The general election was only announced days ago, yet the Tory campaign has already degenerated into farce.
Johnson and Cummings could have picked pretty much anyone on the political right to draw up their election manifesto, but somehow they decided to hire a lobbyist called Rachel Wolf for the task. In her day job she lobbies on behalf of fracking companies and multinational tax-dodging corporations (so no glaringly obvious conflicts of interest there eh?)
The BBC and most of the mainstream media obliged Boris Johnson's minders by presenting his visit to Addenbrooke's Hospital in exactly the way they planned it, but the truth soon came out on social media. Johnson was booed out of the hospital by staff and patients alike, and hospital workers were prevented from asking him questions.
The day of Johnson's disastrous hospital visit was also supposed to be Brexit Day, but just like his predecessor Theresa May, Johnson ended up cobbling together such a shambolic, economically ruinous, and downright divisive bodge job of a Brexit proposal it had literally no chance of actually passing.
Despite having said he'd "rather be dead in a ditch" than extend Brexit again, that's precisely what he ended up doing.
Then it turns out that one of the Tories' election candidates was guilty of costing the public a fortune by deliberately collapsing a rape trial in a desperate bid to help his mate get away with raping a woman (his rapist mate was eventually jailed for five years after a retrial).
If Tory candidate vetting processes are so bad that they end up standing a rape trial saboteur, just imagine how many other unspeakably awful people they must be putting forward.
Then it was revealed that on the day the election was announced Tory ministers signed off on a scam to use public money to push a load of pro-Tory Facebook ads in marginal constituencies. Facebook eventually blocked this brazen Tory electoral fraud, but the Tories are steadfastly refusing to admit how much public money has been spent on this cynical election-rigging effort.
A softball interview with Laura Kuenssberg should have been the perfect tonic for Johnson, but he somehow managed to fluff the absolute "gimme" question he was asked about NHS privatisation: Would he rule out more NHS privatisation on his watch? Waffle, waffle, waffle, evasion, deception, whataboutery!
And then to top it all off, the Metropolitan Police finally handed their files on Vote Leave criminality to the Crown Prosecution Service after 16 months, meaning the Prime Minister and his most senior adviser could be facing criminal prosecution for their referendum cheating at some point in the next parliament, whether they're running the government or not.
If Johnson and the Tories can involve themselves in so many scandals in just a matter of days since the election was called, try to imagine how bloody awful they'd be if the British public are reckless enough to hand them a parliamentary majority for the next five years.
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First we found out that the Tory Brextremist faction have been gleefully paying tribute to the KKK by going around calling themselves "the Grand Wizards" and then within the space of a day the Tory MP Suella Braveman openly promoted the modern era reworking of the anti-Semitic Nazi era conspiracy theory of Cultural Bolshevism (Kulturbolschewismus) by ranting about the threat of cultural Marxism.
This is definitely a story about obscene bigotry and extreme-right fanaticism within the Tory ranks, but it's also a story of two very different styles of journalism.
The chief political editor of the BBC News Laura Kuenssberg was the one to break the extraordinary Grand Wizards story, but she named no names, and did absolutely nothing to hold the Tories to account for their grotesque tribute to the KKK white supremacist terrorist group who have lynched and killed thousands of people.
In fact once the story that she broke started going mega-viral, she desperately tried to put the story back in its box with an extraordinarily panicked Tweet aimed at downplaying the story, and creating the absurd fiction that none of the Tory ERG Brextremists were aware of the fact that Grand Wizard is the name of the head of the KKK when they started calling themselves "the Grand Wizards".
What Kuenssberg tried to do was portray the scandal as just an innocent mistake, but it simply came off as a desperate last ditch PR damage limitation exercise on behalf of the Tory party after her original matter-of-fact Tweet ballooned into a huge scandal.
Suella Braveman ranting on about the extreme-right Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory demonstrates an extraordinary lack of awareness, and to do it when the Grand Wizards thing was still brewing up into huge scandal was unbelievably bone-headed.
But this time the journalist didn't treat it as some kind of benign anecdote and then desperately try to row the story back when people pointed out how outrageous it was. This time Dawn Foster immediately pointed out to Braveman that the mass-murdering extreme-right terrorist Anders Breivik was fixated with the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory.
This challenge resulted in Braveman actually doubling-down on her use of the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, claiming that "no one can be offended" because "we're in a war" and "it's damaging to our British genius"!
