Simeon Scott
Introduction
Bradford residents might be interested in thinking about the language routinely used by politicians along with journalists in the broadcast and print media. We could begin by looking at such mainstream texts as Crystal (2016); however, I found his book thoroughly disappointing. A simple, but important, example of the kind of language at issue would be the large number of history programs shown on TV. Rarely do male commentators engage with use of the word history, rather than herstory. Lucy Worsley is a notable exception in that she frequently addresses the ways in which women have by and large been written out of history. Ms Worsley could usefully present a documentary about the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst who, unlike her mother and sister, made monumental contributions to the wellbeing of working class women and men; including her deep opposition to WWI and the Bolshevik coup of 1917. We could ask: why do young journalists tend to trot out clichéd language that limits their critical thinking skills? One reason is that our colleges and universities focus on maximising income, especially the fees coming from overseas students doing business or IT, in order to pay their senior managers eye watering salaries. As a result further and higher education, especially in the social sciences and humanities, is turning out graduates with little knowledge beyond the principles of ‘free market’ economics.
With these comments in mind, the first section of this article deals with a text by the previously mentioned David Crystal (2016), who analyses various political speeches but immediately disappoints by writing that their content “is not really the subject of this book” (180).The next section considers the use of clichés in the multi-billion-dollar industry that is contemporary professional sport. The text then turns to the kind of fillers that are fashionable amongst journalists in general, such as repeated use of such words as narrative, actually and interesting. A common cliché amongst political journalists is conspiracy theory; a term used to dismiss the idea that the rich and powerful routinely conspire to maintain a world that promotes their interests. With profound relevance to events in Gaza during 2023-24, a section of the text discusses the word anti-Semitism, which is used as a means of closing down criticism of the policies of Israel’s Zionist ruling elites.
There follows a discussion of other clichés used by political journalists, including the spatial metaphors left wing and right wing. It is argued that these terms deflect attention away from the essence of both market capitalism and state capitalism, the latter as practiced in Xi’s China and North Korea; the essence being the wage labour system. Similar arguments are presented with regard to such terms as the national interest and liberal democracy. The text then considers the current media preoccupation with the language of equality and identity and, before moving to a conclusion, refers to some economics/business related terms such as the free market and shopping centre footfall.
The sweet nothings of David Crystal
Probably the best known British writer on language is David Crystal. His text, Crystal (2016), focuses on the eloquence of various politicians, ignoring both the content and ideological function of their speeches. As a simple example, he devotes a lot of words to Barak Obama’s famous electoral slogan “Yes we can”; yet fails to consider to whom the word “we” refers. After Obama’s 8 years in office, America’s rich got richer whilst the poor got poorer and, despite his implied message to them as part of the “we”, African Americans continued to be murdered by racist police officers, typically ending up in prison out of all proportion to their numbers in America’s population. In contrast, Akala, to whom Crystal makes a passing reference, offers a more specific “we” with his wonderful analysis of the genesis of the language relevant to Black people in Britain; see Akala (2019). In contrast, compounding his naivety, without even a hint of irony Crystal refers to the BBC’s remit: “to inform, educate, and entertain” (60); a claim that will be challenged in the text before the reader.
The clichés of professional sport
Many of us are familiar the kind of comments that slip off the tongues of sports commentators, managers and players in post-match interviews featured by the BBC et al. Thanks to the money provided by TV companies, advertisers, sponsors and Middle Eastern oil sport-washers, professional sport is big business, being watched by billions of people across the globe. British viewers of Match of the Day, for instance, often hear such clichés as: “It’s a game of two halves”; implying that, given that winning is what professional football is all about, a team’s second half performance will be better than it was in the first. More loaded is the term “take one for the team”, suggesting that a player commits a foul which may result in him or her being sent off, not to mention a possible injury to the opposing team’s player, but thereby saves the team from conceding a goal. Football club owners are often quoted as saying: “despite the team’s recent poor results we have every confidence in the manager”, which is code for we will be holding a board meeting at which we might sack the manager, as continued poor results may lead to relegation, falling attendances and merchandise sales. Tennis fans watching coverage of Wimbledon may well be familiar with “the ball is in your court”, indicating that a player, under pressure to win the match, has to make a split second decision with regard to what kind of return shot to play. The latter example, as with many of these clichés, has become a metaphor routinely used in a range of social settings. We could add such phrases as “they’re in a league of their own”, “they don’t pull any punches”, “she was thrown under a bus”, “it doesn’t get any better than this” and so on. Repeated again and again in the broadcast media, we hear such metaphors and similes in the workplace, the pub, coffee bar and other settings.
