The front page of the Daily Mail screamed about the supposed bias on the BBC Debate and the right-wing demagogue Nigel Farage even called for people to be sacked over the fact that the audience didn't cheer Amber Rudd and Paul Nuttall enough!
This victimy whinging from right-wingers about the supposedly biased audience at last night's TV debate is yet another example of the feeble "poor us" victim complex narrative that right-wingers like Nigel Farage deliberately stoke in order to drum up support from the cognitively impaired.
Instead of just recognising that Amber Rudd had a bit of a nightmare (hardly surprising given that her father had died just two days before, but her mercilessly self-serving leader Theresa May still sent her grieving subordinate into the firing line to take the hits she wanted to avoid being seen taking herself) and that the new UKIP leader Paul Nuttall was his usual charmless, boorish and flagrantly dishonest self, it all had to be a conspiracy by the nasty BBC didn't it?
Media bias
Right-wingers whinging about media bias is extraordinary stuff. The research has shown time and again that the media is intensely biased against Jeremy Corbyn and in favour of the Tories.
Analysis of press coverage of the 2017 General Election campaign at Loughborough University has shown that the print media is intensely biased against the Labour Party, and on average still actually singing the praises of the Tory party despite their catastrophically inept election campaign so far (calling a self-serving election they promised they wouldn't call, their farcical uncosted shambles of a manifesto, their plans to snatch food out of children's mouths, thier scrapped pledges not to raise Income Tax and National Insurance for ordinary working people, their depraved plan to asset strip frail elderly people who need social care, their cowardly leader refusing to appear in the election debates ...).
The BBC isn't quite as biased as the Tory-worshipping print media, but they're still bad. The BBC Politics team is stuffed full of Tories and Laura Kuenssberg was famously caught out manufacturing fake news by splicing together different questions and answers in order to attack Jeremy Corbyn.
During the EU referendum campaign the right-wing bias of the broadcast media was laid bare. An astounding 71.2% of political sources were from the Tory party compared to just 18.4% from Labour. When you factor in the 7.6% of coverage that went to UKIP, the two hard-right political parties were given 77.8% of the airtime, while all the other political parties combined subsisted on just 22.2% of the airtime between them!
Audience appeal
The BBC Debate audience wasn't shockingly biased. There was no conspiracy.
The fact is that Paul Nuttall has always been a noxious and deeply unpopular buffoon, and Amber Rudd has always been a bit of a plonker (who Theresa May should never have sent into the firing line when she should obviously have been at home grieving).
If the right-wingers wanted applause from the audience, maybe they should actually have made stirring speeches about how Britain deserves better (Jeremy Corbyn and Caroline Lucas did several), witty political jibes (Tim Farron skewered the cowardly Theresa May multiple times, the best being his closing speech) or appeals to basic human decency (Angus Robertson's impassioned defence of the contributions immigrants make to our society, or Caroline Lucas' condemnation of arms dealing to depraved Islamist tyrannies like Saudi Arabia).
It's simple. The two hard-right politicians didn't get applauded much because performed poorly and talked humourless and uninspiring rubbish for most of the debate.
People didn't want to hear Paul Nuttall's divisive anti-Muslim ranting (especially so soon after Manchester) and the Tory broken robot repetition of the same tired propaganda tropes is no more appealing for the fact that it was Amber Rudd doing it this time, not the cowardly Theresa May.
Victim compexes
The hard-right thrive on victim complex narratives. They know that the most effective forms of political propaganda are the ones that create strong emotional reactions, and a hugely effective way of creating strong emotional reactions is by inflating people's victim complexes.
The hard-right have deliberately created a right-wing "snowflake" demographic who walk around with victim complexes the size of hot air balloons, and react with outrage at every perceived injustice.
These people are remarkably easy to trigger into totally abandoning their cognitive faculties and wallowing in self-pity with conspiracy theories about how white, wealthy, middle-age males are the most persecuted people in society, and how the nasty BBC are terribly biased because they didn't stuff the debate audience full of people so thick they couldn't even recognise the fact that Amber Rudd had a nightmare of it, and Paul Nuttall was his usual obnoxious, abrasive and deeply unappealing self.
Conclusion
The actual evidence (mountains of it) demonstrates that the mainstream media bias is actually intensely anti-left (hence the existence of homemade blogs like mine to try to counteract it a bit), but facts and evidence are are utterly irrelevant in the world of hard-right victim complex wallowing.
No! According the the hard-right demagogues though. According to them the evidence of your eyes is wrong. Amber Rudd didn't have a stuttering nightmare, and Paul Nuttall wasn't an abrasive boor. What actually happened is that they both performed magnificently, and the only reason they looked ill-prepared, unappealing and hopelessly out of their depth was an evil BBC conspiracy to undermine them.
And if you'll believe that lamentable, reality-denying, victim-complex riddled gibberish, you'll believe literally anything won't you?
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
No comments:
Post a Comment