Tag Archives: the Guardian

Why some control of the press does not mean Hitler

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Boing Boing is one of the most enjoyable blogs around. It combines silly shit with genuinely interesting shit in a format that people like me have loved for years. From time to time, editors of Boing Boing, respected as they are as media experts, get a chance to comment on current affairs on newspaper websites like that of The Guardian. This is cool because new media arseholes like myself yearn for old media recognition. Well, I don’t. But the rest of them do.

So Cory Doctorow, the dude from Boing Boing, gets to write a column from time to time for The Guardian. Which is something I’d love to do (except for the rooting around in my private life, the tall poppy syndrome mentality and the likelihood of my words being twisted by some scumbag on a personal blog: kudos for avoiding comments on your column, Cory: that’s the best way to stop dissent).

In his column, Doctorow celebrates the downfall of the News of the World because of its revolting tactics [it’s the paper’s attitude which was even more revolting as far as I’m concerned], but warns that such a case ought not be used to “rein in the press”.

Doctorow, full of the fear of fascism, agonises:

For me, the phrase “the press is too powerful” is as chilling as “these elections are too time-consuming” or “this secret ballot is just a farce” or “due process is too expensive; we know who’s guilty and who isn’t.” It is a contradiction in terms: for while it’s possible for a particular company or cartel to be too powerful, the idea that the institution of the press is too powerful is Orwellian. If a media company grows too powerful, that generally means the press is not powerful enough: an all-eclipsing media empire blots out press freedom by monopolising distribution channels, distorting discourse and allying itself with this party or that in exchange for favours and (of course) more power. A powerful press is one built on vigorous, pluralistic debate, one that allows new voices to emerge and new points of view to be heard. The more diverse the press is, the more powerful it becomes.

 

Sadly, this is his response to suggestions that the press (that old dog we can’t quite bring ourselves to shoot) ought not regulate itself, but that someone else should take a look at the whole mess and… sort shit out.

When I say “the press is too powerful”, I do not mean, “there ought to be a commission what decides on what, how and why a newspaper reports a story”. No, I mean to say: “the press, outside of its service of information to the people, and reporting important news and suchlike, ought not exert such power over Government that said Government is rendered entirely at the mercy of a foreign man hellbent on a personal crusade whose ideology is exactly that by which he became the most powerful media magnate in our history”.

I hope the entire empire comes tumbling down.

Incidentally, England already has very attractive and lucrative libel laws. So Doctorow clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Bruce Anderson is a stupid man

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I wouldn’t normally post a link to the Independent, mainly because of Bruce Anderson. A few years ago, I liked that newspaper’s international and environmental coverage, the columns by Robert Fisk and even its silly covers. But it was Bruce Anderson’s bilious opinion pieces that made me turn away for good.

Tonight, I read an opinion piece on the Guardian which obliged me to see what this stupid man had written. His article which, through a series of bafflingly illogical and incoherent arguments, makes the case for torture – frankly beggars belief. One can only assume that he is either a malicious agent provocateur, a truly evil pervert or simply stupid. I think you’ll agree that I’m being charitable when I plump for that last answer. The article is so riddled with fallacy and flaw that I have neither the time nor the patience to pick it apart here. Read it for yourself and see whether I’m really employing an ad hominem fallacy, or whether my treatment is actually quite fair. After all, we needn’t waste our time debating what fools say, right?

Barcelona sex mayhem – stories from Sunday night

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Now I don’t know how late Giles Tremlett filed this story about Barcelona. But the Guardian has it timestamped at 1938 Madrid time, which is certainly late enough to have come after a very hearty lunch indeed. One clue suggesting that this is the case comes in the form of the article’s shortness. Tremlett isn’t the most wordy of reporters but all the same…

Another oddity is Tremlett’s insistence that “Although Las Ramblas has always attracted prostitutes, they used to occupy a small area near the port”, which is, as a local travelling tinker muttered to me, “a complete load of bollocks”. I’m not sure when this golden age of non bollock grabbing Rambline strolling is supposed to have occurred but it was certainly not very recently. Barcelona has always been packed to the rafters with ladies and gentlemen of the night (and plenty of lady gentlemen too). Indeed, it’d be hard to walk down a single street in the city without passing some brothel or other (even if you don’t realise it).

What this whole story really represents is the latest development in a late-summer-nothing-to-publish episode, where El País shocked our sensibilities (and had us checking again and again) with some pictures of a long-haired tourist making the beast with one back with a prostitute round the back of an overpriced market. Noted local newspaper, 20 Minutos (oh, yes I did!) interviewed various pillars of the community the other day, asking them whether they thought that Les Rambles has a major problem with prostitution. General opinion: it’s a hell of a lot better now than it used to be.

My feelings: Mexican sombreros and €7 a beer are far more offensive and nearly as exploitative.

Israel invades Gaza… again

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Sadly, it seems that the Guardian’s predictions were accurate: the invasion was obviously going to happen. As usual, the leading liberal democracies are backing an illegal invasion (quietly in public, slavishly, no doubt, in private).

I wish I could attend one of the demonstrations going on around the world but it doesn’t look likely. If anyone has any reports from the demos, I’d love to hear them.

