Murdoch Hacks Now Begging People to Buy Papers

Okay, no sooner had I put up my piece earlier today arguing that the reason the Scum’s journo, Trevor Kavanagh, wanted the lockdown lifted was because it was causing Murdoch’s papers to lose money, then confirmation of a sort came. Zelo Street had put up a piece reporting that various hacks from the Scum and the Times had written pieces begging people to #buyapaper. They included the Scum’s political editor, Tom Newton Dunn, Jack Blackburn of the Thunderer, Mark Lawton, another Times hack, the Scum on Sunday’s political editor, David Wooding, Sathnam Sangera, Matt Chorley, Martyn Ziegler, all of the Times, and the Scum’s Ryan Sabey and Dan Wootton. They said that the press was in trouble, but journalists, production staff, printers and distributors were all working hard during the crisis to bring us all trusted information, not myths. We would all miss the papers if they vanished. That included the local papers, whom they condescended to mention were also experiencing problems.

Zelo Street commented at the end of this litany that in times like these, people realised what was essential and what was not. ‘A daily paper is rapidly falling into the latter category, especially when, unlike the claims of the Murdoch goons, it is bringing not trusted stories, but an incessant diet of bigotry, hatred, political propaganda, and worthless and uninformed punditry.

Our free and fearless press is bottom of the European trust league. The Murdoch titles play their full part in that ranking. Karma can be a beast sometimes.’

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/04/murdoch-goons-pass-begging-bowl.html

This is correct. I think Zelo Street, or perhaps one of the other left-wing blogs, has put up the stats for the most trusted, and trustworthy, papers in Europe. And they don’t include Britain’s. Murdoch’s own papers have been leading the decline in quality in the British press since he acquired the Herald in 1969 or thereabouts, and turned it from a quality socialist paper into a Tory propaganda rag. Murdoch’s journalistic standards were so low that his staff in New York and Australia went on strike against the way his direction for their journals had turned them into a laughing stock. But Murdoch ploughed on, and the malign influence he exerted through his press and media empire has contributed to Britain becoming a spiteful, hateful place for ethnic minorities, the disabled, and the unemployed, low paid and other folks on welfare. Murdoch’s not alone by any means. The Heil, Depress, and Torygraph have all played their part. But the Scum has become proverbial for its gutter journalism.

This country does have some very good journalists – Mike is one, obviously. But its newspapers are disgusting. Many of them are effectively kept running by unpaid interns and freelance staff, whom they try to find every means they can not to pay. According to the Eye, the worst newspaper for using interns was the Groaniad. Meanwhile, the name hacks get salaries in the tens of thousands, and the proprietors and board all give themselves very handsome salaries and bonuses. As for content, it’s almost entirely shameless Tory propaganda. That, in my view, reached a new nadir last year in the massive smear campaign against Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, in which Mike and very many others were libelled and smeared as anti-Semites and Nazis. This included decent, self-respected Jews like Jackie Walker. This all comes from Murdoch himself, although I very much doubt he personally ordered any of it. It’s just the direction he’s taken these papers from the start. He is reported to have a very cavalier attitude to libel. Apparently he isn’t deterred from publishing a libelous story by the mere fact that it is libelous, only by whether the fine from a successful prosecution would be more than the sales gained through publishing it. If the number of copies sold wouldn’t be worth more than the fine, the story’s spiked. If the sales and the profits from them are more, then he goes ahead. And heaven help the poor soul at the other end.

According to the Eye, the Times is losing money hand over fist. So much so, that if it were any other paper it would have been axed or sold years ago. But it’s Britain’s paper of record, and so gives Murdoch a place at the political table. Murdoch’s empire as a whole is also in dire financial trouble. Zelo Street a little while ago put up a piece about what News International’s published accounts showed, and instead of a tidy profit they showed a massive, staggering loss. Some of that is due to the fines and out of court settlements Murdoch has had to make for the phone hacking scandal. I’ve forgotten the precise figures, but it’s tens of millions – a truly eye-watering amount.

The Murdoch press’ concern for local papers is also, as you might guess, hypocritical. Going back to Private Eye again, that paper reported in its ‘Street Of Shame’ column that in terms of sales, local papers are actually doing rather well. They’re bucking the decline in newspaper sales. However, they’re under immense financial pressure to the point where many are folding because they’re owned by the same corporations who own the big national papers, and their profits are being used to keep the national papers going.

