There was a time in the not too distant past when the only access to current affairs came from three television channels and the national and local news groups.

Newspapers were a huge part of our lives as anyone who has ever done a paper round will testify, however, they are now falling in numbers and as a consequence, their owners are pushing even harder than ever to get the general public to buy into their agenda.

The comment pages like ‘The Sun Says’ are divisive and vindictive whilst The Daily Mail play on common decency to infiltrate the minds of the unwitting middle classes, making them feel under attack from the less well off and immigrants.

When it emerged that a Kurdish asylum seeker had been beaten senseless by 20 youths in South London, it made most of us with a decent bone in our body wonder what on earth the country is coming to, asking what would drive people to carry out such a cowardly attack?

Now, whilst it would be churlish to blame the major media groups for attacks like these, one look at the headlines below suggest that their articles condemning the attack are more than a tad two faced. These headlines are pretty incendiary don’t you think?

Before I go on, my favorite is ‘WHY WE MUST NOT TAKE 3,000 MIGRANT CHILDREN‘ with a picture next to it of tennis player, Johana Konta, featuring a headline saying ‘Hands of our Tennis Golden Girl, Aussies’.

Konta was born in Australia and her parents were Hungarian. I have no objection to her (I might if I was Australian) but because she is good at tennis and didn’t arrive via the undercarriage of juggernaut and man made raft, she fits The Daily Mail immigration criteria just dandy.

So anyway back to my main point. The Mail The Express and The Sun are everywhere, often given away in shops, garages or restaurants, or even on budget planes heading out to the Costa Del Sol. There must something odd about picking up The Sun and reading the headline ‘UP YOURS SENORS’ (sic) as you board a flight to Malaga.

The Mail and The Sun have an agenda as media barons to wrest back control from the EU, not for the benefit of Britain, but for themselves. There is, without doubt, a desire to be unaccountable and to regain control of the masses who were erring towards the kind of independent thought that has emerged from the simple process of finding solid information through the internet.

However, all these right on campaign groups trying to get The Sun and Mail banned are really not worth bothering with. Newspapers can publish whatever they want within reason and have well trained editors and solicitors to look out for them. They have a justifiable right to offend and actually, if they didn’t, it would be an uncomfortable take on democracy, so forget all that nonsense.

They also supply much of what the public want, notably extensive football and racing coverage in The Sun and the occasional excellent pieces of historical fact by the likes of Max Hastings in The Mail, so they are not going anywhere. That doesn’t mean they can’t be put in their place.

Here’s what I do. Every time I see something in the media that appears sinister, such as the antagonising of Spain over Gibraltar, or words like flood, swarm and deluge, when it comes to immigrants, I Google the keywords and try to see if anything that is being printed is based on fact.

Any of you can do this, it is really easy and very interesting; I really enjoyed reading about the history of Gibraltar earlier in the week, a place that until I visited it just a few years back, I thought was an island like Mallorca (a sad but honest admission).

Sites such as Wikipedia have mines of independent information and there are a host of sites that feature census and population statistics that are genuine source of enlightenment with regards to ethnic minorities the economy and migrant levels in the UK. For instance, did you know that since austerity measures were put in place by George Osborne in 2010, debt of GDP in the UK has risen from 65 to 90 per cent?

With not much research, you will see that The Mail and The Sun are full of absolute fantasy carefully pieced together to make us angry. If you want it from the horse’s mouth, read the sentence below and leave it imprinted on your brain.

‘When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.’ – Rupert Murdoch.

Most of the people who read this blog are bright enough but sometimes drawn into laziness when it comes to being controlled by the media. My Thursday night ‘call to arms’ is to challenge everyone reading this post to find out information for themselves rather than through huge media groups with a self-serving agenda.

Come on, be honest with yourselves. Do you really want to be pushed around and dictated to by Paul Dacre, Rupert Murdoch and Richard Desmond? These are people who give nothing back to Britain and would walk on by if they saw you starving in a ditch.

That quote once again.

‘When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.’ – Rupert Murdoch.

Goodnight.