Dan Hodges has become ever more desperate at the prospect of UKIP getting a permanent place in the hearts and minds, and on the voting slips, of the British people….even more so than the BBC, almost.
He’s denounced them as racist, and when he realised that this was not such a good idea as UKIP routed the other parties and he was ridiculed by thousands of comments under his articles, he’s decided to claim well, actually, not many people really voted for UKIP at all…apparently the Tories won the elections.
Anyway here is a comment, from ‘dissidentjunk’, under Hodge’s cry in the wilderness which might be of interest…..
The BBC’s election coverage is poor because BBC news reporting is no longer “old hack” journalism; it is, more or less, propaganda engineered by over-politicised reporters and commentators.
Many moons ago, when I trained as a journalist, I was taught by old Fleet Street hacks that journalism was about asking a group of wildly disparate people the same set of questions about an issue and giving the answers to another set of people, always in mind of what the other set of people really wanted to know. The mark of a good journalist, I was taught, was that they understood that if they didn’t know what the other set of people wanted to know, they should go out and damn find out before they did anything else.
When you adhere to this formula, any kind of journalism is automatically fairly impartial because a journalist is merely a conduit that passes information from one group of people to another.
The BBC has three problems: one, it no longer conveys information in this straight manner; two, it doesn’t ask wildly disparate people the same questions; and three, it has no idea what the other (ie. the public) really wants to know.
Instead, the BBC feeds personal prejudice and attitudes into the information it conveys, it asks people different questions or asks the same questions to the same types of people, and then it tells the public what it thinks they should hear. This is, fundamentally, propaganda.
Any decent journo that had been taught by the old guard would have known UKIP stood to gain in the Euro elections … because they, as I, would have been taught that the best way to gauge the mood of “the street” is to be “on the street”: in Britain, this tends to be pubs (little wonder Farage has caught the zeitgeist); in other parts of the world, it’s coffee shops.
But journalism in Britain has become this strange commentariat …
The best beat reporters were always working class because they had a direct connection through environment, family and friends in their locality. At one time, these reporters used to be recruited up to Fleet Street so they took that approach with them onto nationals.
The rot really set in when “the media” became an upper-middle-class career goal. Okay, you would have always had an toff editor on a national, but the lower reporting ranks would have been quite gritty. Now, we have reporters and journalists that use their air time or print space to engage in a kind of *philosophical exploration of the mind*, which is what I would argue our friend Dan here does.
Of course, it is interesting and we are all commenting on his piece, but where exactly is the journalism here? Why hasn’t Dan contacted the BBC and asked them why their election night journalism was, to his mind, so strange? Why hasn’t he spoken to Sky and asked them what their editorial policy is surrounding election nights?
Where is the information that we, the public, could use to inform ourselves?
Because Hodges is no more a journalist than are the amateurs at the BBC.
Dissidentjunk’s comments are entirely accurate, too. The disease has infected and corrupted both the dead tree press and the broadcast media and it stems (as so many things do in this country) from the brainwashing factories through which would be reporters, politicians, bottle washers and dustmen are now expected to pass before they are allowed to earn a living.
Far be it from me to suggest that a new UKIP government started out by purging the university system but…
UKIP always had a permanent place in my heart and mind, and on the voting slip of the EU elections ever since it was the last one left with human beings, unrepressed by political correctness, standing in the elections after the Referendum party disappeared, the first time I voted was a wasted vote, the second time they got one MEP, the third time they got one MEP and then this time they got three MEP’s.
At the BBC, political correctness seems to be a religion, and the church is Labour, and the duty of a Journalist is to Censor anything disturbing outside of the hideously white BBC bubble, because they really do not like the metropolitan shithole that surrounds them in London, so if they cannot avoid reporting on such areas, they go to relatively more hideously white places such as Salford or Newcastle.
But UKIP seems to terrify these morons, because they (mainly Farage) talk about the real world and its problems, and that pricks the politically correct bubble of ignorance at the BBC.
It is a significant pointer to the mindset of those now “running” the Telegraph, in their obviously Guardianesque way, that Dan Hodges continues to write his shit. He is hated, and roundly, and soundly thrashed by his readers (or ex-camp followers) in every piece he writes, right down to a personal level. I would have thought the time had come to wave “bye-bye” – he must be dragging that once readable organ into comical disrepute. If the number of commentators who confess to being fed up with it all, and abandoning ship are to be believed, sales figures will plummet – most of us have already found our way around their stupid (and ineffectual) “paywall”, but having done so, find little to read there of interest, and quietly slip away.
Breitbart’s readership figures, however, must have sprouted wings. I go there, for commentary, now.
Dan is or should be) finished.
Yes, it is amazing that a writer as poor as well as so misguided as Dan should be associated with the Telegraph. I have not seen any insightful stuff from him in any the articles I have read. His stuff really is a load of rubbish, mostly just bile, and readers’ comments are scathing time after time. He is a standing insult to the readership.
The analogy would be giving Scotty a permanent column here ! Nutty, skewed and full of venom, utterly pointless.
I can only presume it’s something to do with social media numbers.
Often a publication will stick a lightning rod out to garner a few more visitors not so much from the light but the heat.
Can’t see it working over the longer term. Loyalists will ignore or bail, and combatants will eventually get bored, as they are now with Mr. Hodges, as they have with Ms. Riddell, Mr. Lean or the now unlamented Ms. Gray.
He has become no more than a sad punching bag figure, lurching around picking fights he can’t win (anology applicable elsewhere too).
But in hiring and retaining such folk, whilst driving out higher calibre controversial debaters, I can’t see what the Tel is hoping to achieve other than an ignominious demise.
