Here’s another video from the Cartoonist Kayfabe channel in which hosts Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg discuss a comic with a paranormal theme. This time it’s not ancient astronauts, but Bigfoot, created by horror director Rob Zombie and comics legend Richard Corben. Corben is one of the great comic artists, though his work I think overwhelmingly appeared in the underground, independent comics and Heavy Metal, the Canadian version of the French Metal Hurlant. The Bigfoot comic didn’t last very long. It told its story in about four or so issues. It was about a child who goes on holiday with his family to the great northern woods, where everyone except the boy, including the family’s dog, is beaten to death by a rampaging Bigfoot. The orphaned lad pleads with the local sheriff to hunt down and kill the monster, but the sheriff refuses to do so for the same reason the local authorities don’t close down the beach in Jaws – they’re afraid of creating a scare. Years later, the boy, now grown up, returns and he and the sheriff and his deputies go after Bigfoot. They manage to kill it, but it true horror style there’s a whole family of Bigfoots, who manage to survive and escape.
The two talk about how the comic’s depiction of Sasquatch as a brutal killer is a quite a departure from the creature’s normal appearance in popular culture. Quite. It isn’t like the show, Harry and the Hendersons, in which Bigfoot lived with an ordinary American family, and very definitely did not go on the rampage and try to kill them. It also differs from the various accounts of encounters with the creature. Many of the people, who claim to have met Bigfoot say they had feelings of fear or terror, and some of the encounters were genuinely terrifying. In some of them, the witnesses say that the creatures surrounded their house or cabin howling. I’ve also read and heard of cases where people say that the creatures threw rocks at their homes. In one case I read, a man was abducted by Bigfoot and taken to its lair before finally managing to escape. However, I haven’t heard of Bigfoot actually killing anyone. The comic does, however, connect with Bigfoot lore by including references to the Patterson-Gimlin film. That’s the piece of cine film, which apparently shows a Bigfoot walking through the forest. The video’s thumbnail shows the comic’s portrayal of the creature in the movie. It was shot in the 1970s by two men when they were out travelling through that part of the American wilderness, and still divides people today. One documentary discussed the movie with a primatologist and a special effects expert with the film industry. The primatologist believed the footage must be fake because the animal didn’t look like a real ape. The special effects expert, however, believed it was genuine because its fur was of different length on different parts of the body, something that isn’t achieved even on the very best Hollywood creature costumes. Zoologists have also cast doubt on the creature’s existence by pointing out that none have ever been captured and if it does exist, it’s numbers are too small for the creature’s survival.
Similar ape-men, however, have been reported all over America, such as the Florida Skunk Ape, so called because the women who encountered it said it gave off a pungent smell. Some of the Bigfoot reports are more like a paranormal encounter than one with a real, paws and pelt animal. Witnesses describe it appearing and disappearing, or suddenly noticing that it was there and there have been suggestions that it has the power to make itself invisible. I honestly don’t know what the reality is. I suspect the creature is probably paranormal rather than physical, but some of the encounters may also be the result of hoaxing and misperception.
Bigfoot and the Yeti interest me, and I find it interesting how the creatures have entered popular culture, of which this comic is an example. Piskor and Rugg debate whether there were any other Bigfoot comics. One believes there weren’t, while the other says that there were any number in the ’80s and ’90, but they were all produced by comics fans and so were home-produced. They appeared in mimeographed copies with the pages stapled together at fan conventions. This isn’t a comic I’d ever read, but I do find it interesting as a cultural curiosity.
Photographs of the Unknown, by Robert Rickard and Richard Kelly (London: New English Library 1980).
I thought this book would be a suitably spooky subject for Hallowe’en. Bob Rickard is one of the founders and editors of the Fortean Times, the magazine of the weird that’s been going since the 1970s. A little note on the last page underneath the picture credits gives instruction to readers how they can submit their photographs of the paranormal to the Fortean Times. The blurb on the back cover runs
SEA MONSTERS
ALIENS
LEVITATION
POLTERGEISTS
ECTOPLASM
PHANTOMS
UFOS …. all photographed!
The largest, most complete, most amazing collection of photographs of the Unknown and the Unexplained ever published.
Many have never been published before, others are presented for the first time in their original full colour. They have been researched and collected from all over the world.
If you believe and want to convince other people, if you don’t know for sure but have an open mind, if you’ve ever been inclined to believe but want to see the evidence, you will need this unique archive that covers the whole range of unexplained phenomena.