It's delightful to see a journalist actually holding a politician to account on the dangerous rhetoric they're spouting rather than running damage limitation PR for them like Laura Kuenssberg
But it's disheartening that Dawn is one of the minority who actually do their job and hold the powerful to account, and even more dispiriting to see that most of the mainstream media have chosen to just ignore the fact that a Tory MP and former government minister has been publicly spouting Nazi rhetoric.
Of course there are reasons for this lack of coverage. One is that highlighting an extremely overt and obvious case of Tory anti-Semitism would spectacularly undermine the carefully curated mainstream media narrative that Labour are the nasty bigots with the anti-Semitism problem.
Another reason this story isn't getting traction is that a lot of the pro-Tory establishment propagandists in the mainstream media hack pack understand how much of a headache this would present for Theresa May if it gets amplified.
May would be left with the choice of suspending Breveman from the party which would incur the absolute wrath of the ERG Brextremists, or she could ignore it which would infuriate the "moderate Tories" who detest what she's allowing their party to turn into.
Tories from all factions of the party are already itching to get rid of Theresa May, so her supporters in the press don't want to rock the boat by amplifying this story, for fear of causing the May government to collapse and ushering Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street in the ensuing General Election.
These outrageous Tory scandals aren't just an indictment of a Tory party that is rushing headlong towards the extreme-right to such an extent that they're publicly espousing the vile rhetoric that motivated Anders Breivik and the Christchurch killer, it's an indictment of the mainstream media for allowing this to grotesque Tory radicalisation go on right in front of their faces as they desperately try every trick in the book to paint the vehemently anti-racist Labour opposition as the terrifying bigots.
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Laura Kuenssberg is the political editor of BBC News. She's already been in trouble for her displays of political bias before, especially when she was reprimanded for creating "fake news" about Jeremy Corbyn by misleadingly splicing his answers onto completely different questions.
In just two Tweets she managed to illustrate how far BBC standards have dropped under her watch.
In the first Tweet she casually reveals that the Tory Brextremist faction are calling themselves "the Grand Wizards", which is the title of the leader of the Ku Klux Klan (a white supremacist terrorist organisation, not just a bunch of freaky bigots in white cloaks).
Somehow Kuenssberg completely fails to point out how vile and outrageous this nickname is, which is a puzzling one to explain. Either she's so lacking in basic political knowledge she's unaware of the very clear KKK connotations, or she is aware of the KKK aspect but saw no problem.
Despite Kuenssberg's casual and offhand presentation of the "Grand Wizards" story, Twitter absolutely exploded in condemnation, with people from across the political spectrum weighing in to condemn this racist nickname.
But then in her second Tweet Kuenssberg did something even more extraordinary that the casual offhand presentation in the first.
She actually tried to row back the story that she had created by portraying the people who self-applied the Grand Wizards nickname as being so naive and innocent that they didn't realise that it had grotesque racist connotations, and making out that the seriousness of her story is diminished because it's only based on a couple of anonymous sources anyway (as if half the mainstream media's political coverage isn't based on tittle-tattle from anonymous sources).
She asks us to believe that the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, Steve Baker, David Davis, and Iain Duncan Smith are all so ignorant that not a single one of them is aware that the leader of the KKK is called the Grand Wizard, and that they came up with their "Grand Wizards" nickname with "no intended connection to anything else"!
She tries to shut down the mega-viral story that she created by asking us all to believe an absolute absurdity.
Now just try to imagine if a faction of the Labour Party had been calling themselves "the Gestapo" or something equally disgusting. Do you think Laura Kuenssberg would present the story in such a casual manner, as if she was incapable of even recognising that such a self-applied nickname is grotesque and offensive?
Of course she wouldn't. It'd be ammunition in a full frontal attack (and rightly so if anyone in Labour were sick enough to behave like that).
And do you think that she'd actually try to row the story back by creating an absurd fiction that the Labour faction were so unbelievably naive that they didn't see their "Gestapo" nickname as being offensive?
Would she try to claim that they were just "using the nickname informally" and that there was "no intended connection to anything else"?
Of course she wouldn't. She'd be repeatedly harking back to the offensiveness of it every time she mentioned anything to do with the Labour Party for months. It'd be the new endlessly repeated "brick through Angela Eagle's window" or "where's Jeremy Corbyn?" attack line.