Stopped reading Hodges articles about 10 days ago – don’t want to give him the clicks. His entire output seemed to be designed to garner negative comments – indeed he did this with great success but why feed the troll, declining clicks will soon see him replaced – sadly it is likely to be by another stooge – used to subscribe but will not be renewing.
Snap.
Hodges works for the Communist propaganda outlet, ‘Hope Not Hate’.
Judging by the crap he spouts in his Telegraph columns, he probably forgets who he’s writing for, and continues fabricating lies that the brain-bleached cretins, who follow HnH, would buy in to.
He also works for ‘Migration Matters’ which campaigns for more immigratiion.
Lest we forget, Gritty Dan the Working Man is, in reality, the son of actress, Labour MP and hag Glenda Jackson, and so is about as authentic as a seven pound note.
Dan Hodges has the (un?)fortunate situation of having a life story that admits of two interpretations, with regard to a pivotal event in it.
He has been made out a martyr to the “cause” (in any event, his face and the loss of his eye have been) because of his well-known barroom brawl, allegedly in defence of a mate who was being racially harassed. The other version has it that he grew a set of beer muscles and foolishly harassed some pub loudmouths, believing he could whip the arse of any of them with the temerity to try him out.
He can’t lose for winning here– either he’s a “middle-class hero” who put his body on the line in a way few would be willing to do and paid for it, or else, he’s really not all that much a toff, see? He can yob it up with the best of ’em, and he’s really a working stiff trapped in the life of a privileged son of a film and television star, the difference between him and many of the louts in Hollywood doing the same sort of slumming is that he had the chance to write for a living, and surprisingly was able to string sentences together: “Yes, I can do more than piss my life away getting pissed, I can opine about this, that, and the other, and everyone assumes I know that of which I speak because after all, Mum is an MP!”
I’m fairly sure he’s been riding the street-cred of that punim of his, whichever side of the street accords it to him for whatever reason.
(And I’m actually old enough to remember a “nine-bob note” had there ever been such a thing, back when there were “bob.”)
Hodges is a Blairite. These people began by bending the Labour movement to suit their own middle class career aims. Having outwitted the tribal core and riding on the crest of a media/luvvie anti-Thatcher wave they happily embraced a form of Hunnish-style corporatism whilst sneering at capitalism.
But they required an ideology of some sort to cloak their vacuousness…..
Enter Political Correctness, health and safety, rabid badge-wearing anti-‘racism’, liberal self-loathing, anti-fox hunting, green issues, one worldism, anti-Christianity, charideeee, etc etc…. say hello to Dan Hodges
In other words he is a five-star, full fat, high octane twat.
Or, in short, a Fabian.
Good post.
As Guess Who pointed out, the fascinating bit is the decline of non-lefty comment and journalism at the Telegraph. Any publication which gives regular columns to Lean, Hodges and Riddell as well as having recruited Bakewell to mouth off from the bien pensant standing of a paid-up member of the political class, not to mention selecting Steve Jones of all people as its science commentator is not seeking a “diversity” of view, it’s leaning leftwards. None of the above would be out of place writing for the Guardian or whining for the BBC. If I wanted the tat spouted by any of the above I would buy the Guardian.
As an instance of the Telegraph’s stance, look at the main article in the Telegraph today concerning the Hay Festival: a 21st century gathering of the literary section of the political class. That article publicises – not unfavourably – the shite dropped in the public arena by a member of the New Economic Foundation – a
extremeradical left-wing pressure group/think tank whose members (and views) feature regularly on the BBC. Admittedly I’m not forced to buy the Telegraph (as I am to pay for similar – actually identical – tat from the BBC) and, unfortunately for the Telegraph, it’s more than likely that I will not renew when my present subscription ends.Yet it has the majestic Charles Moore with some occasional fine pieces by Boris, Peter Oborne and Daniel Hannan etc.
And Sundays give us Janet Daley and the sublime Christopher Booker.
AND it was they alone who gave us the MPs scandals over expenses in 2009.
So they`re OK…but Hodges is a creep, unless he`s bitching about Miliband-which he does quite a lot.
But-like the Times-if they tried to smear UKIP-they`re finished with me…the Parris Black Spot as it were.
Chris Booker is the best in the Telegraph, exposing the nazi behaviour of social workers towards child custody and the useless police who are in cahoots with them, plus attacking the soviet EU etc…. i asked the Telegraph why they persisted with the useless Hodges, no reply. I do not buy it anymore, just read Booker on-line. I read leftist stuff for balance as a rule, but find it just gets me shouting aloud in ridicule and boosting my blood pressure….not worth it.
Thanks to dissentjunk for posting this-and thanks to Alan for letting US see it.
Really important to see how an old school journalist with the training and experience is able to tell me how his noble profession of old has turned into the plaything of squits like Hodges, Owen Jones, Hari, Toynbees, Alibiah Browns.
My profession is teaching-and has been turned into a liberal parody in a similar fashion.
But Mr Junk shines a light on it-and we can learn.
Ta!
if ever there was a green eye monster and hypopcrite it is dan hodges,this turncoat former labour party activist and ed milliband hater and now liberal party supporter is one strange man indeed,why is he a columnist in the right wing conservative supporting daily telegraph,what is all that about,the man is becoming as boring as owen jones with all his leftist i am superiour to everybody anti ukip hate mongering and gets far to much airtime in the media and the bbc for a non entity in poltacal terms,there is something very creepy about dan hodges,very creepy indeed,who cares about this creeps strange opinions,i dont.