105 Responses to Start the week 14th October 2024

←Older Comments
  1. Fedup2 says:
    October 14, 2024 at 8:02 pm

    No ! Someone called ‘Greg Wallace ‘ is under investigation for inappropriate sexy words .. in 2018? ( might have misread it )

    Greg is one of those ‘ larger than life ‘ characters the BBC loves – until they get cancelled on a Rolf or Savelle sort of way …

       2 likes

  2. Zephir says:
    October 14, 2024 at 8:11 pm

    “The BBC’s phoney war on disinformation A bit of self-awareness wouldn’t go amiss.

    In this week’s interview, Spring described her job for the BBC as “interrogating how mistruths or trolling or abuse online can affect real people, and then to investigate and hold to account the social media companies, policy makers, law enforcement…”. At face value, this may seem like a fairly standard quest for a journalist, albeit a noble one — a bit like investigating fraudsters or corrupt politicians, in order to bring their misdeeds and lies into the light.

    But there’s at least one big difference. A journalist investigating fraud, but who accidentally misidentifies either what fraud is or the people committing it, doesn’t thereby become guilty of the very thing she is investigating. In contrast, a Disinformation Correspondent who misidentifies disinformation, either positively or negatively, runs the risk of disseminating disinformation herself — and is arguably all the more harmful because of the status implied by her position.

    Perhaps it could be rejoindered that disinformation is not the same as misinformation. Whereas misinformation consists in the unwitting dissemination of false statements believed to be true at the time, disinformation is the knowing introduction of false statements with the explicit intention to deceive people. In other words, with disinformation, there is an intent to deceive. That’s a reasonable distinction to make as far as it goes; the problem is that it’s utterly useless in helping us analyse the growing problem with conspiratorial and magical thinking in the world. It also has no relevance to most of the things reported on by Spring.

    Basic critical questions one might have asked about this narrative were missing in action. The most obvious of these is what counts as hate speech. Throughout her work, Spring’s habitual examples (speech by misogynists, rape apologists, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers) tend to suggest she thinks hate speech is angry, threatening, and/or insulting speech produced by people with the Wrong Politics, causing anxiety and distress in more innocent people who don’t share their persecutors’ dodgy views. I’d be fascinated to know whether Spring assumes that the level of insult and aggression flung by online anti-vaxxers towards epidemiologists, for instance, becomes morally neutralised when directed instead towards radical feminists, Zionists, Tory politicians, or any other folk devils of the contemporary progressive mindset.

    When talking about QAnon supporters, she clearly feels it’s important to throw in that they are “pro-Trump” as well.”

    https://unherd.com/2023/03/the-bbcs-phoney-war-on-disinformation/

       3 likes

  3. Zephir says:
    October 14, 2024 at 8:15 pm

    “Troubling questions surround BBC ‘disinformation correspondent’ Marianna Spring.

    Little is known about the history of Marianna Spring, the BBC’s first “disinformation correspondent.” But her record of churning out disinfo of her own in the service of British government objectives sends a bright red flag up over the new Verify project.

    Her LinkedIn profile has been cached by the Internet Archive suspiciously few times since its creation, suggesting certain captures may have been scrubbed upon request.

    There can be little doubt Spring’s online footprint elsewhere has been subjected to a dedicated cleanup operation. One of the most prolific editors of her Wikipedia page is the mysterious ‘Philip Cross’ profile.

    Deployed as an influential public face of this effort, Spring relied heavily on an incestuous cluster of shadowy state-funded organizations to bolster her reporting. Foremost among them was the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a shadowy NATO state contractor that reaps millions to research supposed “disinformation”. Invariably, this term serves as a basis for defaming and suppressing anti-establishment viewpoints, and censoring inconvenient truths.

    Marianna Spring had been eager to stoke the perception of antivaxxers as a highly mobilized, several-million-strong death cult posing a mortal threat to Britain over the previous two years. Yet, just as suddenly as she began scaremongering over the non-existent scourge, she casually moved on.

    Despite transmission and recovery rates remaining unchanged from the date the pandemic was declared, even the previously pro-lockdown Guardian began edging its way into the critical camp. In January 2022, the paper published a sympathetic interview with epidemiologist Mark Woolhouse. He firmly declared, “Britain got it wrong on Covid,” and branded lockdowns as “a failure of public health policy.”

    Nonetheless, BBC Verify’s launch makes clear neither the British state, nor faithful minions like Marianna Spring, have faced accountability for the damage caused by their propaganda campaign.

    Instead, they appear to have conjured up a new divide-and-rule wedge issue and furnished Spring’s friends at the ISD with a new government contract to advance it. The shady outfit is due to receive tens of thousands of pounds to “analyse climate related mis/disinformation on social media.””

    https://thegrayzone.com/2023/06/01/bbc-specialist-disinformation/

       5 likes

    • Fedup2 says:
      October 14, 2024 at 8:35 pm

      Interesting -a kidult like spring – with little real word experience pumping out state propaganda and being well rewarded for it .- maybe she works for 77 brigade making the tea…

      Her existence reminds me of the advert the bbc is pumping out with the bruvver Marie telling us about the bbc fighting for the truth – innit …

         5 likes

  4. Fedup2 says:
    October 14, 2024 at 8:45 pm

    The pre budget depression continues – a triumph in news mismanagement . Week after week of negative . This time Reeve signals that National Insurance tax is going up . A disincentive for jobs and business and work .
    The figure of £50 billion being floated about … I reckon it’s more than that – more like £70 bilion – which should nicely kill the economy …

       3 likes

  5. tomo says:
    October 14, 2024 at 9:25 pm

    Here’s hoping one (or more!) of Spring’s smears rebounds like the Daily Mail here:

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/article-13953629/Dr-Zo-Harcombe-PhD-Dr-Malcolm-Kendrick-Apology.html

    longer version :

    https://metatron.substack.com/p/the-clot-thickens

       0 likes

  6. vlad says:
    October 14, 2024 at 9:30 pm

    Mere hours after Musk’s extraordinary achievement, the Home page of the BBC webshite has already erased it and posted 1) a NASA launch (thereby eclipsing Starship) and 2) a nasty little allegation that Musk ‘copied’ some designs from some sci-fi flick.

    The petty little commies just can’t bring themselves to congratulate the guy, can they?

    Talking of petty little commies, did Kamala or Biden?

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1482xzrge1o

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ced04q39w33o

       5 likes

←Older Comments

Leave a Reply