There's absolutely no way that Kuenssberg would be trying to do free PR damage limitation work for the Labour Party if a Labour faction had self-applied such a sickening nickname.
When the chief political editor of BBC News is behaving in this extraordinary manner, the pro-Tory bias is impossible to ignore.
But as we learned from the total lack of punishment Kuenssberg received over the Jeremy Corbyn "fake news" story she concocted, she'll continue to get away with this kind of overt political bias. And as long as she's still running the BBC's political output, it's entirely justifiable for the public to perceive the supposedly unbiased and impartial BBC News as simply the propaganda arm of the Conservative Party.
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Jonathan Freedland's opinion piece about the assassination of the Maltese investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia is a smug, astonishingly self-defeating, and downright offensive effort to piggyback a pro-mainstream media narrative onto a tragedy.
Daphne Caruana Galizia was a brave and principled journalist who never shied away from criticising poweful elites like the Maltese mafia, the political establishment, and the billionaires stashing their ill-gotten gains in tax havens like Panama.
In his article Freedland crudely attempts to equate the assassination of an anti-establishment investigation journalist with general criticism of the mainstream media, as if criticising the inherent biases of pro-establishment mainstream hacks like Laura Kuenssberg (who was allowed to keep her job at the "impartial" BBC despite being caught red-handed faking an anti-Corbyn story) is akin to blowing someone up in a car bomb.
One of the most irritating things about Freedland's opportunistic capitalisation on a tragedy is that his diatribe includes a classic example of lazy and biased churnalism that gives the mainstream press such a bad name.
Here's Freedland using the fact that Laura Kuenssberg took a bodyguard to the Labour conference to attack the Labour left.
And here's his fellow Guardian columnist John Harris using the exact same trope in his excruciatingly poor attempt to throw distrust on independent media a few weeks previously, the Labour left, and ... well ... anyone who doesn't rote learn their political opinions from mainstream media churnalists like him and his Guardian stablemates.
If Harris is to be believed that this trope barely needed restating two weeks ago, why on earth is his Guardian stablemate Jonathan Freeland still lazily regurgitating it now?
We've all seen the endless reliance on lazily churnalised tropes like the Kuenssberg bodyguard (did you know she also took a bodyguard to the Tory conference too?) and the Angela Eagle brick from last year (no evidence was ever provided that the brick was lobbed by a Corbynite, but that didn't stop the endless mainstream fearmongering about the terrifying spectre of "the brick-lobbing Corbynites").
It's this kind of lazy seeding of ludicrously biased political tropes into articles that are ostensibly about the important subject of press freedom that differentiates the likes of Jonathan Freedland from real journalists like Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Caruana Galizia was an independent-thinking investigative journalist who was never afraid to speak her own mind, even under a barrage of death threats.
Freedland is a lazy, smug and self-righteous churnalist who blares the same groupthink drivel as his well-to-do and largely privately educated mainstream media peers, one who even gratuitously piggybacks this kind of worthless tripe onto the death of a legitimate journalist.
Freedland's article is as offensive as it is lazy.
It's downright offensive to capitalise on the assassination of a real journalist who tirelessly worked to hold powerful establishment elitists to account in order to piously condemn ordinary people who are sick to the back teeth of the kind of lazy pro-establishment churnalism peddled by Freedland, Kuenssberg and their ilk.
Unfortunately a lot of mindless media grazers will actually overlook the opportunism and disgusting sanctimony of Freedland's opinion piece, and conclude that yes, ordinary people criticising the pro-establishment bias and complicity of swathes of the UK mainstream media are pretty much the same as those who actually killed an anti-establishment investigative journalist with a car bomb.
Opinion peddlers like Freedland honestly seem to believe that they're the righteous gatekeepers of public discourse; They're furious at the rise of independent media; They're furious that the Labour left has saved the Labour Party rather that leading it to the doom and destruction they prophesied; And now Freedland has proven that his ilk are even willing to use the worst kind of contrived emotionally manipulative shtick to criticise independent media and the Labour left. Even if it means opportunistically smearing themselves with the recently spilled blood of a proper journalist, one that lazy opinion-peddling hacks like him were never even fit to lick the boots of.
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.
The BBC's Nick Robinson (a former chair of the Oxford University Conservative Association) has desperately tried to discredit independent media by saying that criticism of the BBC is so persistent that it's negatively affecting public perceptions of mainstream media, and also accused independent media of living in a "social media bubble".
