By Karen Orr
Our public discourse is a rotting corpse. A pernicious blight infects the way we consume news and understand our society. It is the toxic marriage between the billionaire-owned press baron model and the hunger for anger clickbait. This alliance doesn’t seek to inform; it seeks to inflame, to divide, and ultimately, to protect the very power structures that allow those press barons to exist in the first place.
And nowhere is this mechanism more clearly exposed than in the egregious framing of minor, isolated incidents as national scandals designed to outrage. Take this story before us . The headline screams a victim narrative: ‘I was snitched on for putting up 150 British flags and lost my teaching job.’
Some people’s blood is already boiling. They are thinking, ‘The woke brigade has gone too far! They’re cancelling patriotism! This is an attack on our country!’
The Anatomy of the Lie
But let’s pause, step back from the emotional eruption, and apply the cold, hard lens of fact—the kind of fact-checking the billion-dollar media machine deliberately skips.
The reality, buried deep beneath the sensational headline that has spread from online paper to online paper, is that this entire narrative is a manufactured outrage.
”Lost my teaching job” vs. The Facts: The individual was not a permanently employed teacher who was sacked. He was a classroom assistant working for a supply/temp agency. One single school decided they no longer wanted to use his services. Crucially, he remains on the agency’s books and is available to be sent to other schools. He didn’t lose his profession; he lost one client. The headline is a deliberate, manipulative exaggeration.
”For putting up 150 British flags” vs. The Facts: The issue was not the flags themselves. The school’s concern was primarily about online posts the individual had made—posts deemed inappropriate or unprofessional for someone in a position of trust over children. The flags are merely the emotional currency used to distract from the actual facts of his conduct.
”Snitched on” vs. Accountability: Framing the process as “snitching” is a classic clickbait technique to assign villainy. In reality, a school has a duty of care. Any professional whose behaviour raises concerns should be subject to review. This framing attempts to turn a discussion about professional conduct into a battle between a patriotic “hero” and shadowy, un-named opponents.
The Clickbait Machine and the Political Agenda
This story, like so many others churned out by papers owned by powerful interests, is not news; it is propaganda wrapped in grievance.
The outrage model is highly profitable. Anger, indignation, and confirmation bias are the most potent ingredients for clicks, shares, and ad revenue. The more a story enrages its target audience, the higher the digital traffic, and the richer the proprietors become. The anger clickbait model turns societal division into pure, measurable profit.
But there is a political purpose, too. These press barons and the wealthy elite they serve do not want the public debating systemic issues—like economic inequality, tax fairness, or the lack of funding in the very schools this man was supposed to be serving.
Instead, by manufacturing outrage over “woke teachers,” “cancel culture,” or “flag bans,” they successfully divert the public’s energy into pointless culture wars. This keeps working people fighting each other over manufactured ideological battles, rather than uniting to challenge the actual power of the billionaires who own the newspapers and the wealth.
The Trades Unionist’s fight for economic justice is constantly undermined by this media tactic. We must recognise these headlines for what they are: deliberate distractions. We must reject the toxic lies designed to fuel our anger and demand the truth that empowers us to fight for a fairer world. The fight for democracy today requires us to see past the clickbait and demand that our press serve the public truth, not the private fortunes of their owners.
