It is pointless trying to understand the contemporary British media complex as ‘media’ in the conventional sense—journalism, reporting, or even opinion. The correct frame is propaganda: mood and sentiment management, with its sharpest tool today being crisis communications. The dominant technique, visible daily if you still watch, is inversion—systematic reversal. It flips reality: victim into perpetrator, aggressor into defender, truth into falsehood, good into evil. It constructs Walter Lippmann’s ‘pseudo-environment’, an alternate reality in which the public is meant to dwell. A key subtype is projection, or ‘accusation in a mirror’, neatly summarised by a Rwandan Hutu propagandist in a 1990s manual: impute to your enemies exactly what you and your own side are planning or doing. When a genuine crisis erupts—such as the racially aggravated murder of Henry Nowak—the first imperative of the machine is to stall, dampen, and defeat the natural eruption of public outrage. Call it ‘restoring calm’ if you like the euphemism. In practice, it means herding people back into anaesthetised normality so that inversion can resume. Once the majority has been shamed, distracted, or bullied into silence, the remnant still angry can be ridiculed by the usual chorus—eye-rolling panellists on Have I Got News for You, columnists sneering at those ‘harping on’, and accusations of crypto-racism or worse. Thus, the brutal stabbing of an unarmed 18-year-old student, the false cry of racism by his killer, and the police reportedly handcuffing the dying boy as he bled out on a Southampton street is repackaged as another ‘knife crime’ tragedy (note Shaban Mahmood’s flaccid parliamentary statement this afternoon)—preferably illustrated with a generic white face in the style of the BBC's so-called reality-based drama 'Adolescence' or the more recent but equally putridly manipulative 'The Capture'. Real patterns (grooming gangs, crime disparities, two-tier policing) are airbrushed. This is projection at work: the actual sources of predation and institutional failure are recast, while legitimate grievance is pathologized. The truth? The system enabled both the attack and the immediate inversion of its aftermath and that stands exposed to anyone with eyes and functioning brain by the video evidence. That’s the problem, your own 'lying eyes', that crisis communications has to handle before there can be a return to normal levels of public mood management can be restored. This is precisely what Dan Hodges is performing when he labels people demanding we talk about the murder ‘scum’ for refusing to respect the family’s wish that their son’s death not be politicised. It is phase-one grunt work in the inversion protocol: shame the angry back into silence so the pseudo-environment can be restored. Smart enough to know his role, malleable enough to perform it willingly—exactly as Noam Chomsky described the filtering process that keeps the right sort of voice prominent in the system. The technique still works on some. But it is wearing thin. Every overplayed inversion, every *scummy* dismissal of raw public grief, prepares the ground for sharper identities and clearer grievances against the system itself. Normal people do not remain moderate forever when the machine insists their reality is the problem.

Tonight Question Time features an imagined AI panel made up of historical figures who shaped the modern world Watch the #bbcqt AI special now on @BBCiPlayer and @BBCNews to see what our REAL panel have to say on AI, including how it can blur the lines between reality and fakery

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Line after line of this Telegraph obit is amazing. “She broke off from a bout of fellatio to top up on a family-size tub of walnut-ripple ice cream.” telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2…

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👀Overheard in our newsroom just now: I'm so over formers continuing to write our "obituary" (air quote) when I can turn on TV, check any news channel and see us and our reporting. Case in point. (points to nearby TV with MS NOW showing last night's drone scoop)