The patois of the broadcast media
Crystal refers to the use of fillers, such as “you know”, “I mean” and “like” (121); but fails to offer explanations as to their various functions. Whilst the filler “erm” is a common place, especially amongst working class people, the term “that’s interesting”, which may be a euphemism for boring, is more common amongst the chattering classes. Such a middle class marker, to which we could add “actually”, is common amongst the public school Oxbridge educated ladies and gentlemen who appear so frequently on our screens. The word narrative is a fashionable journalistic cliché; the reader might care to count how many times it is used per hour on the BBC’s 24 hour news programme. Probably knowing little or nothing of the word’s place in French post-modernist thinking, journalistic use of narrative remains a commonplace despite the fact that it was central to an intellectual fashion that is now well past its sell by date. A perfectly good alternative is simply story, but for journalists, particularly those discussing identity politics, narrative sounds more sophisticated and, to be charitable, may sometimes refer to a story told by an oppressed minority. Like the rest of us, with kids to feed and bills to pay, most journalists are under pressure to practice self-censorship; therefore repeated use of clichés, fillers and other politically safe banalities reduce the opportunity, and temptation, to engage in critical thinking and keeps them in a job or, for those on temporary contracts, makes it more likely that they will be extended.
Narrowing our political horizons
A key ideological function of the print and broadcast media is to narrow down the limits of our ability to think critically about the workings of the world in which we live and thereby reduce the likelihood of challenges to the status quo. We have already noted the cliché conspiracy theory; indeed one columnist for The Times, David Aaronovitch (2010), has written a book on the subject. Using such examples as the Kennedy assassination, doubts regarding the American moon landings and events on 9/11, Aaronovitch distracts us from seeking explanations as to why the world is in such a perilous state. The function of the term conspiracy is to dismiss the idea that career politicians, billionaire business men (rarely women), generals and leading bureaucrats meet in private and, in essence, make decisions that profoundly affect our lives. So, for instance, speculating on who killed Kennedy is to detract attention away from the sordid history of the Kennedy political dynasty. The father, Joseph senior, was a wealthy, but dodgy, stock market player; a Nazi-supporter with Italian mafia connections. He used these connections to fix ballots and get his son John elected congressman, then governor and later president. A serial abuser of women, president JFK was similarly connected to members of the mafia via his friendship with the go-between Frank Sinatra. For much of the 20th century the mafia had a high profile in most areas of American economic and political life. Although the media are reluctant to discuss such matters, to this day many American, and indeed most British, banks routinely launder the dirty money of drug dealers, pimps and others in order to maintain their liquid assets.
Another key function of the media is to bolster national chauvinism and one way of doing this is promoting loyalty to the royal family. To this end, in the 1930s, the press covered up the pro-Nazi sympathies of key members of the royal family, including king Edward VIII. In recent years, coverage of the royals has become more sophisticated in that, as long as they are cast as unrepresentative of the “hard-working” royals, some unflattering coverage of the comings and goings of the likes of princes Andrew and Harry, along with Megan, is permitted. Nevertheless, perpetuating the myth that the royal family represents “the national interest” as a “freedom loving, democratic and prosperous” people is central to the function of the media. In fact, the royal family, and the ownership of land in Britain, can be traced back to the Norman invasion of 1066. The American media play a similar ideological function by lionising their president, as is suggested by one Democrat voting student, who on a visit to Britain in the 1980s was shocked to find that the British press ridiculed the then Republican Ronald Reagan who, despite her dislike of his policies, was after all her president.