Now many businesses are suffering because of the crisis and the necessary lockdown, especially small businesses like local shops and the self-employed. Many of these are seriously worried, because they don’t qualify for the government’s promised payment of 80 per cent of their income. Or if they do, it’ll come too late, as the first payment will come in June. But I have little sympathy for the Tory press because of their role in cheering on and propagandising for 40 years of Thatcherism and the poverty, unemployment, and now starvation they’ve caused. All for the profit of the rich few.

If Murdoch’s squalid empire went under tomorrow, it would just be too bad. Except that the people who’d suffer would be the junior writers, the production staff, printers and distributors. The big, star writers, editors and management, including Murdoch himself and his family, would all get generous payouts for their part in degrading British culture and its working paper for all these decades.

 

Desperate, Paranoid ‘Sun’ Puts Up Conspiracy Map

This shows how weird and desperate Tom Newton-Dunn, the Scum’s political editor, is to smear Jeremy Corbyn. Zelo Street yesterday put up an article revealing that Newton-Dunn had written an article declaring that former members of British intelligence had revealed that Jeremy Corbyn was at the centre of a network of ‘hard-left’ extremists. The article carried a chart, known apparently as the ‘Traitors Chart’, which purports to reveal the connections between such subversive groups as ‘International Marxism’, the People’s Assembly, Stand Up To Racism, Stop the War Coalition and ‘Left-wing media’.

It’s classic far-right conspiracy stuff. It’s the kind of chart that the far-right uses to prove that the supposed subversive groups are all ultimately controlled by the Illuminati or the Jews. Zelo Street states that anyone looking for subversion and treachery, whether from the right or the left, isn’t going to find it at the Beeb, the Guardian, the NEC or People’s Assembly. The fact that these organisations were on this map should have been enough to have it pulled. But it wasn’t. And one of those organisations threatened to complain to IPSO. Peter Geoghegan of Open Democracy declared it was ‘pitiful shite’ and threatened to complain, because his organisation was on there despite winning numerous press awards. But they were a subversive organisation because they had received funding from George Soros. Yep, the George Soros, the infamous Jewish banker at the heart of so many real anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Zelo Street was also flattered because the chart included it, even though the connection with Guardian is utterly erroneous. But that’s only because the paper once ran a feature on the site and its author. Apart from that, there’s absolutely no connection. He’s never written for them or done anything else for the newspaper.

Andrew Bartlett commented

Tom Newton Dunn sharing fascist conspiracy theories should be the end of his career. But it won’t be. So feel free to laugh in the face of any journo moralising about fake news or extremism when that beetle is still invited on Newsnight and so on.

To which Zelo Street adds that Newton-Dunn regularly appears on Andrew Marr’s show, who also appears on the chart. Which should make for some interesting explanations the next Newton-Dunn turns up in that studio.

The article has, however, now been taken down. The text explaining this and redirecting those looking for it says ‘legal removal’, which suggests that m’learned friends might have had something to do with it.

Zelo Street concludes

‘Publishing drivel like this in a mainstream newspaper is going to get someone hurt or even killed. Newton Dunn should have been sacked for going anywhere near it.

But as it’s the Murdoch press, he’ll probably get a promotion instead. Same old, same old.’

https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/12/sun-conspiracy-map-busted.html

There are several things to be said about this farce. Firstly, the Scum and the Tories are trying to run another version of the ‘Zinoviev letter’, trying to link Corbyn to evil left-wing subversives. The Scum ran a version of this in the 1987 when it printed pictures of Labour MPs with quotations showing how far-left they were and so a threat to British society. I also would not be surprised if former members of the intelligence services were also trying to discredit Corbyn with this smear. In the 1960s and ’70s MI5 was running the smear that the-then Labour leader, Harold Wilson, was a KGB agent. IRD, that branch of the intelligence services supposedly tasked with combating Communism, ran disinformation linking Labour MPs with the Communists, Soviet Union and the IRA. And the Integrity Initiative, another intelligence outfit, which although private has extensive links with British intelligence and the cyberwarfare branch of the SAS, has lost its charitable status, at least in Scotland. Instead of countering Russian propaganda, it chose to smear Jeremy Corbyn and other left-wing political figures, both here and on the continent instead.

