Saturday 8 June 2019

Didn't see the caption


A five and a half minute section of (17:21 - 22: 53) yesterday’s Politics Live covered Lisa Forbes’s election. Initially, Faiza Shaheen defended Forbes’s Tweet, using the “She didn’t notice the caption” defence. When that wouldn’t wash she tried a bit of whataboutery. What about Islamophobia? she said. Then, what about Ann Widdecombe? 

Just a minute, who IS Faiza Shaheen and why is she always on the Beeb? Okay, she’s a Labour Party candidate who only joined the party after JC was elected; she’s after Ian Duncan Smith’s seat and the Guardian newspaper calls her a "rising star" campaigner.

You know when your kids do that thing when they think you’re being annoying and stupid? Mine used to, and I know all their mates did it a lot. They’d push their tongue in front of their bottom teeth to make their lower lip look ‘monkey’ and go ‘ugh’?  
Shaheen is grown up, but she reminded me of Kevin the Teenager, gurning like billy-oh, especially when it came to the bit about Ann Widdecombe.
 This lady is said to have studied at Oxford so you’d think she might have at least learned to speak proper. What grievance has the Labour Party got against the le’er T?

Incidentally, this caught my eye, because it happened in my neck of the woods. The good people of the far south-west have no-platformed Widdy. The most exasperating thing about all this OTT hooha is that she wasn’t advocating ’cures’ for homosexuality in the first place.

These days reporting often ignores inconvenient facts and verges on ‘reductio ad absurdum’.  It seems to be par for the course.  Someone says something, (it could be anything at all) about a controversial subject, and some god-forsaken reporter will reinterpret it to slot into their own prejudice. 
One day, science could invent a cure for this.

5 comments:

  1. "Someone says something, (it could be anything at all) about a controversial subject, and some god-forsaken reporter will reinterpret it to slot into their own prejudice. "

    It's worse than that, the 'reporter' will ask a 'wife beating question' in the hope that the interviewee will say something that with a following tornado might just fit the headline that they are determined to run.

    Andrew Marr's Sunday show does that all the time with its in-show 'news' segment, from answer to headline in minutes, certainly not enough time for a proper editor to review the 'story' before publication.

    Ann, being Catholic is an easy target for this technique. (Are there no Labour Catholics? Why don't they ask the 'gay' question of Labour Jews, Catholics or Muslims?).

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  2. Whoops! Roger Godsiff MP, (Labour unknown)does an 'Ann'!
    https://www.itv.com/news/2019-06-08/labour-mp-sparks-party-row-after-telling-lgbt-teaching-protesters-youre-right/

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  3. "I didn't see the caption" and "I was only protesting against Israel" are modern-day replacements for "I was only taking orders" and "Some of my best friends are Jewish".

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  4. The refusal to acknowledge the existence of the letter t is obviously a membership requirement for joining the Labour Party. Blair and co. were almost apologetic in their approach to the despised letter, but Faiza Shaheen goes for the full glottal. I can only assume that her experience at Oxford was so traumatic that adolescent rebellion was her only defence - a challenge to all us awful microaggessors. It’s okay Faiza you can stop it now and talk normally.

    To be fair to Jo Coburn, she did at least point out that Lisa Forbes was a serial offender. But that pales into insignificance in the overall picture. The BBC seems to be completely blind to how much effect their persistent lies about Israel have contributed to this disgraceful election result.

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  5. There is another Labour superstar of faith currently involved in quite the knockabout with JHB on Twitter. Expect to see more of her in the studios.

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