If they want to avoid being blacklisted, or more accurately whitelisted given the race of most editors, it is important for political and economic journalists to avoid any mention of the working class. Preferring such terms as low income families or hard working families, references to social class would undermine the view that Britain is a unified nation, more or less satisfied with the status quo. To refer to “capitalists” is a serious journalistic faux pas: investors, wealth creators or entrepreneurs, are preferred terms. The familiar phrase “you’re fired” from the BBC’s The Apprentice, seeks to legitimise the right of the capitalist to condemn his/her workers to the dole queue as and when required. Another important ideological function of the media is to the promote the idea that Britain is a “democracy”, because our ruling elites have seen fit to allow us to put a cross on a piece of paper every five years or so; few people bother to vote in annual local elections. To this end, the rise of the political party system over the last couple of centuries has created a caste of career politicians, sometimes described as show business for ugly people. Whilst the ideological differences between Starmer’s Labour Party and the Tories is wafer thin, the media has created a panorama of spatial metaphors in order to maintain the illusion that all political philosophies are catered for. To this end, the use of left wing and right wing are central; indeed, these terms are typically qualified by such additions as: far right, hard left, centre right, centre left and so on.
Focussing on the term far left or hard left, for instance, the presumption is that this refers to current supporters of the Bolshevik party, which took over Russia following a coup in 1917. Such supporters differ in their particular affiliations, some preferring the theory and practice of Lenin, whilst others prefer Trotsky and others still prefer Stalin. Impatient with such detail, some journalists settle for the cold-war term communist, citing contemporary regimes in China and North Korea. Amongst most American journalists the word communist remains a political swearword, with no clear meaning save as a synonym for “evil empire” or “undemocratic”. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson used the word Marxist in like fashion to discredit then leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn. The function of the metaphors left wing and right wing, however qualified, is to distract us from the capitalist versus wage worker relationship that is fundamental to both market capitalism and state capitalism. The latter term offers the best explanation of the political/economic system in both contemporary China and Russia, the two are run rather like mafia states with Xi and Putin as their respective godfathers. The limiting media panorama presented to us with such lazy jargon of left wing and right wing is intended to prevent us from noting the centrality of the wage labour system in most nations. This hinders our ability to contemplate the introduction of democracy into all areas of our lives, in particular the workplace; encouraging us to settle for putting a cross on a ballot paper every now and, on returning to work, asking “how high?” when the boss tells us to jump.
The Jewish question
The Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland (9th March 2019) addresses the issue of why “antisemitism is so ingrained”, including amongst “some leftists”. The context of his column was the issue of alleged antisemitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Using some of the above mentioned clichés, including conspiracy theory, Freedland mentions the Rothschilds’ banking empire as an example of the Jewish money lender stereotype. Alas, he fails to point out that all religious and ethnic groups are marked by their class structure, be it landowner and landless peasant or, since the industrial revolution, capitalist and worker. Prior to and during the Ottoman era, tribal members in the Eastern Mediterranean changed their religious affiliations in all directions; most being landless peasants who would be required to hand over part of their crop to the landowner and provide military and other services from time to time. Thus, the system of exploitation was transparent, whereas in contemporary Israel, most capitalists are Jewish and make their profits by appropriating a portion of the value produced by, mainly Jewish, workers. An understanding of these economic structures helps to explain Freedland’s otherwise random comment that “Jews were mocked for being both too poor and too rich”. Needless to say, some of the Israeli capitalists’ profits are appropriated by banks and hedge funds, often located on Wall Street or London, in the form of interest on loans. On a global scale, the capitalists, bankers and hedge fund managers might be Christian, Hindu, Muslim or atheist. We may note here the negative connotations of the term usury, as discussed in Aristotle’s writings; today people of all faiths and none tend to ignore any prohibitions linked to this practice. To the extent that money lenders on Wall Street, the City et al identify themselves as Jewish, and their numbers are disproportional as compared with the overall Jewish population in the given countries, clearly this has a history, one which Freedland needs to engage with. What is clear is that this disproportion is not to be explained by some inherent gene, any more than the disproportion of African Americans in prison, or Indian sub-continent Americans in the tech sector, are to be reduced to genetics. We may also note that people of all faiths and none were involved in the slave trade, and this needs to be investigated rather than brushed under the carpet, as Freedland seems to prefer.
