Why on earth is the Guardian editor siding with The S*n over the people of Liverpool?

If you ever needed a demonstration of how far to the right the Guardian has shifted, consider the fact that their political editor Heather Stewart decided to insult the people of Liverpool, and insult the intelligence of the rest of us by presenting hacks from the S*n as poor innocent victims, solely in order to score ridiculously cheap political points against the Labour left.

The Tweet in question relates to a Momentum event in the city of Liverpool. It wasn't Momentum's choice to hold the Labour Party Conference in the city (it was the Labour leadership) but once it was settled that all the conference events were going to be in Liverpool it was obvious that anyone with any decency and respect for the victims of the Hillsborough disaster would avoid inviting hacks from The S*n to their events.

The reason is simple. When police negligence resulted in the deaths of 96 innocent Liverpool fans in 1989, The S*n produced a truly vile pack of lies on their front page to deliberately deflect blame from the police onto the victims of the tragedy. Worst of all, the headline above the extraordinary pack of front page lies read "The Truth".

For decades this grotesque fan-blaming narrative was used to deflect blame from the true culprits onto the victims of the disaster.

Just imagine how the families of the deceased felt to have their loved ones falsely blamed for their own deaths. Just imagine how the traumatised survivors of the tragedy felt to be smeared as drunks who pickpocketed the dead and urinated on the "brave cops" (you know the "brave cops" who actually caused the tragedy through their negligence).

Just imagine how it felt to suffer these lies for decades before the truth was finally admitted; that police negligence caused the disaster and the fan-blaming propaganda was all a pack of lies.

To their eternal credit the fans of Liverpool's rival club Everton FC put aside all their footballing differences and supported the Boycott the S*n campaign too out of solidarity for their friends, family members, neighbours, and work colleagues from the red half of the city.

So if you can't see why The S*n is still boycotted across Liverpool to this day, you really can't have much in the way of basic human empathy.

Despite this well-known and commonly understood history between The S*n and the city of Liverpool, Heather Stewart decided to use this show of respect for the Boycott The S*n campaign as a stick to beat Momentum with, publicly calling the decision "outrageous" and comparing it to Donald Trump's tactic of excluding journalists who criticise his Presidency or dare to ask him awkward questions.

After being called out on her misrepresentation, Heather's response was to feign ignorance with 'oh, I couldn't have imagined that not inviting a S*n hack to an event in Liverpool could have had anything to do with Hillsborough' type Tweets.

There's no way that the political editor of a British newspaper could have remained entirely ignorant of the reasons The S*n is boycotted in Liverpool. No way at all.

So dressing this respect for the Boycott The S*n campaign up as some kind of Trumpian press censorship, rather than respect for a Liverpool-specific boycott is clearly an attempt to deceive the reader.

And feigning ignorance in the aftermath is perhaps even worse. 

Not only is siding with hacks from The S*n to present them as the poor innocent victims of lefty oppression an gross insult to the people of Liverpool, it's an insult to the intelligence of everyone else that she expects us to believe it too.

It's a clear demonstration of the level of contempt Heather and many of her fellow Guardian hacks seem to have for ordinary people. 

They think we're crap-brained and gullible enough to fall for their politically partisan smears, even when they're as poorly crafted as Heather's.

Heather's smear also demonstrates something else about the media. Her decision to shit all over the people of Liverpool in a show of solidarity with hacks at The S*n, just in order to smear the left-leaning grassroots campaign group Momentum is evidence that the mainstream media is a clique where comfortably wealthy hacks from the hard-right Murdoch propaganda empire and from the supposedly left-leaning Guardian have way more in common with each other than they do with ordinary people.

In recent years The Guardian have run countless articles bitterly attacking left-wing independent media sites like mine, and decrying the fact that the traditional mainstream media hacks are having their role as gatekeepers of political discourse undermined, and Heather's S*n solidarity Tweet is about the best demonstration of why this is happening that you could ask for.

If the Guardian's political editor has more empathy towards hacks from the Murdoch propaganda empire than she does for the people of Liverpool and the victims of the Hillsborough tragedy, then she's clearly living in an insulated bubble very far removed from the real world.

And if she's willing to distort the Liverpool Boycott The S*n campaign solely in order to score cheap political points against the Labour left, she's using the same kind of despicable and deceptive journalistic tricks as S*n hacks do, and displaying the same outright contempt for her audience too.

So it's absolutely no wonder at all that ever more people are cancelling their subscriptions to The Guardian and making donations to independent media sources instead.

 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.