The use of the chart also clearly shows the Tories’ desperation to smear Corbyn, because a casual glance at it would show to most people that it was ludicrously wrong. Unfortunately, there really are loonies out there on the far right, who do seem to think that the Beeb is an extremist organisation. Because the Corporation promotes multiculturalism in its programming, as well as defends Muslims from the charge that they are all terrorists. The kind of people, who would agree with this map that the BBC is full of left-wing subversives, would probably be the same rabid islamophobes and racists, who think that there is a Jewish plot to encourage non-White immigration in order to destroy the purity of the White race.

Which raises real questions about racism at the Scum.

The Scum has a history of racism stretching right back almost to its appearance in the late 1960s, and was fined several times for its bias by the press complaints authority. In the early part of this century Private Eye revealed that there had been 19 such judgments against the wretched paper. The use of this chart therefore suggests that there is real, very deep-seated racism at this paper and it verges on the anti-Semitic extreme right.

And it also makes me wonder if Newton-Dunn and co. aren’t heading towards the same kind of sheer paranoid lunacy that has got hold of Rachel Riley and Tracy Ann Oberman. They seem to believe that not only is the Labour leader a real threat to Jewish life and safety in the UK, but that he’s also persecuting them personally. Like when Oberman declared on Twitter that she was being stalked by him, because he happened to turn up at the Manchester theatre in which she was performing, to see a play. Which he was entirely entitled to do, as he was one of the theatre’s founders and patrons.

I’ve written a couple of pieces about how Oberman reminds me of some of the more notorious paranoiacs on the American conspiracy fringe. Like Steve Renstrom, the artist who believes that Senator Alan Cranston is at the centre of a global conspiracy that has killed millions, including the actors Natalie Wood and Jim Belushi. Or Dr. Francis E. Dec, who believed that there was a Jewish-Communist-CIA conspiracy to reduce the world’s peoples into FRANKENSTEIN COMPUTER GOD TV EYESIGHT SLAVES. This was the same conspiracy which had forced him into a run-down neighbourhood with ‘apoidal Nigers’. He obviously means ‘Blacks’ here, but the misspelling of the racial smear shows how far gone Dec’s mind is. Niger, as any fule kno, is a country in Africa, and one of that continent’s great rivers.

How long will it be, we wonder, until Newton-Dunn similarly goes bonkers, and starts writing completely insane pieces like this before they finally put him away.

By the evidence of that conspiracy chart, not long at all!

Boris Was a Terrible Speaker with or without a Secret Earpiece

Questions are being asked about After Boris’ performance on the Question Time leader’s special on Friday. According to Zelo Street, the peeps on Twitter are wondering whether he was secretly being coached in his answers, as there he seems to have had what looks suspiciously like an earphone. Will Black posted images of Boris’ right ear, which may show the device. Cathy Higgins called on Johnson, Cleverly and Tory HQ to clarify if it was an earphone. Matt Buck suggested it could just be for the studio’s sound system. But  Zelo Street observed that it raises the question why it was so discreet. Suzy Williams, however, complained about it to the Beeb by telephone and email. And even if it was an earpone, it did Johnson no good whatsoever. Julie-JC4PM-Stevenson observed that if he was wearing an earpiece, it didn’t help him much. Paul Usher expressed the same view, that even with it in he was ‘incredibly shit’. And Rinders declared that “I reckon he had Cummings shouting, ‘GET BREXIT DONE’ (sic) down his earpiece every 5 seconds. Johnson was ridiculous”.

See:  https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/11/bozo-and-question-time-earpiece.html

Some idea of how terrible Johnson’s performance was can be gleaned from the rage from the Tory press, who started screaming that the Beeb was biased against him. Thus the odious Sarah Vine, Gove’s missus, declared that the audience was a labour stitch-up. Allison Pearson announced that she was complaining about the Labour bias of the BBC audience. Darren Grimes moaned about how the BBC behaved typically and there weren’t any pro-Tory, pro-Brexit voices. Murdoch hack Tim Shipman complained that Johnson was interrupted 45 times, far more than the other leaders Corbyn, Swinson and Sturgeon. The Daily Heil’s Andrew Pierce complained that the audience was packed with ‘Corbynistas’ and wondered if there were any Lib Dems or Tories in the audience. He didn’t know, as he hadn’t seen the programme because he was presenting his LBC show. Ian Dale made the same complaint, and also made a cheap sneer about whether Daniel Blake, the titular character of the film of that name, would appear. Along with another sneer about Momentum packing the audience. The Scum’s political editor, Tom Newton-Dunn, and Guido Fawkes’ invertebrate Tom Harwood Tom Harwood both complained about Kate Rutter, an actress from the film I, Daniel Blake and Coronation Street being in the audience.