In the oil rich Middle East, aware of their faith’s ban on usury, hypocritical Muslim bankers not only charge interest on loans, euphemistically referred to as charges, but also routinely launder money for the world’s criminals. In contemporary Israel, as elsewhere, a significant portion of the population is either agnostic or atheist, yet subscribes to religious and national chauvinism. Which begs the question: who benefits from such chauvinism? Well, during the wars which inevitably arise from competing chauvinisms, certainly not the peasants and workers in uniform on whichever side they may be. This contrasts sharply with, for example, the American and British arms manufacturers who offer generous benefits to their shareholders, directors, fund managers and bankers by providing Netanyahu and his Zionist settler friends with the latest high tech weapons. The British press, notably the Express and Mail, present Israel as a unified whole; when in fact it is a capitalist state riven by the antagonistic relationships between wage workers and their employers, along with a range of racial and ethnic tensions. Chauvinistic Zionist settlers, who get away with murder on a daily basis, are opposed by Kibbutzim and military refuseniks, the latter being imprisoned for their beliefs by the pro-settler government.
Rather than venting his wrath on Corbyn et al, Freedland could have focused on the real antisemitism of, for instance, the ruling elites of British, and American, capitalism by reading the pro-Nazi editorials of such newspapers as The Times, The Mail and The Express during the 1930s. He might have referred to the fascist rantings of such powerful people as Edward VIII, Lord Reith, Henry Ford and many other well-known and powerful people. Freedland needs to engage more honestly with the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism; in particular attempts to equate the two as a means of fending off criticism of the policies of the Israeli government, notably the genocidal war on Gaza in 2023-24. With profound implications for the limiting use of language, the BBC and other broadcast media avoid using either the term ethnic cleansing or the term genocide, merely quoting the Palestinian death toll “according to a Hamas source”; the implication being that the numbers quoted are overstated. The fact that Zionist Prime Minister Netanyahu is a crook and psychopath, in the mould of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and so many other political rulers around the world, seems to have escaped Mr Freedland’s notice. The courageous editors and journalists working for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz argue that Netanyahu turned a blind eye to the military build up of Hamas, including the makeshift rockets used to attack Israeli civilians, so as to justify his refusal to engage in peace talks. Some sources claim that Netanyahu was warned about the October 7th attack; it would seem likely that Hamas was infiltrated by Israeli Mossad intelligence officers, but chose to let it happen in order to justify his genocidal Zionist ambitions. The word hostage, as used by the western media to describe those Israelis taken by Hamas on the 7th October, can be contrasted with the word prisoner used to describe the thousands of Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons, most of whom have never even been charged with, never mind convicted of, any offence.
A note on Zionism
It is surely to be hoped that Mr Freedland is active in the anti-racist movement, as Nazi sympathisers, Muslim haters and the like are still trying to the take control of the streets of Britain. Unfortunately, Mr Freedland fails to see that the accusation of antisemitism to which his column refers was closely linked to Britain’s ruling elites using the media as their ventriloquist’s dummies to reduce the likelihood of a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corby winning the 2019 general election. Freedland really ought to have done his homework and noted that of those kicked out of Starmer’s Labour Party for ‘antisemitism’, the majority have been Jewish! In point of fact, there is all the difference in the world between antisemitism and opposition to the neo-colonial creed of Zionism. The ideological basis for Zionism consists mainly of the various ancient texts claiming that Israel is the Promised Land and the Jews are God’s chosen people. However, such claims and the myths and stories cited to support them do not stand up well when compared with those texts which are more historically reliable, such as those from ancient Egypt and the Tigris-Euphrates basin, along with ever expanding archaeological sources. The word Zionist was perhaps first used in the late 19th century to refer to the ideology espoused by Theodor Herzl. As Khalidi (2020) reports, Herzl wrote of “expropriating” Palestinian land and property, describing the latter as “the penniless population” which was to be moved out of their traditional home in order to create a Jewish state. With these ideas in mind, fleeing persecution, European Jewish settlers bought Palestinian land, often from absentee landlords living outside Palestine; if persuasion failed, then force was used by the settlers. After 1917, aware that the loss of British soldiers’ lives was to be avoided for political reasons, the British armed and trained Jewish settlers, encouraging them to suppress Palestinian resistance. As the Americans emerged as the world’s superpower after WWII, they too used the Zionists, encouraging them to create the buffer state of Israel as a means of influencing events in the oil rich Middle East. Yet, times change and the American demographic is changing, which raises the question: will the American people alienate most of the world’s population by continuing to support the Zionist project in perpetuity? If not, with events in Gaza in mind, the Israeli people may well be made to pay a very heavy price.