OR

The S*n's attempted hatchet job on Richard Burgon is spectacularly idiotic

Let's start with a fact that everyone should know. The S*n is a despicable hard-right propaganda rag that nobody should read. They have no respect for the truth or basic human decency. If they decide to attack you for any reason, they will print lie after lie to smear you, even if you've just survived a horrific football stadium disaster at the hands of a negligent police force.

On evening after The S*n mocked a footballer with black ancestry by comparing him to a gorilla and attacked the city of Liverpool on the eve of the Hillsborough disaster, hacks at The S*n decided to turn their fire on the Labour MP and Shadow Justice Secretary Richard Burgon.

The S*n's political editor Tom Newton Dunn attacked Burgon for supposedly joining "a heavy metal band that delights in Nazi symbols". Everything about the story is fact-averse nonsense.

Burgon hasn't joined the (not very famous) band Dream Troll, they're actually some of his old heavy metal mates from his teenage years in Leeds. He still knocks about with them now that he's an MP and they invited him to sing on one track for their latest album.

The band are not Nazi sympathisers in any way.

The cited "Nazi symbols" in the S*n article relate to Dream Troll's "We Sold Our Souls For Rock n' Troll" album cover.

It is so obviously a tribute to the legendary 1975 Black Sabbath album "We Sold Our Souls For Rock n' Roll" it's ridiculous. (judge for yourself).

Before they went to print The S*n hacks were sent a copy of the Black Sabbath album cover, but they denied that it was relevant to their story and published their misleading hatchet job regardless 

The S*n even got rentaquote Tory MP Charlie Elphicke to put his name to a load of sanctimonious drivel criticising Richard Burgon for hanging out with his old mates, calling it a "terrible misjudgement", accusing him of "sending the wrong message" and demanding that he "distance himself from this band as soon as possible".

That lot would be sanctimonious enough in its own right, but it comes from a guy who Tweeted furious condemnation of anti-fascist protesters, but said nothing to criticise the actual fascists they were opposing.

When picking a guy to condemn someone for his old mates' totally made-up fascist sympathies, it's probably best not to pick a guy who (like a lot of other Tories) is clearly a lot more sympathetic to extreme-right fanatics than those who oppose them.

A badge of honour

Burgon is a target for hacks at The S*n because he's one of the few
MPs who criticise the ruinous neoliberal economic dogma that
Rupert Murdoch and The S*n endlessly propagandise in favour of.

Anyone with any sense will know that Burgon and his old heavy metal mates have no extreme-right sympathies, and that the S*n story is a woefully misleading hatchet job that was still published despite the idiocy of it being pointed out to them before it went to print.

The problem is that an awful lot of idiots read hard-right propaganda rags* and allow themselves to be influenced by this kind of spiteful and ridiculously dishonest hatchet job.

Even if gullible people have been convinced into hating Richard Burgon by this smear-job, it's quite telling that this piss-weak fabricated nonsense is the best they can come up with to attack him.

If this embarrassingly lame rubbish is the worst they can sling at him, that just goes to show that he must be a pretty good guy that they couldn't find anything else.

Additionally, the fact that Burgon still knocks about with the mates he's known since he was a teenager, rather than going out on junkets with lobbyists and corporate executives in his spare time like a lot of other MPs do, is another quite strong indicator that he's a pretty decent bloke.

Burgon should see this embarrassingly lame fact-free character attack from bitter black-hearted hacks at The S*n as a real badge of honour. 

Burgon's response

Richard Burgon posted a response to the hatchet job on his Facebook page. Here's an extract.

"When The Sun hates you and what you stand for, they'll come at you. That's not right, but it's what The Sun does to people like me who have different views and principles to those of Rupert Murdoch, Kelvin MacKenzie and the rest of them.

But The Sun should leave my mates out of it. They are not politicians and they shouldn't have their lives intruded upon in this way. They are mates and they will always be my mates. In places like Leeds, we stick together.

The Sun doesn't get that. They'll make up stories about innocent people dying at Hillsborough and not care.

They'll attack trade unionists.

They'll attack police officers for getting a lunch break.

They'll attack immigrants and asylum seekers.

They'll attack people who are looking for work and people who can't work because they're ill.

Don't ever let The Sun become "The Voice of Britain" - because if it does, we will all become victims of the hate of those who run the show at The Sun." 

Boycott the S*n

On the 28th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster it's worth reiterating that no true football fan would ever touch a copy of the S*n or be seen dead sharing links to their website on social media. How could anyone imagine that The S*n wouldn't have printed the same kind of disgusting lies if it had been their club that had lost 96 fans to appalling police negligence that day?

