Table for 1 at the Neolib Café
Risible lies about the BBC are not the way to improve it
In trying to rationalise and feed a future corporacratic globalist world, the Daily Telegraph is gradually killing itself. Janet Daley is an unwitting agent of that assisted suicide.
At today’s Tearaway Telegraph site, the Barclay Bumboys ask:
Which gin are you most like?
How well do you know your pasta shapes?
What are this year’s best fashion items for staying unflustered in the heat?
Are gap years becoming less fun?
Do you want us to write nice things about your scam?
Why TF are you still reading this infantile crap?
I made the last two up, but they might just as well be in there. You can judge the intelligence of those still reading the paper by examining some of the comment threads:
This was in response to an article by Janet ‘Silly Mayor’ Daley about the Beeb. However, she thoroughly deserves the threads she gets, because she writes stuff like:
Janet (for those of you unaware of hacks still happy to take the Sark shilling) is an American and former 1960s Berkeley Campus student radical who realised the error of her ways a few decades ago, and has been making a living from churning out selective neoliberal nonsense ever since. Her style is perfectly demonstrated in the way she calls the NHS funding model “an anachronism” but keeps shtum about the solution adopted by her own country, in which (a) the insurance companies win-win (b) the doctors win-lose (c) the patients with money lose-lose and (d) the poor die because they don’t have insurance .
Likewise with the BBC, Daley hates the licence fee funding system, but omits to mention who the sole beneficiary of BBC demolition is going to be: Newscorp….another nondom tax conglomerate which just wrote an unwarranted and gratuitous attack on supposed Nazi sympathies within the Royal Family, and has been more responsible for institutional corruption in the UK than all other media apertures put together.
But Daley’s quoted research stats are not just risible: they are a lie. And either she’s stupid, or she quite happily let the lie stand. Take a look at this classic at the end of her piece:
According to whatitcost (as good a source as any online) the nearest year to 1922 used – 1925 – shows that ten bob [shillings] would’ve been worth £22.44 today. Um, not ’50p in today’s money’.
BUT all you got for that in 1925 was 2 channels of crackly analogue radio for ten hours – The Light Programme and the North Home Service. Today, 35 channels of digital radio plus mono television costs £49.00. With zero-cost freeview + the licence fee today of £145.50, you can get over 3000 channels in HD digital colour 24/7.
As Ms Daley knows perfectly well, that works out at being the deflationary bargain of the Millennium. And you can also get BBCNews and all the radio FREE on your pc without paying any licence fee at all….unless of course you live in France, where you can’t…because Rupert Murdoch blocks it.
Why am I ranting on about this, given I’m on the record many times as saying the BBC’s cosy liberal PC bollocks never fails to irritate me, and BBC News is the most slavishly anodyne on the planet? The answer is simple: I’m not a selective ideologue beeleeever. Janet Daley Dose of Double-Dutch is nothing more than a mouthpiece hired to spout dissembling propaganda that simply doesn’t bear even the most cursory examination.
As we can see, her preferred sugar-daddy funding model of private media is working really well, because (with some commendable exceptions like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard) the Barclaygraph is staffed by braindead columnists writing for braindead threaders…and circulation is down 30% in just five years. So to make up the shortfall, the Twin Tubbies of tosspot tittle-tattle have taken to selling disguised editorial spin to a money-laundering bank working for drug lords.
I wouldn’t call that model anachronistic so much as anarchic amorality, but each to its own: however, what it SAS isn’t is journalism. George Orwell would’ve called the contemporary incarnation of the Daily Telegraph “just PR”, and – as always – he would’ve been right.
Our journalistic media need to be saved from themselves before Theresa May and the other Black Knights of Corporate Camerlot decide they need to be silenced. Ms Daley will wind up being a catalyst for that if she’s not careful. And I’m magnanimous enough to believe that isn’t what she wants.
Still, the Maily Deligraph isn’t just a series of dumbo tabloid questions acting as a carrier of Daley’s pigeon messages. It’s also managed to incorporate the tabloid list model while perfecting its triple-twist Olympic dive into the sewers. Here’s just three chosen at random from the grab-bag of delights that sat beneath Janet’s column yesterday:
Top 75 funeral songs
Noel Gallagher’s 12 best insults
27 best biscuits in the world
The 27 best biscuits in the world. For myself, I have to see the Number 1 slot there going to the Bourbons, as they’re the only ones that formed a monarchy for more than four centuries and brought about the French Revolution. But that would be me being flippant, lightweight, and not serious enough to compete in the broadsheet sector.
The Slog 