~ bbc.co.uk (2024)
It's been clear over the past year-or-so that the guns of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp haven't been taking aim or popping shots at the Labour leader for some time, suggesting for whatever reason that a change in the weather from NewsCo is coming in UK politics:
'In the U.K., the correlation between Murdoch’s blessing and political power is so striking that The Sun, one of the most read papers in Britain, has had a 100% record of backing winning candidates since 1979' ~ NBC News (2023)
On Thursday, a more select subset of UK residents will hit the polls (as voter ID has been introduced as a requirement at polling booths this year...), and the outcome will show either the end to 14-years of Conservative Party rule or some kind of anomally has occurred. What remains to be seen, is whether Murdoch's flagship UK tabloid paper, The Sun, will follow the Sunday Times in backing the Labour Party leader, and whether this rule or correlation of influence will continue.
The first half of the match has come to an end, with England down 0-1 against Slovakia, and tensions and passions rising among fans, across Europe.