Did we dutifully watch Ian Hislop’s piece about Fake Noos? I did but unfortunately kept dozing off - partly due to the previous night’s insomnia.
I hope you’ve got access to The Times’s (£) review by Carol Midgley because this is going to be a review of a review. Ms Midgley usually comes out with fairly perceptive analyses of programmes I’ve watched.
While her take on “Motherland’ is spot on, in my humble opinion the Hislop review lacks a certain something.
Yes, the example of the false-flag fake story planted merely to hook a rival’s plagiarism was entertaining and informative, as was the tale about the child sex-ring fake noos linked to Hillary Clinton and the near-fatal consequences of the hatred engendered by it - but did Hislop allude to the fall-out from the equally apposite ‘credible and true’ business? If so, I missed it due to one of my unconscious phases.
Then Ms Midgley says:
“Hislop was variously playful, concerned, droll and exasperated in an intelligent film that treated viewers as if we have a brain, which makes a nice change. Donald Trump’s version of “fake news”, Hislop said, is “real news that he doesn’t like”. By denouncing real news as fake, he added, Trump and his supporters allow real fake news to flourish. “
Here we go. Trump.
Hislop did indeed mention the alarming tendency we all have to believe what we want to believe regardless of ‘facts’, and I’m reliably informed that while I only was half-awake he cited ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ as an example of debunked, disproved and demonstrably fake news that still refuses to be put to sleep by those that ‘like’ it. But he also cited that great authority on impartiality, Mark Thompson. It’s a wonder he didn’t bring in John Sweeney while he was at it.
The Times is veering further and further away from us. (me.) (eg., Caitlin Moran? She has a way with words, granted, but will she ever grow up?
Does Carol Midgley treat readers as if we have a brain? Let’s assume she watches HIGNFY. Is the BBC still regarded as impartial? Does The Times still pass for a right-of-centre paper? Does Carol Midgley really think Ian Hislop is a balanced and thorough adjudicator of purveyors of the truth? A credible and true authority on Fake Noos?
There are too many elephants silently squatting within Hislop’s world view. Maybe I should just have resigned myself to my slumbers.
