Remember General Guthrie, the head of the Army - and also the bigot who, at the end of 2000, decried the idea of disabled people being employed by the armed forces? Well, on Wednesday February 14th, he was interviewed by the Daily Mirror - in which he now decried the idea of women soldiers serving on the front line.

This is hardly surprising, from a man who seems to be deeply reactionary in many ways. He was also in charge of the Army when it was fighting against a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that it was illegal for the Army to ban gay people from serving.

What is perhaps more surprising is that it was the Daily Mirror, a paper which is supposedly more "left wing" than the other tabloids, which printed his defamatory and patronizing rubbish.

However, the Daily Mirror's "left-wing" reputation is largely illusory. Yes, they have always supported the Labour Party. But the Blairite Labour Party in power today is hardly left-wing; as has been shown by its failure to deliver decent benefits (disability benefits included), fight job losses by taking on big corporations, while at the same time pandering to right-wing ideas with racist attacks on asylum seekers and the planned imposition of curfews on kids. Indeed, Blair was quick to defend Guthrie after his comments about disabled people, even though these comments were even described as "patronizing" by some disabled people's charities! Any paper which mirrors (no pun intended!) such politicians is bound to be pretty dodgy, politically.

But the problem doesn't end there. Backward ideas such as racism, disabled-ism, sexism and homophobia have been disseminated so effectively by the Establishment that they have become prevalent in society. A newspaper which is being published for profit must have a mass circulation, ie as many readers as possible, even if that means pandering to reactionary ideas. This becomes a vicious circle in that, by pandering to these ideas, the media re-inforces them and enhances the Establishment's ability to brainwash the British public.

Who's the unfair-est of them all ...

What's more, the political content of a mass-circulation newspaper is less dependent on the mass of its readers, than on the small minority of people who advertize in it.  The edition of The Mirror which featured the Guthrie interview, also had the equivalent of 16 pages of adverts in it - some from major Capitalist corporations, who have an obvious interest in defending capitalism and all the divide-and-rule tactics used to bolster capitalism. At least one of the companies which I have seen advertize in the Mirror was openly disabled-ist, and I suspect were racist also.

Which goes a long way to explain why right-wing ideas are commonplace throughout all the mass-market tabloid newspapers.

Whenever disabled people are mentioned by the mainstream media, their disability tends to be portrayed in a negative light, and they tend to be portrayed very patronizingly as "tragic" and "brave" (but not, it seems, "brave" enough to fight for "their country" ...)

So whichever viewpoint a mainstream newspaper claims to represent, its content will always be tainted by the Capitalist system on which it depends. Every mainstream newspaper, from the Sun and Daily Sport to the Mirror, are run for profit by a handful of bosses who are wedded to the Capitalist system, and their newspapers reflect that fact.

If you're looking for a newspaper which doesn't pander to right-wing attitudes, which genuinely supports the rights of minority groups such as disabled people, and which is run by and for the working class - read the Socialist Worker.

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