Earlier this month, Extinction Rebellion (XR) shut down the Murdoch-owned printworks where The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times are printed, as well as non-Murdoch-owned titles The Daily Mail, The Telegraph and others. Activists parked two Luton vans across the factory’s single delivery exit and blocked the road with protesters, some of them mounted on ingenious bamboo structures, making it harder for police to remove them. The result – delivery vehicles were unable to enter or leave the premises and distribution of these newspapers was delayed, leaving many newsstands empty of these titles for the entire day.
Predictably, the political and media establishment were quick to round on XR. Home Secretary Priti Patel called protesters “eco-crusaders turned criminals” who mounted “a shameful attack on our way of life”, suggesting that the law could be changed to classify XR as a serious organised crime group, a classification reserved for violent offences such as human trafficking, modern slavery and drug smuggling, rather than peaceful and non-violent – albeit controversial – protest. The Prime Minister accused XR of attempting to “suppress free speech” – on the same day that the Council of Europe issued a media freedom alert following the UK government’s decision to blacklist investigative journalists. In Parliament, South Cambridgeshire Conservative MP Anthony Browne condemned XR’s “assault on the free press”. After a lengthy silence, the Labour leader Keir Starmer also weighed in to defend a free press in a seeming bid to court the right-wing media.
Well here’s the twist. XR agrees. The politicians are right – a free press is a vital part of a functioning democracy. But a free press is exactly what Britain does not have right now. 70% of the British print media is owned by five billionaires. Rupert Murdoch alone owns The Sun, The Sun on Sunday, The Times and The Sunday Times – which have a combined daily readership of over 13 million. Murdoch uses his media empire as a platform for his own financial and political interests, which means his papers function as propaganda for the Conservative Party. What’s more, Murdoch is widely thought to be a climate sceptic, even sitting on the board of an oil and gas company (Genie Energy).
A free press holds power to account, scrutinising politicians of all stripes and offering a balanced, objective perspective on the day’s events. But we can see the priorities of the Murdoch press – and the entire print media – in its response to XR’s printworks shutdown. The media closed ranks, siding with the political establishment to defend its own interests, playing into the dangerous narrative that those who act to safeguard our planet’s future are sinister extremists - instead of highlighting the UK government’s criminal and disastrous inaction on the climate and ecological emergency.
In the week leading up to the printworks shutdown, XR had carried out a series of large occupations, protests and direct actions in Central London. You would be forgiven if you hadn’t heard about this, because aside from a handful of low-profile articles in a few outlets, this was met by radio silence from the majority of the media. It was as if the press had been instructed by the Home Office not to report on the protests – or had themselves taken a political decision to keep XR out of the news. It was only when the story was unmissable that XR finally hit the headlines. This is precisely why large-scale, controversial direct action is necessary to get the climate crisis into the news – because in a country without a free press, it is the only way to get the media to report on the most important news story in human history.