The book has the following chapters, each containing these individual sections
Introduction
Strange Life, Loch Ness, Water Monsters, Sea Monsters, The Yeti, Bigfoot.
Unusual Natural Phenomena, Living rocks, Falls, Atmospheric magic, Natural ‘UFOs’, ghost lights.
UFOs, Flying Cigars, UFOs and Planes, UFOS over Water, UFO Shapes, UFOs Above Us, UFOs in Motion, UFO Beings Among Us? Optical UFOs, Computer Analysis, UFOs from the Sea.
Psychic Phenomena, Possession, Stigmata, Bleeding Images, Ectoplasm, Mediumship, A Modern Medium, Thoughtography, Kirlian Photography.
Paranormal Persons, BVM and Angels, Portraits of Christ, Aliens, Phantoms, Materializations.
Mind over Matter, Yoga, Pain Immunity, Psychic Surgery, Fire Immunity, Firewalking, Spoonbenders, Table Turning, Levitation of Objects, Apports, Levitation, Poltergeists.
This is another book I ordered from Amazon in order to give myself something to read during the lockdown. I think I remember it from the time it first came out, and if so, then the book really scared me. I was at secondary school, and the books publication was featured on breakfast TV. I remember one of the presenters of the Beeb’s breakfast show introducing a piece on it by saying something about the unknown being photographed and asking ‘but what are they photographing?’ Which is a very good question. The book I remember had a different cover. This was a monotone/ black and white photo of a medium producing ectoplasm from their mouth, in which there were faces. This doesn’t seem to have this image, which may well have come from the hardback edition. Or it may be that I’m confusing it with a completely different book. There is, however, a photo of ectoplasm coming out of a medium’s left nostril, in which there’s the face of a young soldier killed in World War I. It was these ectoplasmic faces which scared me, and I can remember the fear I felt passing the book on a display table in George’s, the big local bookshop in Bristol on a trip there.
Some of the photos are very well known, like Patterson-Gimlin pic of Bigfoot, a still taken from film footage of the creature walking in the American woods made a few years before. To many people, the film and photo are proof that Sasquatch is a real, paws and pelt animal. The film’s been shown on any number of TV documentaries about Bigfoot and the Yeti. Some of the experts called on in these programmes to give their opinion have said that it’s unlikely to be a fake because the fur is of different lengths. You’d see this in a real animal, but not in a costume. On the negative side, other experts have said that it can’t be real, as the creature seems to have both male and female genitalia. But perhaps it’s just got manboobs.
The debate about this photo still goes on today, but others are hoaxes or almost certainly hoaxes. A few years ago it was revealed that the ‘surgeon’s photograph’ of the Loch Ness monster, which has appeared in countless documentaries, newspapers and magazine articles about the cryptid, was very definitely a fake. It was created by adding a plesiosaurus-style neck to a toy submarine, which was then sent sailing in the Loch.
The same goes for some, at least, of the UFO photographs. There’s a photo of a UFO bearing the Ummo symbol. The Ummo messages were a series of letters sent to various people in Franco’s claim, which claimed they came from aliens, who had travelled to Earth from the planet Ummo. They contained a wealth of detail about their spacecraft, language, home world and so on. Most, if not all UFO investigators now believe they were a hoax. As are the photos of the Venusian spaceships taken by George Adamski. One of the photographs Adamski claimed was of an alien spacecraft was actually of his chicken coop. A few weeks ago I went to an online lecture hosted by the paranormal investigation group, ASSAP, in which the speaker suggested that Adamski’s Venusian spacecraft was actually a photograph of a type of gas lantern then available. And yes, they do look exactly the same.
The ‘thoughtographs’ are the images Ted Serios, an alcoholic bellboy, claimed to produce on film using the power of his mind. This was after he’d drunk enough to start his gums and anus bleeding. I don’t know if Serios was ever caught in fraud, but I’ve watched documentaries where sceptics have shown how it could have been faked. The same goes for the piccie of Soviet psychic Nina Kulagina showing off her telekinesis skills. This was debunked back in the ’90s or so in the Channel 4 programme Secrets of the Psychics.