I'll tell you what really negatively affects people's perceptions of the BBC. It's stuff like the BBC politics editor Robbie Gibb moving directly from the supposedly impartial BBC directly to Theresa May's propaganda team at 10 Downing Street, BBC journalists like Laura Kuenssberg fabricating fake news stories to attack Jeremy Corbyn and being allowed to get away with it without punishment, and the shockingly biased BBC coverage of stuff like the Scottish Independence referendum (massive anti-Independence bias that was obvious to all but the most rabid of Unionists) and the General Election debates (Jeremy Corbyn getting relentlessly grilled on his sticky subjects while Theresa May was tossed one ridiculous softball question after another).
As for living in bubbles, it's not the diverse range of independent media journalists who are living in a deluded political bubble, it's clearly the mainstream media journalists who operate in the cosy Westminster clique alongside the politicians they're supposed to be holding to account.
How else is it possible to explain that the political class and Westminster bubble journos were both so ridiculously out of touch with the public mood that their only debate about Theresa May's vanity election was whether she'd end up with a super-majority of 100+ or a mega-majority of 150+?
Mainstream media journalists have become so absorbed in the Westminster political bubble that they've ended up uncritically repeating the tropes that are circulating amongst the privileged political class (many of whom went to the exact same elitist private schools as they did) instead of actually trying to hold the political class to account for their actions.
All too often mainstream journos just regurgitate these delusional tropes from Westminster bubble as if they're news, whilst basically ignoring the serious real life issues faced by ordinary people (the lower orders) like the unprecedented ongoing Tory wage slump since 2010, the systematic abuse of disabled people, the housing crisis, and the critical state of the NHS, the education system, local government services, and the rail network.
Their total immersion in the insular Westminster bubble perspective is the reason so many mainstream media journos were flabbergasted and completely incapable of understanding how Theresa May lost her majority on election night.
The gradual realisation that independent media had a significant role to play in the result that took the mainstream journos by such surprise has got them fired up and angry.
They're furious because they see themselves as the true and only legitimate gatekeepers of public opinion, and they can't stand the idea that uppity plebs from ordinary backgrounds are now using social media to influence public opinion away from the predetermined news agenda favoured by the elitist establishment class of Westminster politicians, mainstream media hacks, and corporate fat cats.
People like Nick Robinson are outraged because they tried every propaganda trick in the book to guide the public into handing Theresa May a huge parliamentary majority, but we didn't do as we were told, shopping around for news that better matches our own perception of reality than the ludicrous tropes that emanate from the Westminster bubble and get magnified by the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media.
Just hours after Robinson fearfully aimed both barrels at independent media the Tories shot a massive great hole in his already sinking argument by parachuting the former chair of the BBC Trust Rona Fairhead into the unelected House of Lords to take up a ministerial position in Theresa May's government!
How on earth is anyone expected to believe that the BBC are actually an impartial public service broadcaster when these days they're obviously more of a fertile recruiting ground for new members of the Tory government than an institution committed to holding the Tory government to account?
But Robinson and his ilk would have you believe that any critical coverage of the revolving door between the BBC and the Tory party, or the desperately deteriorating standard of BBC political coverage, is some kind of nasty conspiracy spread by sinister forces who are intent on upsetting the natural order of things.
As far as they're concerned the intimate relationship between the BBC and the Tory government is all above board and nothing to worry about.
And it's this complacency and complicity that is the main reason that their influence is being gradually eroded by independent media journalists who cover politics from outside the confines of the insidious Westminster bubble.
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.
Theresa May is running scared of a head-to-head TV debate with Jeremy Corbyn and she's running scared of an unscripted TV debate with the other party leaders too.
Not only is our "strong and stable" Prime Minister terrified of being held to account by her political opponents, she's also petrified of the general public too. She launched her opportunistic self-serving election campaign in front of a hand-picked audience of Tory loyalists (Corbyn launched his in the streets) and at another micro-managed Tory publicity event the staff at the factory she visited were banned from talking to the press.
The BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg is notorious for her anti-Corbyn bias, in fact she's so bad that a BBC investigation concluded that she fabricated a fake anti-Corbyn story in order attack him, but somehow she was allowed to keep her job at the taxpayer funded BBC.
