The Alexei Navalny story presented to western journalists at Munich might as well have been a James Bond movie script for its lack of facts and romantic folly.

In recent pieces, I have thrown a spotlight on the demise of journalism – on what journalism actually is, or was, and how it has transformed its own core identity into something completely different today. We previously witnessed the head of CBC news recently admitting that old-school journalism which produced “scoops” that were lapped up by a broad public base which wanted media to hold elites to account, is no longer popular. She claimed that there just aren’t the numbers out there who are glued to their sets watching 60 Minutes investigative journalism shows of previous times, watching today. I personally find this claim hard to believe as, in the same breath, the same media boss justifies a new style of journalism which aligns itself much to the narrative of the government of the day. Hard to imagine people prefer the latter. In reality, what she is probably trying to say is that for big media to survive and to cling on to the few remaining advertisers who will keep it from being wiped out altogether, it needs to get into bed with the deep state and forget about the truth altogether. Who needs the truth, after all? It’ll only bring you stress, make you angry and probably crash your car on the way home from the grocery store, creating a huge fight with your wife and ruining the weekend.

The truth is so old-fashioned, so out of touch with modern foibles and is practically considered a South American poison which can kill you within seconds. Hardly surprising that a new UK government department which censors journalists’ pieces has a whole new lexicon of nasty words to label fringe, independent journalists sticking to the old working methods of journalism.

The truth was always the starting point for journalism. It was always easier to remember and was always an excellent grounding agent for journalists who had lost the plot of the story they were working on. It can sometimes be terrifyingly awkward and often is just a plain son of a bitch for governments, media, watchdogs, the deep state and anyone who gives a damn about democracy.

But it was always important.

Yet these days we are working in a new environment entirely and journalists are under enormous pressure to simply get words out there. Any words. Words might as well be tins of baked beans stacked up in crates loaded onto containers destined for consumption. The truth is simply no longer part of any interest or working consciousness of mainstream media operators.

And of course, this works as a new support mechanism for sloppier, lazier and increasingly inept government officials, elected or otherwise. Never before have we been ruled by such underperforming, lame government ministers than today, who need a servile media to manipulate to get the perceived truth out there unchallenged by the actual truth.

In this new world media order, anything is possible. Any story can be manufactured as the mechanism of fact-checking has been long abandoned. I personally gave up trying to write international news stories decades ago when the biggest hurdle I had to face in getting those investigations published was the hilarious demand from younger editors to get the thrust of the piece checked by the UK Foreign Office press department! This demand was always given without irony whatsoever by a 25-year-old desk editor who was simply not programmed to be told by a journalist of my experience that “this would be a total waste of time as those c—-s at the Foreign Office just lie through their teeth and will deny it all”. Many stories just got blocked by the fact that the official denial from the press office of the Foreign Office was enough to scare the editor of the day into not publishing it and not wasting any time on it from that point onwards. This practice started in the late 90s and was intensified in recent years by the Foreign Office when they realised how effective it was in simply blocking all good stories about Syria, Iraq, and Libya.

And so in this environment, the journalist who phones in the story in 2015 that the US government is funding about a dozen Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria, or that in fact Assad is not dropping chlorine on his own people but rather that the terror groups that the West is backing are doing it so as to fake the news, is laughed at. At best he is told to send his allegations to the Foreign Office press department who, of course, issue a gobbledygook statement dismissing it as lies or propaganda.

In reality, British journalists wrote up the Assad story hundreds of times without a scrap of evidence simply because, by contrast, when the government of the day has a narrative to put out there it doesn’t need backing up with any kind of evidence. And so, Assad dropping chemical weapons on his own people becomes a fact, which then gets established and enshrined as a fact for other journalists to propagate. Once journalists get comfortable with a narrative, as we saw in the Syria war, any kind of amateur, faked news can be fed into their computer email boxes and it gets processed within hours and put out as hard news which has been checked.

The BBC during the same period presented us with real video footage of school children being burned alive during one of those chemical attacks. Horrific images of children screaming in agony with their eyes rolling madly as those possessed by the devil.

But the devil was in the detail, or lack of it. In truth, that infamous report was entirely fake and produced by Sunni rebels on the Western payroll in Syria who knew it would have a huge impact with Western audiences. The rebels simply directed the kids to act while they filmed it, then sent the raw footage to the BBC “correspondents” in Beirut who were delighted to make a package about it, without actually bothering to fact-check.