Sceptics have also argued that psychic surgery is also a fraud. The psychics who claim to be able to perform such miracles don’t actually cut into the body of their unfortunate dupes, and the disease organs they remove aren’t human but chicken guts. This particular paranormal field was the subject of an episode of Jonathan Creek, the BBC detective drama about a crime-busting stage magician. That particular episode involved the murder of someone, who was dying and desperate to have similar treatment, or who had actually undergone it. It was some years ago, and I can’t really remember. It doesn’t matter, as the show came down very much on the side of the sceptics.
Sceptics have also presented a strong argument that firewalking isn’t supernatural either. From what I remember, flesh burns at quite a high temperature, higher than the coals and embers on which people walk, and so anyone can do it. Well, that’s what they claim. I wouldn’t like to test it, and don’t advise anyone else to do either unless they know exactly what they’re doing.
The Fortean Times also carried an article a few years ago, which also claimed that the photograph showing a group of men in broadbrimmed hats and raincoats surrounding a diminutive alien was also a hoax. It was published in a German newspaper as an April Fool’s or Hallowe’en prank, or the German equivalents thereof. As for spoon-bending, made notorious by Uri Geller, there’s a trick to fake that which goes all the way back to the 18th century and the book, Rational Recreations. It’s possible that Geller, if he is a fake, is using that trick or similar.
It’s also entirely possible that some of the spirit photos are also fakes. They’ve been taken since the 19th century and the American photographer Hans Mumler. I have a feeling that Mumler was sued by people, who believed he’d deceived them. They noticed that the dead relatives and other people, who appeared in Mumler’s photos, did so in the same poses, expressions and attitudes as they had in other photographs. There were several ways such photographs could be faked with the plates exposed twice, once for the image of the sitter, and again for the supposed spirit. However, I think Mumler, or perhaps one of his competitors, was found not guilty because the prosecution couldn’t prove which method, if any, he’d used.
There are also problems with the photos of mediums producing ectoplasm. I think some fakes used to swallow cheesecloth, which they’d then regurgitate during seances. It was also noted that the female spirit one of the 19th century mediums used to materialise looked remarkably like her, but the two did appear side by side. It’s probably fraud but this argues against it.
Several of the poltergeist photos seem to be of the Enfield polt that was investigated by the SPR and Guy Lyon Playfair in the 1970s. This is a notorious British case which Playfair seemed to believe was genuinely paranormal, and which he publicised. The sceptical UFO magazine Magonia has suggested instead that it was fraud within an unhealthy family situation.
Other paranormal phenomena are almost certainly camera artefacts, such as the mysterious balls of light in one set of photographs, as the book itself suggests. Others include the mysterious tendrils of light captured by a female photographer. I came across the same effect on photos taken by a visitor to Derby jail, which is now open to ghost hunters as a haunted location. A few quick experiments showed that this did seem to be a trick of the light as it was caught in the camera lens.
I’ve also come across an explanation, which I’m afraid I can’t remember, for the Kirlian photographs that were also all the rage at one time. This showed that, as dramatic as they appear, they definitely aren’t of any aura surrounding living things. But they do look really beautiful, however.
I doubt if any of these photographs would convince a sceptic like the late James Randi or mentalist like Derren Brown. On the other hand, it may be that some are genuine, and that there really are paranormal forces out there that some have been able to capture on film.
There was a very interesting piece in yesterday’s I newspaper about the discovery of the remains of an ancient ape that lived 12 million years ago in Bavaria. According to the palaeontologists and zoologists examining the creature, its remains suggest that it could walk as well as climb trees. This seems to support the theory of initial bipedalism. This states that walking on two legs is not a trait humans acquired, but one what that apes lost.
The article by Frank Jordans, ‘Ancient walking ape takes stand against evolutionary theory’ runs
The remains of an ancient ape found in a Bavarian clay pit suggest that our ancestors began standing upright millions of years earlier than previously thought, scientists have said.
An international team of researchers said that the fossilised partial skeleton of a male ape tyhat lived almost 12 million years ago, in what is now southern Germany, bore a striking resemblance to modern human bones.
In a paper published by the journal Nature, they concluded that the previously unknown species, named Danuvius guggenmosi, could walk on two legs but also climb like an ape.
The findings “raise fundamental questions about our previous understanding of the evolution of the great apes and humans”, said Madelaine Boehme of the University of Tubingen, Germany, who led the research.
Previous fossil records of apes with an upright gait dated only as far back as six million years ago.
Ms Boehme, along with researchers from Bulgaria, Germany, Canada and the US, examined more than 15,000 bones found west of Munich.
They were able to piece together primate fossils belonging to four individuals that lived 11.62 million years ago.
