Lots of journalists do disinformation. After all, it’s often their job: to get you looking in the wrong place or viewing events through the wrong lens.
A good illustration is Tom Slater, editor of Spiked magazine. Tom isn’t dumb. But in his latest article, titled “The monstering of Ed Sheeran proves ‘Free Palestine’ has become a cult”, he does a very good job of pretending to be. Why? Because that’s the best way for him to keep his readership dumb.
He’s far from alone. Right now, there’s a whole industry of media professionals responding to the Sheeran furore by pointing in the very opposite direction to the one the public ought to be looking in.
Like Slater, these journalists and pundits understand that Sheeran isn’t in trouble because of some supposedly out-of-control “Free Palestine” cult. Like Slater, they know that the issue was never about Sheeran’s failure to speak out about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Had it been, this so-called cult – or what Slater preposterously calls the “keffiyeh classes” – would be “monstering” all of the other prominent artists who have been keeping their heads down and refusing to speak up about the genocide.
No, people are angry with Sheeran for a quite different – and very obvious – reason.
He invited fellow musician and long-standing friend Macklemore to open his tour, knowing that Macklemore would perform a song about the Gaza genocide called Hind’s Hall.
Sheeran then immediately reversed his tiny, proxy act of courage by capitulating to a threat from Robert Kraft, a billionaire stadium owner who is also a pal of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and generous donor to the genocidal Israeli military.
After conspiring with other billionaire stadium owners, Kraft gave Sheeran an ultimatum: drop Macklemore or we pull the plug on your tour.
The pushback seems to have caught Sheeran by surprise. His support acts and backing band withdrew from the tour. That’s not, as Slater and the rest of the establishment media would have you believe, because they suddenly fell under the spell of some powerful cult.
The backlash is far more easily explained:
Because Sheeran has proved himself a spineless and disloyal friend.
Because he has taken a highly political stance, and an ugly one at that, in supporting the genocide apologists who dominate the billionaire class and expect obedience from their political and media flunkeys.
Because he has given his implicit consent for a billionaire with a nefarious political agenda to dictate what can be said in our cultural spaces.
Because through his cowardly capitulation, Sheeran has given his permission for the billionaire class to continue controlling those cultural spaces.
Because the all-too-predictable consequence will be that even fewer artists – certainly any who wish to be “commercial” – will dare to break from the cultural production model preferred by Kraft and the other billionaires of Sheeran-style “soppy love songs” that pose no threat to their power.
People are angry with Sheeran because he has just made it even harder to stand up to the power of the oligarchs. If a singer like Sheeran worth untold millions is too fearful, what chance the rest of us?
If those who dare to speak up are stabbed in the back even by their allies – by artists like Sheeran who have real leverage within the West’s cultural spaces – what hope is there that we can ever seize back the public realm, including the political sphere, that’s dominated not by some imaginary “keffiyeh class” but by the all-too-real super-rich.
The current furore engulfing Sheeran wasn't provoked by his silence on Gaza. But now that the furore has made it all too clear that billionaires such as Kraft dictate what artists are allowed to say in venues, Sheeran’s silence on Gaza looks a lot more malign than it did before.
His supposedly “apolitical” stance looks less like it is providing a “safe space” for his audience and more like it is providing a safe space for billionaires like Kraft that Sheeran has aligned himself with.
Sheeran’s professed political neutrality, it seems, is a cover story, one in which he continues to collude with the billionaires who allowed him get rich in return for not providing a platform to anyone who might scrutinise the super-rich and their poisonous agenda.
Sheeran is just one cog in this machine. In his first public appearance since the row, he took to the stage to demand that we focus on his supposed victimhood, not that of Gaza’s slaughtered children. He whined that his friends, far less powerful than he is, had betrayed him by sticking to their principles and refusing to bow to the billionaire bullies.
Alongside Sheeran, there stands a media class, courtier journalists like Tom Slater, whose job is to similarly misdirect us. They demand we focus on the chimerical threat of a “keffiyeh class” rather than the tangible threat posed by the billionaire class that pays their wages.
For good reason, many ordinary people are angry – with dutiful superstars, servile journalists, and corrupt politicians, all trained to do the bidding of a depraved billionaire class, impervious to the wider good.
Those people aren’t in a cult. And they aren’t “monstering” Sheeran. But they are gradually working out for themselves who the real monsters are.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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Maybe we also need to re-think the whole idea of the superstar, who naturally gravitates towards the super-rich. Truth be told, you can often find better music and better musicians in your own city, town or even village. Is the super-music industry just another part of the great con of twenty-first century capitalism? Something designed to get the masses pouring onto planes and trains and into huge stadiums, buying exorbitantly priced tickets to "major events" (government subsidized in our case) and losing their connections to the really talented music makers in their own midst?
Boycott Ed Sheeran by all means. But remember he is just one individual in a system that exploits and degrades the musical sensibilities of the public. Perhaps we can do without any of them.
I note that Sheeran was not bleating about both sides when it came to condemning Russia, nor was anyone fretting about turning off anyone.
For that matter Kraft and his billionaire buddies didn't seem to have a problem with that stance.
Why. 'tis a mystery.