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| Georgina Rannard |
Ah yes, fake news!
Never mind about Lord Adonis's famous career as an elected MP (fake news!), Georgina from the BBC has a 'thorough' review of this year's fake news for you on the BBC News website.
Or at least the kind of fake news that the BBC considers 'fake news'.
Read it and you'll come away with the impression that fake news appears to come exclusively 'from the Right' and from social media ("right-wing blogs" get a mention).
What about 'respected' media outlets who messed up badly this year (the major US networks especially, who've had to fire staff for fake news reports about the Trump administration)?
And what about those "left-wing blogs" like The Canary, Skwawkbox and Evolve Politics who have been accused (often fairly) of pushing fake news? Why not mention them too?
InfoWars is, of course, at Number One in Georgina's run-down, followed by 'the Muslim girl on Westminster Bridge'.
Naturally Georgina doesn't mention, say, the unravelling of the BBC's own fake news over the alleged Brexit-related anti-Polish hate crime in Harlow that turned out to be no such thing, and which was even worse than 'the Muslim girl on Westminster Bridge' in that it wasn't just some Russian bot insinuating something that wasn't true but the 'respected' BBC itself insinuating something that wasn't true.
(The BBC's reporting over this is considered biased, though the BBC disputes this.)
It's an easy game, this cherry-picking, isn't it?
Take the beam out of your own eye please, Georgina.
I think Paddy O'Connell should invent some other strings to Lord Adonis's bow apart from his Commons career. There was his stretch as a male model, Justin Trudeau like, I believe, back in the late 80s. Then there was the Silver he won in the Winter Olympics ski jump (he would have won Gold were it not for foul play by the Russians who sabotaged his skis). Also, let's not forget either the Granita meeting where he agreed with Blair and Brown that he would be the third of them to become Prime Minister, having demurred at Blair's suggestion he should go first.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that the BBC obsesses about reality checks, fake news, social media and all the rest tells you they are really concerned about power.
ReplyDeleteMost of us use a range of information sources to construct our version of reality. I sometimes use the BBC for a limited number of purposes but I also use Bloomberg, Fox, Mail Online, ITBBCB, Biased BBC, Infowars, and sundry other sites. Above all of course, I use my own personal experience - having the good fortune/misfortune to live in a world city (London), there's rather a lot of experience you can draw on. But of course on top of all these information sources, I apply everything I know about economics, history, politics, sociology, biology, anthropology, geography and so on...
The last thing I need is some scatty brained junior in the BBC Newsroom telling me what I should believe.
Her twitter header bio is... ‘interesting’, if unsurprising.
DeleteSome script and the obligatory ‘views my own’ after the bbc employee bit.