Zelo Street concluded of Johnson’s wretched performance that

‘Bozo The Clown failed to live up to the hype once again. That is not the fault of the BBC, but those who put him in 10 Downing Street and his press cheerleaders. End of story.’

In addition to his account of the proceedings, the commenters on his story also made some very good points. ‘Mirandola’ and ‘Mark’ both pointed out that a South African, Ryan Jacobsz, appeared at the very beginning of the programme to ask Corbyn questions. Jacobsz had definitely been on Question Time four or five times before. Jacobsz was a Conservative, who the Tory hacks had somehow overlooked in their moans about Labour bias.

And Andy McDonald commented on the Tory mentality behind these complaints. They took it for granted that they would win, and when they don’t, they start whining about bias.

What’s interesting is the assumption, the default expectation that their side is going to win. That any criticism isn’t just the natural way arguments work, but an aberration. That it has to be a “stitch up”, because they cannot conceive of anyone naturally reaching the conclusion that Labour might be better for them.

Says an awful lot about the Oxford debating club mentality driving the Tories (what larks, all a big game, call daddy’s lawyer if shit gets a bit real).

See: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/11/question-time-tories-whine.html

In fact, as Zelo Street, Mike and various other left-wing blogs have pointed out numerous times, Question Time has a massive Tory bias both in its guests and the audience, so it’s massively hypocritical for the Tory hacks to complain of bias in their turn.

Martin Odoni also put up a piece describing how terrible Johnson was as a speaker at the ITV leaders’ debate, filmed near him at MediaCity in Salford Quays. Martin was part of crowd determined to give our farcical Prime Minister the benefit of their opinions on his squalid, malicious government and character. He points out that BoJob has all of May’s faults as a speaker. Both of them repeat meaningless catchphrases. With May it was ‘strong and stable’, with BoJob it’s ‘getting Brexit done’. They both stutter and stammer. And they both run away from hostile crowds. Martin describes how Boris took one look at the mass of protesters, and order his driver to go in the back way. Corbyn, by contrast, came out to talk to them. Martin comments

I must remind everyone once again though, evading the public was a dreadful weakness May showed for most of the spring and summer of 2017. I criticised her myself for refusing to speak to the public, given that, in a country that likes to call itself ‘a democracy’, politicians should be accountable to the people, especially during a General Election. How can that happen if the Prime Minister refuses to speak to them? It looks arrogant, high-handed, and cowardly, and yet Johnson is now emulating it almost daily, after his embarrassing experiences on visits to hospitals during the Autumn.

Martin also discusses how Johnson also shot himself in the foot by declaring that the monarchy was beyond reproach, at a time Prince Andrew is in serious trouble about his relationship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.He’s also shown how hopelessly out of touch he is through his frequent remarks about how the rich deserve sympathy as they are a ‘put-upon minority’. As for the Tories trying to rebrand their HQ as ‘Factcheck UK’, Martin states

Now, it is insulting enough that the Tories would imagine significant numbers of people would be stupid enough to fall for this. But if it had worked, that would be worse, because once again the Tories have shown a pathological willingness to corrupt the democratic process to advance their power. If the Tories had actually been seeking a way of convincing the public to trust Corbyn more than their own leader, they could have found no more certain way than this.

Who’s the ‘chicken’ really, Boris?

Boris fancies himself as a statesman of truly Churchillian stature. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that, literary ambitions as the great man’s latest biographer aside, he is nowhere near. And the more he speaks on television and in public, the clearer it is. Zelo Street remarks that if the object in his ear was an earphone, ‘then it tells you all you need to know about the Tories’.

Exactly. They don’t believe they can win except by cheating, and that includes whining about BBC bias. They’re a danger to this country, it’s people, and to democracy itself. Get them out, and Corbyn in!

Tory Bloodlust, Corbyn, and the Drone Strike against ‘Jihadi John’

Okay, this is going to be another article commenting on the current situation in the Middle East. I’m sorry about this, if you’re bored with the subject, guys. Please stay with me. This stuff’s important. But I guess you already know that very well already.

