A Place to Stand

  New article now up on ThinkScotland. Please put any comments there.
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   It isn't so much a massive conspiracy to control the press as interlocking conspiracies and special interests.

   It started when Rupert Murdoch asked for permission to buy up all of Sky with a view to enlarging it and making it a full competitor to the BBC.

   The BBC and its print arm, the Guardian, went into action. They took a very minor story, hardly news since in no way new, that reporters had used illegal avenues to get information. This is something that newspapers not only have done since the first typesetting but something they SHOULD be willing to do. The Guardian itself has previously publicly boasted of doing so.

   The alternative is that no paper would/will ever be able to report something that those involved don't want known - reducing papers in whole, rather than, as now, in very large part, to rewriters of PR press releases.

    They used their media monopoly to make this non-news the first, main and occasionally virtually only, news item in their main evening "news" programmes. And invited any politician who wants favourable airtime to help the story run. The foreign media expressed amazement at how importantly this non-story was being treated but it is hardly a new way of setting the agenda.

    Look at the way that "catastrophic global warming" a story with no factual base gets treated as more serious than the related deaths of 25,000 British citizens from fuel poverty annually. Which is at least 1,000 times more important? Which gets at least 1,000 times more coverage?

    When they had nothing to horrify people, however hard they pushed, they simply turned to lying. The claim that the NOTW had not only accessed Milly Dowler's phone but had deleted messages, convincing the police and family she must still be alive was simply a lie. The Guardian even apologised for producing it along with 40 odd others - months later, when it no longer mattered - far less prominently than the initial lie.

   Then a bunch of rich rascals and media celebrities, whose agents hadn't been able to keep all their scandals under wraps, set up Hacked Off to try and make sure the press always did what they wanted. For once this seems to be a genuine organisation rather than the normal government funded fakecharity. This is strong evidence that it is not one massive conspiracy.

   The Labour party naturally willing to do anything for favourable airtime and Cameron panicked, setting up a lawyerly enquiry without fist squaring the judge to make sure he wouldn't propose anything non-token. Naturally if you pay a courtful of people £5.6 million and counting they must be expected to come up with some proposals, useful or not - otherwise they will look as if they weren't worth the money.

   So Leveson inevitably came up with a scheme to regulate the press. Labour, being totalitarian and the Pseudo-Liberals being wholly opposed to liberal principles adopted them. And Cameron, despite clearly knowing they were dangerous, but having no trace of moral courage, adopted them. Or as the BBC dishonestly said "the 3 main parties" stitched it up, only the 3rd party being opposed and they weren't asked.

    We have seen generations of broadcasting media largely owned by the state (the rest being state regulated) with promises in their charter of honesty and impartiality. So much so that it is now, with 28 gate, literally impossible for anybody who is both informed and honest, to deny that the state broadcaster will lie, slant, select and censor any sort of dissent, to an extent no Russian broadcaster would dream of doing. And that they will do so to promote a form of dictatorial bureaucratic, parasitic big state socialism no Russian broadcaster would dream of supporting.

     It is noticeable that the people running this Royal Charter will be drawn, not from either those who know anything about the press, nor from politicians. This leaves the "great and good" of the civil service and judiciary" - not like the bad old days when trials were conducted by juries of ordinary citizens. That is to say exactly the same class who run the corrupted BBC monopoly.

    And next the blogsphere.


   Graphic from a highly recommended article by the Daily Mail, the only newspaper trying to stay in the gutter where the press belongs.
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  Also Jerry Pournelle, a must read for anybody interested in politics or human progress, used this link I sent him:

Dinosaur Killer Likely To Be A Comet Not Asteroid
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21709229
In which case we can’t predict when the next one will turn up..
It is by no means certain which it was but this shifts the odds
Neil Craig