The most complete, an adult male looked similar to modern-day bonobo chimpanzees.
They reconstructed how Danuvius would have moved, concluding that, while it would have been able to hang from branches by its arms, it could also straighten its legs to walk upright.
“This changes our view of early human evolution which is that it all happened in Africa,” Ms Boehme told AP News.
Fred Spoor, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, said that it could challenge many existing ideas about evolution.
“This is fantastic material,” said Mr Spoor, who was not involved in the study, “there undoubtedly will be a lot for people to analyse.”
Some of the fossil apes they’ve previously discovered seem to have different proportions to modern apes. Ramapithecus had arms that were proportionally more like those of humans, rather than the long arms of apes. This suggests to me that the animal was more bipedal than modern apes, which commonly walk on fours.
I first encountered the theory of initial bipedalism through articles written by the French zoologist, Dr. Francois Sarre, in the ’90s cryptozoological magazine, Animals and Men. Cryptozoology is the study of mystery animals. It covers everything from creatures that may plausibly exist, to beasts that are probably mythical like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. Animals and Men was a strange mixture of the paranormal and popular articles about respectable zoological discoveries, like the fossils of various types of extinct whale. It was very much fringe literature, which is possibly the reason why Sarres’ articles were published in it. He may not have been able to publish them elsewhere. Now this discovery suggests he was right. Which also shows you shouldn’t discount everything in the paranormal press.
What kind of drugs are the hacks at the Sunday Times on? Because whatever it is they’re doing, it’s not normal dope. Not from the stuff they’re writing. I’ve heard that very heavy, long term use of cannabis and amphetamines can cause psychosis. Heavy ketamine use can also cause paranoia. The pioneering psychologist John Lilley, who invented the sensory isolation tank and began the scientific attempt to communicate with dolphins was at one time shooting up ketamine every hour. His mind got so twisted on the drug, that he became convinced that there were solid state, computer civilisations out in space conspiring against us. In fact, he was so convinced, he was considering phoning up the president of the US. As this was the early ’70s, and the president was Richard Nixon, this could have been an extremely interesting, if possibly short, conversation. I can only conclude that the hacks in the Tory press, and very definitely the Sunday Times, are on some kind of terrible recreational chemicals from the rubbish they’ve written about Jeremy Corbyn.
Last weekend’s Sunday Times was a case in point. This carried an article by hack Sarah Baxter, in which she declared that
“People are being as gullible about Corbyn getting a whiff of power as I was about Mugabe”.
Say whaaaat! As Zelo Street’s article about this latest slur against the Labour leader has pointed out, since Corbyn was elected head of the party in 2015 the right-wing press has been telling everyone that Corbyn was the reincarnation of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zhedong, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Erich Honecker, Nikita Khrushchev, Nicolai Ceaucescu, Josep Tito, and even Osama bin Laden.
The Sage of Crewe pointed out that Corbyn isn’t a Marxist, merely because the right-wing press says so. And that Marxism is not the same thing as the political system of the former Communist bloc, including China. The peeps on Twitter also weren’t impressed. The Zelo Street article contains a selection of comments from people sick and disgusted with Baxter’s noxious slur. Dane Harrison tweeted
“Yeah fine. Why not, Jeremy Corbyn is Robert Mugabe. He’s also a Jihadi, an IRA operative, Kim Jong Un, Joseph Stalin and a Czech spy. Aren’t you embarrassed by the character assassination? Crazy idea, why don’t you rub two brain cells together and come up with a real critique?”
Hindu Monkey said
“Another morning. Another right wing paper casually comparing [Jeremy Corbyn] – a man who has fought his whole life for peace, with a mass murderer” and added that he f**king hated the media barons who run this beautiful country.
The tweeters noticed how the Times was trying to distract everyone from BoJob’s attack on democracy with the smear. Zelo Street commented
‘The “look over there” factor was also clear, with “The Times, there, running a column that positions Corbyn as a Mugabe figure whilst Boris Johnson ices out his cabinet, suspends Parliament and literally tries to break the law to force through his extreme agenda” and “The Times: Damn, Boris Johnson really triggered the libs by suspending Parliament … Also the Times: Just like Robert Mugabe, Jeremy Corbyn harbours contempt for our institutions of democracy”. Sarah Baxter’s deflection and propagandising duly busted.’