Identity politics: looking inward
In Britain, the print and broadcast media rightly draw attention to the issue of identity; in particular race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, disability, age, sex and gender. The 2010 Equality Act was a landmark in that it sought to prevent identity discrimination in the workplace and wider society. Although pioneered by the Labour Party, the Act was passed by a Tory dominated coalition led by David Cameron who, despite the disapproval of Tory members, had pointed out that unless the party accepted the rights of those outside the traditional white middle classes, it would never win another election. Today, Cameron’s legacy is still apparent in that the Tory front bench is more diverse than that of Labour. Whilst there remains opposition to the 2010 Act, especially amongst some religious groups, for most people its provisions have been welcomed. Rather than the white middle class men of old, the media features journalists from a more diverse range of backgrounds.
However, despite the journalistic and advertising spectacle of equality, the Act fails to mention the key inequality in Britain: the sacred god of capitalism, access to money. In truth, since 2010 inequalities in income and property have continued to widen. So, when the media encourages us to look inwards and ask: “who am I?”, we are distracted from thinking about the class structure of the country; whether as workers we can pay our bills, find a job after being made redundant and the 101 things that plague the lives of working class people. Despite its positive core, in keeping with Cameron’s vision, like multiculturalism in the 80s and 90s, identity politics has become a marketing opportunity. Media language, such as promoting LGBT rights, and such spectacles as BBC3’s drag queen programmes, whilst sitting comfortably with a the ‘free market’ agenda, distract us from the policies of a government that, for example, whips up hatred against non-white immigrants, does little to narrow the gender pay gap, fails to take rape and domestic violence seriously and much more.
Shock therapy and the ‘free market’
Radio, TV and newspapers routinely feature pieces on business and economics, which typically feature such terms as footfall, customers, the consumers etc. What is immediately noticeable is that whilst these categories include millions of working class people, as workers they are ignored. Media pieces will often refer to such claims as “wage growth is too high and pushing up inflation”; yet make little or no mention of workers resorting to the services of food banks, increases in child poverty, homelessness and the like. Similarly, when do you hear reports that the supermarkets, for instance, are “pushing up inflation by price rises that increase their profits”? These media typically interview small and medium business “entrepreneurs” who, for the most part whine about having to pay their workers an increase in the minimum wage, along with the perennial complaints regarding taxes, VAT, business rates and so on. Expressing anger at workers not turning up for job interviews, they fail to acknowledge their poor treatment of job applicants, such as failing to inform them that they have not been successful either at shortlisting or interview. Apart from disparaging strikes, condemning wage rises and continued use of Thatcher’s anti-trade union legislation, working class people are pretty much airbrushed out of existence by the media.
How often has the reader heard such media jargon as “the markets are buoyant”, or “worried”, or any one of the range of human emotions? Thus “the markets” are seemingly given supernatural powers, rather like fickle ancient Greek or Roman gods or goddesses. In point of fact the term normally refers to the bankers, hedge fund managers and other wealthy agents seeking to make money buying shares, or bonds, cheaply and selling them dear. Or, when prices seem likely to start falling, following the lead of the earlier mentioned Joseph Kennedy, they make money by firstly borrowing financial assets for a period of time. They then sell these assets at their current price to other unsuspecting buyers for later delivery. Assuming that they are correct and the price of the assets fall, they wait until they think the prices have hit rock bottom, when they then buy the shares, return them to the original lender within the agreed time period and make a profit equal to the asset price differential. This common procedure, known as “short selling”, is more likely to be successful if those engaged in “shorting” have access to “price sensitive inside information”. Though technically illegal, this way of making money is commonplace, with virtually no one ever facing prosecution.
Common media euphemisms for “greed is good” capitalism are such terms as “the free market economy”, “neoliberalism” and “globalisation”. Klein (2008) offers a brilliant genesis of these terms, explaining how, aware of rising real wages, increasing trade union power and falling profits, the international capitalist class turned its back on the Keynesian full employment economics that had become the norm in most western economies in the post WWII era. Unlike media apologists, Klein does not mince her words in explaining the reality of the, often violent, shock therapy pioneered by Milton Friedman and his associates at the university of Chicago. She explains how Friedman provided the theory, the CIA the organisation and various American corporations the finance, for a pioneering murderous military coup which overthrew the elected government in Chile in 1973. Friedman’s theory was that only a violent shock could break the Keynesian consensus and introduce a programme of mass privatisation, anti-union laws and access to American companies, which would reverse the gains made by wage workers and return Chile to high corporate profits. Similar shock ‘free market’ models were introduced elsewhere, including such countries as China, following the Tienanmen Square massacre, and Russia, following the collapse of Bolshevism. In Britain, where the shock treatment was applied to breaking the power of the miners’ union, the Thatcher/Blair ‘free market’ consensus was established and remains to this day. As the election, due in 2024, approaches, most journalists employed by the media remember little, their formal education being so threadbare, of the, often violent, genesis of the ‘free market’.