Even if you don't like football, there's still no excuse for supporting Rupert Murdoch's disgusting hard-right propaganda empire by actually paying money to read the utterly misleading bile he's intent on spoon feeding his readers, or giving him free publicity by sharing links to The S*n website.

 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.

OR

* = Reading a tabloid newspaper has a worse effect on your English language skills than not reading a newspaper at all!

Paul Nuttall just deleted his website

Even judged by the staggeringly dishonest standards of his political contemporaries the UKIP leader Paul Nuttall is in a field of his own.

• Nuttall put a furious anti-NHS diatribe up on his website, then when called out about it decided to delete the page and pretend that he now loves the NHS. Only the most ridiculous Internet n00b could believe that deleting the webpage makes things disappear from the Internet.

• Nuttall's LinkedIn profile claimed that he had a PhD from Liverpool Hope University which was an outright lie. His excuse for this one is that the page had nothing to do with him or his team, expecting people to believe that his own LinkedIn profile was actually part of some terrible anti-UKIP conspiracy.

• Nuttall was forced to admit that claims that he'd played professional football for Tranmere Rovers were outright lies. Just imagine the stupidity of a person who thinks that the football nerds wouldn't eventually go through the records to check out such a bold claim.

• When he decided to stand as a candidate in the Stoke Central by-election Nuttall registered using the address of an empty house that he had never even set foot in. Doing that is a criminal offence. Nuttall obviously just expected to get away with that lie too.

• When pressed about claims on his website that he'd lost close personal friends at the Hillsborough disaster Nuttall was forced to come clean that he hadn't in fact lost a close friend. A scapegoat was found and his media manager was persuaded to take the blame but then it was revealed that he told the same lie about losing close personal friends to the BBC in 2011. 

In the wake of the Hillsborough lie Nuttall seems to have gone into hiding. I can't see his Twitter feed these days because he blocked me for tweeting this photo at him, but I'm told that he's stopped tweeting. He's also completely pulled down his website, presumably to stop people scouring it for more of his blatant lies.

The idea of going into online hiding just a week before a high profile by-election is quite extraordinary.

Most politicians wouldn't try to hide from the lies so pathetically, but it seems that Nuttall's lies are so numerous and so brazen that he feels that he's got no choice but to keep his head down and hope that the people of Stoke Central are stupid enough to elect such an obvious and distasteful liar, with no connections whatever to the area, as their parliamentary representative.

The problem with Paul Nuttall isn't that he's dishonest. If dishonesty was any kind of political impediment how on earth would it be possible to explain David Cameron's political career?

No - the problem is that Nuttall is such a hopelessly bad liar that surely even the most idiotic of people (Daily Express readers, Britain First enthusiasts ...) can't help but see that he's an absolute bullshitter.

 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.

OR

The right-wing hypocrisy over "Fake News"

Whatever your view on the Buzzfeed decision to publish the unverified Watersports-gate Trump dossier, it's pretty difficult to argue that it was "fake news". Buzfeed didn't make up the dossier or its contents. They didn't make up the fact that the US secret services were made aware of its existence before the Presidential election, but chose to sit on it. They didn't make up the fact that both Barack Obama and Donald Trump were briefed about the dossier after the Presidential election. They simply made the decision to publish a leaked document without making sure that the allegations it contained were verifiable first.

The sight of Donald Trump scrawling an ALL CAPS Twitter rant about the leaked dossier being "FAKE NEWS" was one of the most blatant displays of hypocrisy we've yet seen from him.

This is a guy who fuelled conspiracy theories for years over Barack Obama's birth certificate! This is a guy who spread the fake news that the father of his Republican leadership rival Ted Craz was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy! This is a guy who openly lied about having seen Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the September 11th attacks (the only 9/11 celebrations that were ever actually verified were a bunch of deliriously happy Israelis). This is the guy who claimed that climate change is a conspiracy invented by the Chinese!

Donald Trump isn't the only one to have a hysterically hypocritical hissy-fit over the Watersports-gate dossier. Rupert Murdoch's UK propaganda sheet The S*n printed a bizarre editorial slamming Buzzfeed for supposedly "making a mockery of journalism" becuase of their decision to publish the documents, which is quite some allegation from a newspaper with such a history of printing extraordinary front page lies. Consider their disgusting efforts to pin the blame for the Hillsborough disaster onto the victims, their brazen misrepresentation of an opinion poll result in order to spread front page anti-Muslim hatred or their use of an undisclosed source to falsely claim that the Queen backed Brexit.

Not only does the S*n's "making a mockery of journalism" allegation contrast with their own appalling track record of making a mockery of journalism, it was printed on the very same day that the S*n published a fake news story about a supermarket attack in Ourense, Spain.

