What indicates to me that Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald and Russell Brand, whatever their personal or political differences, are part of an important social and ethical trend is the huge irritation they cause to the media class who have spent decades making very good livings being paid by the media corporations to limit our intellectual horizons.

Brand and co are an enormous threat to the cosy political-security-media elite that for years colonised our minds as effectively as – maybe more effectively than – Pravda once did in the Soviet Union.

The first responses of a few of Britain’s elite journalists in Twitterland this morning after the Brand interview aired on Newsnight last night illustrated the general rancour they feel towards those who threaten to expose them as the charlatans they are.

Twitter is useful in this regard because its short form forces these journalists’ prejudices out into the open, depriving them of the cover provided by their usual-length columns.

Here are a few I found on a quick search of Twitter.

David Aaronovitch (former Guardian and now Times columnist):

In what way was Russell Brand not an anarchist version of the maddest kind of UKIP supporter?

If you’re angry enough it absolves you from actually thinking anything through. That’s what I got from the Brand interview on #newsnight

Anne Mcelvoy (Radio 3 presenter and London Standard columnist):

Ok even sitting here [in] Nanjing, am irritated we and #newsnight feel need to take Mr Russell Brand’s fiscal recommendations seriously..

Martin Bright (ex-Observer reporter, ex-columnist New Statesman, current columnist for Jewish Chronicle and Guardian, founder of the Creative Society [sic]):

@annemcelvoy Or that we are expected to read a political magazine edited by someone who doesn’t vote

Yes, that’s right. For these power-friendly journalists, just as for Paxman, no one should possibly be taken seriously unless they participate in the political system designed to keep us oppressed, or consume the liberal media designed to persuade us that our vote counts.

Interested in other tweets people come across from these guardians of thought control.