Conclusion
So, we are trapped in the language and images of capitalist social relations; what Guy Debord (1967) referred to as the spectacle. We spend ever increasing amounts of both our working and leisure time staring at screens: listening and watching, rather than doing. The language that accompanies the screen images offers ever decreasing horizons of thought. We are trapped in endless repetition of such prattle as the free market, diversity, equality, parliamentary democracy, government debt, freedom of speech and on and on, see Cave (2020). Such language both reflects and legitimises what is our growing social isolation. As falling numbers on footfall would suggest, we spend less and less time going shopping on what is left of our local high street or nearest mall. Instead we go online shopping in the hope that the “stuff” we buy will relieve our isolation. Rather than going to the cinema to see the latest drivel from Hollywood, in praise of American capitalism, we stream it into our front room. Long gone are the political meetings at which members of the audience were free to heckle the speakers. As those attending demonstrations or participating in industrial action know only too well, they are limited by police tactics, such as kettling, along with ever more restrictive laws. As regards going out for a drink or a meal, for increasing numbers of working class people these are luxuries they can ill afford. On education, our colleges and universities are financially corrupt, turning a blind eye to cheating and maximising income by offering more and more places to poorly qualified overseas students from wealthy families. As regards the content of courses in the social sciences and humanities, or what is left of them, most institutions offer the clichéd language of business studies, law, accountancy and digital marketing.
The media prattle thus deflects us from the fallout accompanying the collapse of the nuclear family, rising poverty, domestic violence, homelessness, decaying social service provision, collapsing infrastructure and more. We live in a tiered hierarchical Britain: the wealthy live in their gated communities, in the suburbs and sleepy villages, hidden from the gaze of their employees, but ever in touch with their lawyers and tax efficiency specialist accountants. Sections of the print media, such as The Sun, The Mail and The Express, aka the gutter press as the mouthpiece of the super-rich, use such language as evil monsters, brutes, scum and so on, to describe those criminals coming from run down inner city areas. Their crimes often involve the sale of drugs, the proceeds from which are typically used to buy “the stuff” advertised on our screens with ever increasing frequency, using ever more seductive marketing techniques. Meanwhile, the wealthy insider traders, tax dodgers, money launderers, fraudsters and the like rarely rate a mention in the press and even more rarely face prosecution. Indeed, the exploitation inherent in the surplus extracted from the wage worker by the capitalist on a daily basis is not defined as a crime at all! I leave the reader to think up the language most appropriate to describe this sorry state of affairs.
So what is to be done? Firstly, we need to take the media, including the cesspit that is (anti) social media, out of the hands of the rich individuals and corrupt organisations that currently control them; placing them under democratic control. Secondly, we need to give aspiring young journalists the education, particularly critical thinking skills, they need in order to do better than those currently doing the job. Finally, with the help of these journalists, we can end the wage labour system and create a fairer and happier society than the above mentioned sorry state of affairs that currently exists in Britain and elsewhere.
Bibliography
Aaronovitch, D. (2010) Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory has Shaped the Modern World; Vintage: London.
Akala. (2019) Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire; Two Roads: London.
Cave, P. (2020) The Myths We Live By: A Contrarian’s Guide to Democracy Free Speech and Other Liberal Fictions; Atlantic: London.
Crystal, D. (2016) The Gift of the Gab: How Eloquence Works; Yale University Press; Oxford.
Debord, G. (1967) Society of the Spectacle; available at: https://files.libcom.org/files/The%20Society%20of%20the%20Spectacle%20Annotated%20Edition.pdf
Khalidi, R. (2020) The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance; Profile Books: London.
Klein, N. (2008) The Shock Doctrine; Penguin: London.
Wake Up Bradford! 
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