[Written on highly expensive Internet access from monsoonal Darwin]

Israel ‘considering’ Gaza invasion?

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I’ve been pretty much completely without Internet access for about 12 days and checked the Guardian today to see that Harold Pinter had died and Israel has killed hundreds more civilians in Gaza. The Guardian reports that they may be about to invade the Palestinian territory.

I can’t write much now but I will note that Israel seems to have learned from the US invasion of Iraq:  starve your enemy to death for months or years, all the while attacking them with air strikes and then you get the ground troops in. So much easier that way.

Let’s hope that the hundreds of Palestinians killed in the last 48 hours will go some way to repaying the FIFTEEN dead EVER from the Qassam rocket attacks they are supposed to be preventing.

Oh and don’t forget that the political wing of Hamas is not a proscribed terrorist group in the UK… just a political party.

Antisemitism rate ‘doubled’ in Spain

Politics, Spain, ,

Islamophobia and antisemitism are both on the rise in Europe, according to a report quoted in the Guardian.

Disturbingly, the scale of ‘unfavourable feelings toward Jews’ in Spain has more than doubled, going from 21% to 46% of the population. That makes Spain the most antisemitic country in Europe. Actually, I happened to see a crappy ‘Jew joke’ on some Spanish blog today, so I guess it’s hardly surprising.

Download the full Pew Global Attitudes report here.

Shock, horror: UK government uses state broadcaster to broadcast propaganda

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This story, which The Guardian broke yesterday, whill no doubt fill all freedom lovers with fear. Could it really be true that the British government, the PM of which has openly called for more resources to be dedicated to ‘propaganda’ in the media, the same government which sacked the entire board of directors of the BBC after the Corporation had the temerity to suggest they’d misled the public, would really use the state broadcasting service to broadcast specifically anti-Al Qaeda propaganda? Surely not!?!

As any fule know, the BBC has been used for this purpose for decades (since forever, basically). In many ways, there’s not much wrong with it: anti-Al Qaeda messages are hardly harmful. But intentionally misleading people (like when they promoted the idea of Al Qaeda as some sort of cogent, identifiable enemy), is.

The BBC deny that this edition of Analysis was influenced by the government. So where, exactly, does ‘security correspondent’ Frank Gardner get his information from? I bet you a tenner that when he’s talking about people as difficult to meet and assess as Al Qaeda, his mates at SIS or FCO give him a pretty good briefing. And why not? It’s not like he’s going to go to Waziristan himself to ask Osama if he’s on hist last legs.

But it’s not just the ‘war on terror’ which the British government operates via the BBC. Most official foreign policy positions are mirrored in BBC coverage. While it is fashionable to call the BBC ‘biased’ (normally because they report the deaths of Palestininan women and children, the bloody Trots!), in fact the Corporation is inherently tied to the establishment, and particularly when it comes to foreign policy. This is why the headline on Radio 4’s PM programme yesterday wasn’t “Is Russia redrawing the world map?” but “Russia redraws the world map” – exactly the UK’s official line, and a far stronger headline than employed by The Guardian or Channel 4.

That anyone at the BBC or the UK government would try to deny what is an obvious, even understandable, state of affairs is hilarious. Almost as much as anyone thinking this is news.

Gaycelona versus Gayxample – does Graham Keeley ever know what he’s talking about?

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As seen in this fluff piece by the Guardian’s Man In Spain for nice hotels under €100 in Barcelona:

Hotel California

Great value for money considering its locaton around the corner from La Rambla. The California offers decent, clean rooms and markets itself as gay friendly, though this is more subtly played than in hotels like Axel, in the “Gaycelona” district of Barcelona.

As any fule know, the so-called gay district is called ‘Gayxample’ from the Eixample neighbourhood. It seems that Graham Keeley’s articles either consist of reheating AP and El País stories or churning out ignorant tosh. Has no one at the Guardian yet noticed that while Keeley is filing tons more stories on Spain than there used to be, they are predominantly ripped off or simply inaccurate? Maybe it’s reading Flat Earth News but this guy is really beginning to annoy me.

Guardian, sort it out!

P.S. I was going to say that Graham Keeley doesn’t know his arse from his elbow but I suspect that I’d have been picked up for bad taste. So I didn’t.

Updated: Iraq war killed more than Saddam

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A depressing article at The Guardian discusses the death-toll of the Iraq war, in which between 700,000 and 1.5 million people have died. All studies into the human impact of the war except the Iraq Body Count now estimate a death-toll greater than the total killed by Saddam Hussein in 30 years of dictatorship.

There’s your moral intervention.

UPDATE: Bush has given a highly upbeat speech about how it was all worth it, despite “a high cost in lives and treasure” – whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. I mean seriously, fuck. Treasure? What the hell is the man on about?

Will Nick Cohen, who flip-flopped on the war before settling in favour of indiscriminate suffering and death (tough decision so he must have been right… right?) – will Cohen also give a speech to say “Non, je ne regrette rien”…? No doubt it’ll be rammed with ‘thought experiments’ and other nonsense, though hopefully not references to ‘treasure’.