by John Ward
Mainstream television “news” is now so awful – off the point, dumbed down biased, D-noticed and neo-propagandist codswallop mixed with lachrymose little boy saves tiger ‘human interest’ vomit – it’s time someone found another word for the generic.
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This morning’s risible effort on Sky Sunrise was a classic. The broadcaster gave two full in-depth “reports” on the police task of dealing with “Far Right Extremism” – which is now, we are told, “the fastest-growing form of violent political action” in the UK.
Nothing in the way of investigative journalism was involved in the feature. I can reveal that the Met Police approached Sky with the idea – not the other way round: not exactly an auspicious start to proceedings.
Throughout last year at various points, the Left-leaning media ran stories claiming that white ‘Far Right’ Briton terror arrests outnumber Left or Islamic arrests. That is a bizarre way to segment statistics, because Islamism is (it seems obvious to me) about as right-wing, violent and misognyist as terror can get. But either way, the Home Office raw stats are telling: in 2018, all terror related arrests totalled just 412. Far Right extremism as a percentage of that is hard to assess given the hazy definition of such things these days, but Home Office prison figures show quite clearly that 86% of all terror arrests involve Islamists, NOT Far Right Caucasian-dominated proscribed organisations like British Action.
In short, the Guardian/Independent stories that ran in March, September and November on this subject were either incompetent journalism or intentional lies.
The “fastest growing” thing (about what I’d term Far Right White offences) is from a base of – count them – sixty-five offences. So Sky’s shock-horror thing involves this percentage of the UK population…..
0.00007701
…..or eight people in a million.
Is anyone seriously trying to suggest to me that this is a serious threat? That 445 nutjobs in a population alleged to be 58 million is in any way whatsoever a bigger threat than Momentum – a major Hard-Left organised group that refuses to eschew violence in pursuit of its aims….an organisation which itself claims to have has 31,000 activists across 170 local groups in the UK?
It really does go to show what utter tosh Owen Jones is pushing when he minces on about ‘the growing legions of Far Right fascists’. There’s barely enough of them in the entire country to carry out an enactment of the Cable St battle of 80 years ago.
One expects the Left to exaggerate the threat from Nazis/Fascists/Far Right knuckle-draggers and their ilk, because without that the Hard Left has little in the way of a raison d’etre. But from Sky? And with the connivance of the Met? Well, there’s another unhealthy relationship that is obviously still alive and well.
Very little we see in mainstream TV bulletins would be defined ‘news’ as people born in the 20th century would understand it. Orwell asserted that “News is the spreading of truths powerful people don’t want us to know about…the rest is just PR”. Spookily, the first two letters of propaganda are ‘pr’. So let’s start with them – the obvious limitation being that we now need a vowel, Carol.
The next sequence on Sunrise today was an analysis spot about ‘the news’. It began with a debate about whether it was ‘news’ that a woman still breast-feeding her baby had won a race of some description. I was about to point a gun at my head in horror at this Les Dawson gossip-level stuff minus the laughs when the tedium was interrupted by a new update on the Royal Car-crash.
For once, this was not about a marriage. Rather, it was a follow-on from last night’s forensic pot-mortem about a prang involving 97 year-old Prince Philip’s Range Rover, following which there had been no morts as such…..but this didn’t stop Sky from turning the incident into yet another National Debate about whether nasty old arrogant reactionaries should be allowed to drive given that their accident rates were far lower than those for braindead young Remoaners.
Here are some things the ‘news’ I watched didn’t include:
- The growing despair in the eurozone as France, Germany, Austria and Holland showed trade slumps this week
- The growing popularity of the Gilets Jaunes in France
- The effective nationalisation of a huge failing bank in Italy….in direct contravention of the ezone policy on bailins
- Labour MPs talking to the May government in direct defiance of Corbyn
- Nigel Farage on Brexit betrayal
- Any trailing of Boris Johnson’s speech about dumping the Irish backstop.
So then, nothing missing really.
My opener in this saga is for the term ‘news’ to be renamed ‘precludes’. In future, all televisual bulletins should commence as follows….
“Good morning/afternoon/evening, and now here are the Precludes”
……where precludes is an accepted abbreviation of
Public Relations Exercises Comprising Largely Unethically Distracting Events