The manufactured consent of western journalists now is at an all-time scandalous low point. Practically everything they are writing about international stories is dictated by the governments who control them. There are just too many stories to list but of course the big ones are legends and have been enshrined for journalism students to study in future generations. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, Assad uses chemical weapons on his own people, 9/11 twin towers were brought down by two jet airliners, Lockerbie bombing was carried out by Libya, the genocide in Gaza is a war against terror. The list is endless. But in recent times, a big one which has gained traction is “the Russians are coming to invade us”.

We are told that the Russians invaded Ukraine as they were bored one afternoon and it was something to do. Almost. British journalists have been spectacularly incapable of nuance since the beginning of the Ukraine war and have avoided at all costs pointing out a few awkward facts, like how the US overthrew the elected government in Ukraine in 2014 and have been preparing to make it a NATO country, armed with western NATO equipment, while allowing ethnic Russian-speaking Ukrainians to be bombed in their own houses. Or how a peace treaty which the West signed with Russia was actually just BS and no one in the West had any intention of respecting it.

But these days, the desperation levels of western elites over Ukraine are getting to new dizzy heights. Ukraine is losing ground in the war and NATO bosses are struggling to explain this. And so there are confused, mixed messages. One moment one NATO figure will say that the Russians have lost record-breaking numbers of troops and their ammo levels are desperately low, while in the same breath another NATO goon, or even EU leader, will put out the “Russians are about to invade and to eat your babies’ heads”. This absurd contradiction is still out there and being repeated. The NATO boss himself, Mark Rutte, who once called Donald Trump “daddy,” is a buffoon of the highest order and stands tall and alone in this competition of putting his foot in his mouth. He recently spoke disparagingly of Russia’s foreign minister while then calling the Russian army a “garden snail”. Of course, no journalist in the room was going to ask him how he connected the banal logic of Russia being a great threat when it invades Europe to it being so meniscal and pathetic that its own army can’t even make a cheese sandwich to throw at its enemy on the battlefield. Or for that matter, if the Russian army was so insignificant, how does the NATO boss explain that with trillions of dollars of money and military kit, the West along with the Ukrainian army can’t defeat it?

Awkward questions. Something that journalists don’t ask any . Same can be said for fact-checking and looking for an expert. It’s just no longer the done thing.

Take the example of Alexei Navalny and the preposterous story of him being poisoned while in jail by a frog toxin. The stuff of James Bond movies, you might say. But how is it possible that not one western journalist can be sceptical about these latest allegations which were timed to be presented to western hacks gathered at the Munich Conference? Journalists used to be sceptical about any information freely handed to them. We used to ask obvious questions like “why would Putin go to such extraordinary lengths to murder a political dissident when, one, he’s already banged up in jail and two, there must be thousands of other practical ways to bump him off?”. Why the frog juice? And secondly, where are the experts? I’m old enough to remember whenever such a story was presented, the first reaction from any journalist would be to look for an expert. Funny how in the tome of British articles pointing the finger at Putin and his South American frogs, not one single expert was asked for his opinion about the validity of this claim. If they were, perhaps some of them might merely point out that the symptoms that Navalny had just before his death are completely at odds with what the frog toxin does when it is in contact with its victim. Or secondly, that for the dose to be administered, it would literally have to be harvested from thousands of frogs? Or perhaps most interestingly, that there is no data at all of the toxin remaining in someone’s body after two years. Just minor points that my colleagues might have included in their pieces if they had bothered calling an expert from any number of fine universities in the UK.

The Navalny story is just that. A story which will never get checked and so becomes fact, just like the recent idea floated by the UK press that Epstein’s honey trap operation was in fact an operation by Russian intelligence. No facts offered, no experts consulted. Media now is really just a stenographer of the deep state’s lies and the poison frog toxin story is a good example of how far this nefarious disinformation campaign can be taken, as is the Russian link to Epstein. The British press, it would seem, is in love with James Bond and his ‘From Russia With Love’ role and for the moment are happy to indulge themselves with this Alice-In-Wonderland space where a really good yarn is what makes a good story. Oh James.