Last week it was reported that the Americans had killed Mohamed Emwazee, aka ‘Jihadi John’, in a drone strike. Emwazee was the British ‘executioner’ with a London accent, shown murdering prisoners in ISIS’ propaganda videos. This was a subject of celebration, with David Cameron appearing on TV to praise the Americans for having done a good job well done, and make various comments about British-American co-operation, intelligence-sharing and so forth.

And then the right-wing press over here decided that they were going to attack Corbyn for not being sufficiently militaristic. The good blogger over at Zelo Street has written a very good piece about this at http://zelo-street.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/jihadi-john-bloodlust-exposed.html. Among the pack baying for Corbyn’s blood was the editor of the Sun, Tom Newton Dunn, Dan Hodges and Toby Young at the Torygraph, Paul Staines of Guido Fawkes and Andrew Neil, known to readers of Private Eye as ‘Brillo Pad’. They attacked Corbyn for saying that it would have been better if Emwazee had been tried in a court of law. This wasn’t enough for the above rightists, despite the fact that Corbyn had prefixed it with a statement that ‘Jihadi John’ had been held to account for his brutal and callous crimes’. Not quite the soft statement the Tories were making it out to be, but still not bloodthirsty enough for them.

The article in Zelo Street makes it clear that capturing ‘Jihadi John’ would have been exactly the right course, given the precedents for it. The Israelis captured and tried Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazis responsible for the Holocaust. There’s a quote by Eichmann in which he states that he had absolutely no regrets about what he did. I can’t remember the exact wording, but it’s something on the lines that only weaklings regret what they have done. It’s one of those noxious statements that make you think that however the Israelis killed him, whether by firing squad or hanging or whatever, it was too good for the b*stard. The Israelis would have been justified shooting him out of hand. But they didn’t. They put him on trial and had him convicted according to the rule of law. Just as the Europeans and Americans did with Radovan Kardzic, one of the Serb generals responsible for horrendous war crimes in Bosnia. He was captured, and tried at the Hague for his crimes against humanity.

And in fact, there are a number of other, very good reasons why it is better to capture and try individuals like Emwazee, rather than killing them in drone strikes.

Firstly, as a way of gaining hearts and minds, drone strikes are counterproductive. Where they’re being used against Taliban enclaves in Pakistan, they’ve actually managed to increase support for the Islamists. Part of this, supposedly, is that the local people feel it’s a cowardly method of fighting. The drones are remotely operated by someone hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the battle field.

Secondly, as a matter of simple military precision, they aren’t very good. I’ve put up a report about them from The Young Turks, which showed that rather than precisely targeting their victims, they simply home in on their mobile phone signals. The result has been that the wrong people have often been killed, simply because they were holding the intended victim’s phone at the time of the attack. This has included the mother of the Jihadis. Those killed in the strikes have also been bystanders, who may not have had anything to do with the victims except having been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The third argument against them is perhaps the most serious. Many liberal Americans have opposed drone strikes, such as that which killed Anwar Awlaki, on the grounds that are a form of extra-judicial execution. Or assassination, if you prefer. Anwar Awlaki was the Islamist preacher killed in a drone strike in Yemen. He was a deeply unpleasant piece of work, having preached murderous jihad and planned numerous terrorism offences. He was also an American citizens, and many Americans were upset about the way the president – in this case, Obama, had ordered his death without having him caught and tried.

All of this also applies to the drone strike against ‘Jihadi John’ Emwazee. And you don’t have to have any illusions about how brutal and thuggish Emwazee was to be concerned about the manner of his death, and the implications it has for global justice. Zelo Street states that he was scum. He was. Utterly. The man butchered innocents and boasted about it, with no remorse whatsoever. He pretty much got what he deserved, at least if his own low standards were applied to himself. But justice demanded that he be captured and tried.

As for Dunn, Brillo Pad, Young, Staines and the rest of them, don’t expect them to make reasoned, nuanced criticism of Corbyn. They aren’t. They’re frightened, and they’ve decided that the best way to destroy him is to make him out to be a dangerous subversive, who supports the IRA, ISIS and other terrorist organisations. Even if he doesn’t quite say what they want you to believe he said. That the ‘narrative’ they’re using, and they’re going to stick to it, according to Goebbels’ maxim that if you use a lie big enough for long enough, then it becomes the truth.