“Is there any way back for journalism Steve?” A colleague and friend asked me that a few years ago. At the time I didn’t want to go down that particular rabbit hole so I changed the subject, which is easy when you know someone’s personal obsession and in his case it’s Gaza. I had spent the day navigating journalistic polarities, Right wing and Left wing press professionals, selling articles written from the perspective of political bias is not pretty to witness or read, it’s the reason that national identities are being overwritten by politicals with inflated agendas and the reason they are successfully managing a social process of polarisation. On the one hand it is a sales formula, creating a need then offering a solution, but also it is social psychology, an attempt to convince an entire country of people that they are victims and you Mr Politician are the solution. Flashing forwards to today and the main tool of that polarisation engine is the media, then taking a sidestep and looking at the tech, even the Ai’s and web servers are polarised by the parameters they are programmed with by biassed engineering. The process of opposition is now an automatic one, and getting to the root cause of any news story is the equivalent of a perpendicular visit to a crazy relative in a psychiatric hospital.

The reason I point all this and that conversation out is because a few minutes before his comment I had already concluded there was no way back for journalism and cut up my press card. Sounds mad but with a borrowed pair of scissors, in the toilet of the Shades pub on Whitehall, Mr Steve Merrick concluded that being a bona fide news gatherer was not what it used to be. Looking at our society today I know that I have lost every battle I have fought, looking at the remains of my press card in the bars recycling bin was a significant personal improvement, but raises a question. How do I depolarise all this? Can an individual achieve anything when post truth social storm clouds are brewing? If the choice is surrender, despair or merely facing impossible odds, this photographer will choose to go down shooting, and as my basic tool kit needs little more than reality and light, on one very real level it is my version of business as usual.

As the forces of social post truth polarisation can be easily represented using a pair of magnets repulsing each other, they can equally with a change of orientation come back together. Thinking further to the human mind, viewpoint is everything, but it will not be changed by offering you a post post truth, or any other truth. No that really wouldn’t work. What works is reality and illumination, shining a light on the con job you are being dragged into and exposing the long con ahead. So talking of long cons let’s go back to Gaza.

Right from the get go of the current expression of this long term conflict, the polarity engines of massed media went into an overdrive in conjunction with the global political establishments, in fact no area of our societies was untouched by often extreme moralities. If I can sum up this extended conflict between Iran and Israel in one word that word is racism. There is only one psychological tool that I can think of that can try to justify the deliberate gunning down of unarmed civilians and that is the purest expression of racial hatred. Both sides have used the most appalling tactics and directly targeted civilians. When war is defined as a breakdown of social order then defining the what of a war crime is confused, but both sides have committed major war crimes up to and including starvation. However the money spent on orienting your opinion of this conflict could have fed the entire world for a month or three. In reality the only choices you were offered devolve to racist A or racist B. The saddest confession of it is that we all bleed red. That racial hatred spilled beyond the conflict zone. The reason that Bondi Beach was assaulted was simply extremism, and political polarity feeds the creation of extremists, without polarisation, racism and hatred subside, but if racism and hatred are stirred up by polarising rhetoric then racism will always be a manipulable and deadly force. This war has even impacted British freedom of speech.

There are a group of pro Palestinian activists called Palestine Action. (PA) they were recently proscribed as a terrorist organisation after they spray painted a bunch of Royal Air Force planes. To the best of my knowledge they have never actually killed anyone or bombed anything. Putting aside this weird decision regarding a graffiti protest, and that the British government seems to think that tagging is a terror attack, lo and behold supporting them became illegal. Which resulted in yours truly photographing the Metropolitan Police getting there mass arrest choreography perfected by arresting just shy of 500 people on parliament green in a single day. Everyone arrested held a hand written placard that said. “I oppose genocide, I support censored censored.” Now I am not really sure if writing the words on the placards is illegal or legal, but that is a freedom of speech restriction, and in regards to Gaza there are a load of chants and speeches that are now illegal to utter. The fact that the entire PA campaign made Kier Starmer look like he was giving a thumbs up and announcing “Genocide is good for you.” Is at this point not illegal to point out. Yet the week after I was confronted by Danny Bammo, who is Tommy Robinsons right hand man, he was trying to rile up some anti Trump protesters by telling everyone that “Violence is coming to your shores, you cannot hide from us, we will take our country back by force, we will storm parliament and take the country over.” Seriously it went on and on and I was left with the impression we were all going to be murdered in our beds, in fact it was more a tragic metaphor of losing your grip on realty than scary. The real point here is that a polarised racist extremist can threaten everyone legally, whilst a hippy grandma cannot oppose a foreign genocide. Is that evidence of polarisation? Or is there still hope we can steer clear of those extremes?

Political polarisation is now torrential. Foreign and domestic governments are choosing to use this as a tool of campaigns to influence other countries, and are having an impact upon democracies everywhere. Polarities push things apart and create extremes. The problem is that divide and conquer actually works, every pathetic political speech calling for action to be taken for often none existent problems, adds to it. Nothing is sacred in the hearts of some global politicians, and everything can be manipulated to create an impression of failure. Even history can be reinterpreted then re written. National identities can be over written, but this is not a natural evolution of our societies, it is a deliberate and manipulative one. So beware of politicians baring gifts, a grand plan always sound good but if it sounds to good to be true then it is probably a lie.

———-

This article is a beta test for an upcoming publication called Ghost Echoes Quarterly. I am sharing it here as a beta test. The concept is simple, it is simply a reflection of reality using nothing but reality to fill the pages. Every photo in it is shot with analogue film and ancient manual cameras. Every word is written by a human being. There is no Ai involved beyond the search engine of your choice. I have nothing against Ai in principle but I am in no hurry to see it replace human beings in the workplace, nor am I in any hurry to see the American post truth ideology transplant good old British incompetence.

Steve Merrick

21/12/2025