Amazingly when Theresa May went into hiding on April 24th Kuenssberg responded to the story on Twitter by turning Theresa May's cowardice into an attack on Jeremy Corbyn, proclaiming that hiding from the press and the public was some kind of political masterstroke from the Tories because it was allowing Labour to "stew in their own juice".
Let's just try a little thought experiment. Let's imagine that the story was the other way around.
Let's imagine it was Jeremy Corbyn running scared of TV debates with his political rivals. Let's imagine Corbyn launched his election campaign in a political "safe space" surrounded by party loyalists bussed in from over 50 miles away with local members of the public excluded and the press banned from asking questions. Let's imagine that Jeremy Corbyn visited a factory and leaned on the owners to ban their employees from speaking to the press about their opinions on his speech. Let's imagine it was Jeremy Corbyn who had gone into hiding for a whole day during an election campaign.
- Who thinks that Laura Kuenssberg wouldn't be furiously condemning him for refusing to debate his political opponents?
- Who thinks Kuenssberg wouldn't be slamming him for hiding in political "safe spaces" and running scared of encounters with actual members of the public?
- Who thinks Kuenssberg wouldn't be screaming blue murder about him barring the press from several of his campaign events, and banning them from asking questions at several others?
- Who honestly believes that Kuenssberg would try to spin Corbyn hiding for a whole day into a "isn't Theresa May shit" Tweet?
So then who is daft enough to believe that the BBC can continue to claim to be an impartial public service broadcaster when they employ such a blatantly biased political editor?
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.
The BBC Trust have admitted that their political editor Laura Kuenssberg created fake news when she misrepresented Jeremy Corbyn's position on shoot-to-kill.
The BBC Trust ruling concluded that Kuenssberg's report was "not duly accurate" because it presented "an answer Mr Corbyn had given to a question about shoot-to-kill as though it were his answer to a question he had not in fact been asked".
The original complaint against Kuenssberg alleged that her sneaky decision to splice a clip of Jeremy Corbyn talking about shoot-to-kill with a question he wasn't even asked was designed to cause "maximum political damage".
Kuenssberg is well known for letting her anti-Corbyn bias interfere with the supposed journalistic impartiality of BBC news reporters, famously orchestrating the resignation of a Labour Party cabinet member live on TV in order to damage Jeremy Corbyn's leadership as much as possible before a Prime Minister's Questions appearance in January 2016.
The role of BBC journalists should be to present the news, not to manufacture the news, nor to just make it up as they go along. Still, despite the evidence that she concocted a fake news hit on Jeremy Corbyn, Kuenssberg looks safe in her job as BBC political editor publicly funded Tory mouthpiece.
Anyone who pays attention will know that the BBC have previous form at chopping and changing the sequence of video clips in order to create highly misleading narratives. The most famous example being the reversal of the footage from the Orgreave miners' protest to make it look like the miners attacked the police, when the reality was that mounted police launched a brutal and unprovoked attack on the miners. Luckily for the BBC the Tories decided not to hold a public inquiry into Orgreave, meaning that the BBC's dodgy conduct on that day wasn't brought back into focus.
Attention-paying members of the public will also be well aware of the academic studies proving a systemic mainstream media propaganda campaign against Jeremy Corbyn that's so extreme that one investigation found that only 11% of all newspaper articles about him presented his actual political views without alteration!
When most of the print media is owned by a small clique of savagely right-wing tax-dodging billionaires, and supposedly impartial BBC journalists like Laura Kuenssberg get off scot-free after inventing fake news controversies, it's pretty obvious that the propaganda war is going to continue, however there are some things we can do about it.
- If fake news producers are allowed to keep their jobs even after getting caught out we need to take all mainstream media stories with a massive pinch of salt. Mainstream media is obviously not all fake news, but we need to engage our critical thinking skills whenever we encounter mainstream media stories because of the possibility that they are.
- Look for reliable alternative media sources and, if you appreciate the content they provide, consider making small donations to help keep them going .
- Boycott appalling hard-right propaganda rags like the Daily Mail, S*n and Express. Don't just avoid buying their newspapers, avoid sharing or otherwise publicising their links on social media.
- If you want to enhance a comment about a particular issue with a link, consider finding an alternative media article rather than linking to the mainstream press. If you can't find an independent source, try rewarding the least savagely right-wing mainstream media sources with the free publicity (Channel 4 News, Independent, Mirror, Huffington Post, Guardian).
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.