These ad hominem attacks on Corbyn remind me of the vicious racist smears the Republicans and their media flung at Obama when he was president. He was supposed to be a militant Muslim infiltrator, determined to bring down America from within and turn into an Islamic country ruled by sharia law. Or else he was a militant atheist. Or a Communist. Or a Nazi. It didn’t matter that all of the smears together are mutually contradictory, they were all flung at him.
He was also accused of being a viciously anti-White racist, who was going to murder more people than Mao and Pol Pot combined. And then there were the unhinged rants of Alex Jones of Infowars, the man who believes 9/11 was an inside job and thinks the evils of the world are caused by the globalist elite. Who are all Satanic socialist millionaires in touch with creatures from another dimension. Or something. Jones, before he was thrown off YouTube and other internet platforms, ranted that Obama was planning to seize control of the US and make himself its dictator. He was going to call a state of emergency, and then decent, law-abiding right-wing Americans would be herded into FEMA camps. This was when he wasn’t denouncing Obama as the Antichrist. Yup, he reckoned Obama was the Antichrist, because he smelt and there were always flies around him. Or so he claimed. Mind you, he also thought Hillary Clinton was a Satanic lesbian witch, possessed by demons, and possibly a cyborg.
Well, Obama has come and gone. He signally was not a Nazi, nor a militant atheist, Commie or militant Islamist. He has not killed tens of millions of White Christians, overthrown the government or declared a national emergency forcing people into FEMA camps. Neither has he turned America into a Muslim country under Islamic law. The separation of Church and state in the Constitution makes that, or should make it, an impossibility. And there’s absolutely no danger of it, either. Several local authorities have passed laws banning the establishment of sharia law, but this is a reaction by racist Republicans to a threat that doesn’t exist.
And just as Obama didn’t prove to be a murderous despot, so Corbyn won’t either.
But there does seem a tradition of hysterical paranoia directed at left-wing figures in the Sunset Times. Apart from that bilge about Mike and other decent people being Holocaust deniers, and the late Michael Foot being a KGB spy, way back during Bill Clinton’s presidency the paper’s hacks really believed in a paranoid conspiracy theory about the president. Along with a group of journos from the American Spectator, which I think must be the Speccie’s transatlantic cousin, these hacks formed the ‘Clinton Crazies’. There was a conspiracy theory going round that Clinton, when he was governor of Alabama, had been importing cocaine from South America using a secret airfield in that state. He was also supposed to be such an evil, malign character that 30 people connected to him had died in mysteriously circumstances, killed by their friend or employer. It was all rubbish. About 30 people connect with Clinton had died, but none of them had been assassinated on the orders of the President, as one former Clinton Crazy actually pointed out. Nevertheless, the hacks got themselves into such a state that one actually hid in his house with the blinds half-drawn, squinting through them waiting for the CIA assassination squad to turn up.
This comparison of Corbyn to Mugabe just seems to be more insane paranoia by the paper’s genuinely extreme right-wing hacks. And by comparing him to Mugabe, they’ve now moved into the realm of real tabloid hackery. It’s on a level with the bogus stories published by the Sunday Sport and the Weekly World News. The Weekly World News was infamous for running highly sensational, and obviously fake stories. My favourites were about an alien meeting Bill Clinton when he was campaigning for re-election, and promising his vote to him. And the headline, ‘Mom was Bigfoot, says beastie man.’ And the Sunday Sport also gained infamy when it claimed that a B 52 bomber had been found on the Moon. It then claimed in a later issue that it wasn’t there, and had probably been towed away by the Space Shuttle.
The smears against Corbyn are as fictitious as all these, and all the fake stories and accusations the American right-wing media hurled at Obama. There is one difference, however. All the highly unlikely stories in the Sunday Sport and Weekly World News were probably written just to entertain. Despite the fears of academic folklorists that people would believe them, and they’d contaminate the real urban folklore about UFOs, Bigfoot and the other weird beliefs they were studying, I suspect few people, if any, actually did.
The fake stories against Corbyn are more pernicious, as they’re clearly meant to be believed. Which means that the journalism in the Sunday Times and the rest of the British right-wing press is in a way actually worse. It’s far more like Alex Jones and Infowars, but pretending to be a reliable paper of record. And that’s no joke.
Mike has also posted over at Vox Political a couple of articles commenting on the lack of coverage of certain issues by the mainstream press. He writes in this article below about the way, with the exception of Channel 4 news, none of the other channels are reporting about a meeting today between the police and the Election Commission to discuss massive Tory electoral fraud.