The sensationalist S*n story claimed that the person who was arrested was a Muslim who was carrying a bag of explosives and shouted "Allahu Akbar" before opening fire in the supermarket.

Both the Spanish police and the Mercadona supermarket chain confirmed that the man was not a Muslim and that he had no terrorist connections. In fact the police stated that he was a Spanish national who had "decreased mental faculties".

Whether you think Buzzfeed's decision to publish the unverified Watersports-gate dossier was justifiable or not, it's clearly nowhere near as unjustifiable and irresponsible as completely making up the details of an apparent mental breakdown in order to make it look like a terrorist attack by an Islamist extremist.

The hysterical reaction to the Buzzfeed Watersports-gate story from right-wingers is yet another demonstration of what a staggeringly hypocritical bunch of special snowflakes they are. They're willing to make up and dish out fake news whenever it suits their interests (which is incredibly often), but as soon as others resort to similar tactics (like publishing unverified content) they start shrieking and crying victim!

 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.

OR

The "fake news" furore

The growing mainstream media furore over "fake news" is telling. Of course there are loads of dodgy websites out there pushing deliberate misinformation and abject made up nonsense, but the idea that the corporate mainstream press is some kind of bastion of reliability, and somehow not guilty of pushing "fake news" of their own is extraordinarily naive.


The mainstream press has undeniably been guilty of churning out "fake news" for decades. There was the uncritical front-page regurgitation of Tony Blair's Iraq distortions (see image). Before that there were the utterly disgraceful Hillsborough lies on the front page of the S*n. and the deliberate reversal of the Orgreave film footage by the BBC to make it look like it was the miners who attacked the police, rather than the other way around.

Even back in the 1920s the Daily Mail published the forged Zinoviev letter four days before the 1924 General Election as a desperate attempt to secure victory for the Tory party.

Even when the mainstream media isn't just making up the news completely by publishing crudely photoshopped images to smear their political enemies, lying about war heroes, or brazenly misrepresenting survey results in order to provoke anti-Muslim hatred, biases like the anti-NHS agenda of the right-wing tabloids are completely obvious for all to see.

It's clear that the problem of "Fake news" has been with us for decades, the only difference is that these days, thanks to the Internet, the corporate mainstream hacks no longer have such a powerful monopoly on the spreading of misleading and downright dishonest political propaganda. The "fake news" furore is more a demonstration of mainstream media hacks' fury that other people are usurping their ability to use lies and distortions to warp the political agenda, than a genuine concern about accuracy in reporting.

Aside from the erosion of their monopoly on controlling the news agenda with fake stories, another thing that mainstream journalists are struggling to cope with in the social media age is the rise of reliable alternative media.

Mainstream media hacks had become so used to spoon-feeding their political agenda to the public that many of them are now utterly complacent, and don't really know what to do about the upsurge in new alternative media sites that are dedicated to critiquing the manufactured news tropes pushed by the establishment media, and focusing attention on the information the mainstream press ignore.

We shouldn't be surprised if mainstream media hacks begin using "fake news" as a crude synonym for all alternative media, no matter how well researched and evidence based it actually is. Time and again mainstream media hacks have displayed their utter contempt towards alternative media and social media news sites, so sweeping up the whole lot under the pejorative term "fake news" would certainly suit their purposes of making all non-mainstream media sources seem inherently dodgy and unreliable.

Alternative media is also a thorn in the side of the Tory government because independent non-corporate websites tend to hold the government to account for things that mainstream hacks have so often been willing to ignore. So don't be surprised if the Tories decide to collude with the mainstream press by introducing legislation to clamp down on reliable and informative independent news sites under the guise of dealing with the problem of "fake news".

Of course I'm not trying to claim that "fake news" isn't a problem. It absolutely is, and it's clearly a problem that long-predates the Internet and the social media revolution too. What I'm trying to say is that the political establishment and their chums in the mainstream press are likely to try to use the "fake news" furore in order to achieve an unspoken agenda of smearing and obstructing the legitimate (non-fake) alternative news sites that they see as a threat to their own comfortable positions at the top of the news hierarchy.

In my view the only truly effective way to combat "fake news" is through a drive to improve the critical thinking skills of the general public so that people tend to ask questions like "who is telling me this?", "why are they telling me this?", "did the writer get paid for writing this, and by whom?", "is this piece evidence-based or opinion-based?", "what are the underlying assumptions in this article?", "does this article cite reliable sources?" before they decide to accept or reject whatever it is that they're being told, no matter whether the source is an independent blog or a mainstream media outlet.

 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.

OR