Farage on the Libyan intervention

Soothscribe Nigel Farage on YouTube telling it like it is, as usual.

You have to see it on RT (Russia Today) Moscow, although it might have been Al Jaz. But not a chance you'll ever see those views expressed on any Brit channel: they're too chicken-shit.

Hat-tip: Muffled Vociferation

Kaddafi: pics you won't be seeing in the MSM

Soothscribe O'Neill once more

From his article "The Palestine Papers: fact and fiction" in Spiked today:

The fuss over the Palestine Papers brilliantly reveals why leaked information is not the best tool for making sense of political affairs. The startled reaction to the papers suggests that our increasingly leak-reliant world is also a profoundly unquestioning place, zapped of critical thinking, where journalists wait around for revelations from on high to inform them of things they could easily have found out for themselves. The cult of leaking neuters journalists’ critical faculties, making them the passive recipients of info rather than hunters for truth.

Well - duh - yeah. But it's not an "increasingly leak-reliant world" - it's a totally leak-reliant British MSM, which has been bereft of investigative journalism and critical thinking for decades.

Brave journalists risk their lives to uncover the truth in many parts of the world - but not in the birthplace of freedom of speech, where the most they can lose is the pathetic pensions for which they, along with the entire state sector, have sold their souls.

Eating crow - the Church of England

Oh dear, done it again. Since I despise the bicycle-seat sniffing that makes up the bulk of MSM journalism, I must refrain from jumping on whatever band-wagon of superficiality they are pushing at a given moment, especially if it appeals to my own prejudices.

Commenting on the failure of the current crop of socialist mediocrities at the head of the Church of England, I have failed to balance my gloating with reference to the immense amount of good work it does at the parish - or "Big Society" - level.

Comes Archbishop Cranmer to rebuke the Tory party in terms that I ruefully accept apply to me as well.

What about the Church of England’s social housing programmes? Its inner-city work among the poor and disenfranchised? The fact that it runs thousands of schools? Its advocacy work for prisoners of conscience in repressive regimes? It unparalleled dedication to charity concerns? Its voluntary work with the elderly, disabled and other vulnerable groups? The Church does not only talk endlessly about these things; it does them. But the media aren’t very interested, you see: they wish to focus on the drama of division, contention and conflict.

Sarah Palin and social media

Given that the Bitchy Boys' vagina envy regularly vents spitefully in the direction of Sarah Palin - oooh, look out Sarah, the BBC doesn't like you! - in the light of their gloating about her having said North instead of South Korea, I thought I'd check for the lady's usually lethal Facebook riposte.

Sure enough, it's a gem. The following is a compilation of The One's verbal gaffes, linked to You Tube clips.

My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that . . . 

The singularly under-reported fact is that The One is a loose cannon away from his teleprompter/autocue, and continues to get very gentle treatment from the MSM. But who cares? The social media now reach far more people than the printed press, and reach them more directly than TV. By constantly misrepresenting easily verified facts the MSM simply increases the rate at which it digs its own grave.

The Gulf between reporting and reality

There's the Gulf of Mexico, supposedly the site of an unprecedented ecological catastrophe following the Deepwater Horizon explosion and subsequent discharge of crude oil, and then there's the far bigger Gulf between what was predicted and what has actually taken place, as reported by NRO's Lou Dolinar:

The growth of the fish population is not occurring because oil is good for fish. Rather, it is occurring because fishing is bad for fish. When fishing was banned for months during the spill, the Gulf of Mexico experienced an unprecedented marine renaissance that overwhelmed any negative environmental consequences the oil may have had.

Oil is being measured in parts per billion - meaning the water is safe enough to drink - and very little has been found on the ocean bottom. Much of it has been eaten by bacteria native to the Gulf’s oil seeps, and . . . other microscopic creatures including flagellates and ciliates ate the bacteria, and in turn provided food for plankton.

Prince Harry mockumentary

I wish I had written David Bowden's acute article "The masturbatory world of the mockumentary". I'm wondering if there is not some way of setting up a perma-link to Spiked, as it is firing on all twelve cylinders right now and highlights the intellectual poverty of the MSM commentariat. Some highlights:

‘Mockumentary’ because, of course, none of these events have happened nor are particularly likely to, but by making it look like a documentary makes it a more effective masturbatory aid for Channel 4-loving liberals. . . . Far from being a sober interrogation of the issues that weighted up the merits of either side, we got a medieval morality play - with the comforting liberal message that people are essentially savages who need a strong and enlightened elite to protect them - played out in modern dress. . . .Yet the argument that it is ‘irresponsible’ to have made this film on the basis it might inspire real-life enactments and jeopardise the lives of British troops in the middle of fighting a war seem equally absurd. It is as if the Taliban sit around all day watching the backwards, anti-Enlightenment and medieval Channel 4.

Warming to Rupert Murdoch

I never read the Sun or the News of the World, I occasionally read the Times and think it's a curate's egg (and mostly bad at that), I do not subscribe to Sky TV and seldom watch any of the Sky channels on Freeview. In sum, the Murdoch media holdings in this country make zero impact on me, intellectually and financially.

By contrast I am compelled to pay £145 per anum (sic) for the Bitchy Boys Club, which I despise and watch only when it is broadcasting films or sporting events that could as easily have been aired by other channels. When I lived in the States, I could subscribe to a basket of very specific channels tailored to my tastes for considerably less than I have to pay the Bitchy Boys to produce and broadcast material that revolts me.

To the best of my knowledge Rupert Murdoch requires only profits from his many media holdings. In the USA it has proved profitable to tack against the cosy leftist consensus of the traditional media, but in Britain it has not. The Times, for example, is a centrist newspaper, editorially indistinguishable from the Telegraph. Nor has the quality of the Wall Street Journal fallen off since he took it over, despite all the prior bleating.

So why the panic in the MSM about Rupert's News Corp offering £8 billion to take full control of BSkyB, when he has effective control already as by far the largest shareholder? Guardian Media group, Telegraph Media Group, Trinity Mirror, Daily Mail and General Trust, the ex state monopolist BT - and tax-payer funded Channel 4 and the BBC have signed a petition demanding that the Secretary of State for Business should prevent the full take-over.

They say it will have "serious and far-reaching consequences for media plurality". What media plurality?

BBC 1, BBC 2, BBC 3, BBC 4, BBC HD, BBC News Channel, BBC Parliament, CBBC, CBeebies, BBC America, BBC Canada, BBC Kids, BBC Knowledge. Then there's BBC Radios 1-7 plus about 45 regional BBC radio stations. As the Times comments in its second leader today:

The man in charge of all these media outlets, their Director-General, has spoke out about his concern that too much media power might reside in one organisation. . . . The crushing weight of Mr Thompson's responsibilities has clearly suffocated his sense of irony.

Furthermore:

Having argued that the BBC should not be regulated in the same way as normal media outlets, he has now acted exactly as an ordinary business would do, seeking to gain commercial advantage in league with News Corps's rivals. They, at least, are openly self-interested . . .  Any pretence that the BBC is not similarly self-interested is at an end. And public money is being used to advance that self-interest.

Can't fault that reasoning. If the News Corps take-over were to be stopped because it poses a threat to media plurality, then the statist near-monopoly should be broken up for the same reason.

It may be a good moment for it. There is cross-party anger at the Bitchy Boys for the enormous salaries they have been paying themselves and even Tessa Jowell, who as Culture Secretary gave them everything they demanded when she renewed the license fee, has said that "the culture of the BBC was out of time then and it is even more out of time now. [They want] all  the benefits of the private sector and none of the risks".