He also has this piece about how Jeremy Corbyn has told Labour members and supporters that people are turning to social media because of the censorship by the mainstream media of positive news about the party.
Corbyn’s exactly right, and the mainstream media are terrified. Social media has already had an effect on American politics. Reginald D. Hunter, the Black American comedian, who has appeared on British TV in, amongst other things, Have I Got News For You, credited Obama’s election eight years ago to social media. Ordinary people got on Twitter, Facebook and so on to support him, thus circumventing establishment candidates like Shrillary. I gather that Corbyn’s election as leader of the Labour party was also in large part due to activists coming together on social media. And I got a feeling that something similar is happening in the Land of the Free for Bernie Sanders. Unlike Shrillary, Cruz and the other presidential hopefuls, Bernie’s campaign is being funded not by corporations, but by ordinary people. He’s the genuinely popular candidate against corporate, establishment stooges. And like Corbyn’s Labour party, he’s also been largely frozen out by the mainstream media. They aren’t reporting him. In fact, there was even a mass demonstration against CNN for their refusal to give him airtime. Donald Trump, by contrast, has been given billions’ of dollars worth of free airtime by the news networks. Possibly because The Donald is a raving Fascist, and, whatever he says to the contrary, the walking embodiment of corporate power.
And there’s been a lot of very ugly censorship in the American media. Israel is a case in point. The American establishment press is uniformly pro-Zionist, and very largely will not run articles critical of Israel. Their stance is more extreme than that of the domestic Israeli press, which will cover stories of harassment, discrimination and brutality by their country’s government and the armed forces. To this day the American press has not published the UN resolution condemning the killing of civilians by the IDF in a particular massacre.
This censorship even extends to attacks on American shipping and service personnel by the Israelis. In 1967 Israeli warplanes attacked a US naval vessel, killing 127 American matelots. But the Israel lobby made sure that the story was spiked and didn’t appear in the press.
And it’s not just Israeli war crimes that the American press refuses to give space to. The New York Times also spike several stories about the atrocities committed by the Fascist death squads Reagan was backing in Central America back in the 1980s. A journo for the Times, Bonner, tried to run a story about the massacre of 1,000 men, women and children by the government death squads in the town of Monote in El Salvador. The story was spiked. Bonner went down there to make certain the story was true. It was. It still didn’t appear. The New York Time’s owner, Abraham Rosenthal, was one of Ronald Reagan’s mates. As a Reagan considered death squads like the Contras in Nicaragua ‘the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers’, Bonner’s report was spiked and his career ruined.
If you read Libertarian blogs, you can easily get the impression that the New York Times must be some towering bastion of liberal journalism. Mind you, the people, who write these blogs are frequently so insanely right-wing that they think the Daily Mail is left-wing. In fact, the paper’s so full of establishment lies and falsehoods that the radical journos, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair published an article about why dumping on the New York Times was useless in their book, End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate. They made the point that the newspaper was so corrupt, you should adopt the complete opposite attitude to reading it. Instead of being saddened that there was precious little that was true or accurate in it, you should instead be glad, and only be downhearted if it actually said something close to the truth.
The end result is that people are abandoning the mainstream news media. The Young Turks and Secular Talk have reported how young people in particular are getting their news from the internet. Even the talk radio stations that carry such right-wing media pundits in America like Rush Limbaugh have a very low audience. If you believe Rushbo, he’s got one of the highest rated radio shows in America. The truth is, his audience is lower than some College campus radio stations, which only have the ability to broadcast a couple of miles at most. As for Fox News, which one pundit in the Radio Times tried to present as a model for future news reportage in the Beeb, its audience has an average age of 68. It’s been described as a television ‘retirement community’. It’s basically a group of reactionary senior citizens ranting about what them thar kids are gettin’ up to.
This is why there has been moaning in the Radio Times and the lamestream media about how irrelevant they’re becoming, and their declining influence. People are getting their news from elsewhere, news that may well be unattributed and sheer rubbish. And, worse, it’s breaking down the social consensus on issues that prevailed when everyone read pretty much the same newspapers, and watched the same TV news.
Too bad. Yes, there is a lot of rubbish on the internet. Bogus stories about dodgy bigfoot sightings, and aliens in the White House. But it’s also been genuinely empowering, and challenging the power of the corporate media. And that’s no bad thing indeed.
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