(Brexit) The media let malicious idiots take over
George Monbiot
Fri 22 Mar 2019 11.57 EDT
Last modified on Fri 22 Mar 2019 13.25 EDT
... When the BBC launched its new Scotland channel recently, someone had the bright idea of asking Mark Meechan – who calls himself Count Dankula – to appear on two of its discussion programmes. His sole claim to fame is being fined for circulating a video showing how he had trained his girlfriend’s dog to raise its paw in a Nazi salute when he shouted: “Sieg heil!” and “Gas the Jews”. The episodes had to be ditched after a storm of complaints. This could be seen as an embarrassment for the BBC. Or it could be seen as a triumph, as the channel attracted massive publicity a few days after its launch.
The best thing to have happened to the career of William Sitwell, the then-editor of Waitrose magazine, was the scandal he caused when he sent a highly unprofessional, juvenile email to a freelance journalist, Selene Nelson, who was pitching an article on vegan food. “How about a series on killing vegans, one by one. Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly? Expose their hypocrisy? Force-feed them meat,” he asked her. He was obliged to resign. As a result of the furore, he was snapped up by the Telegraph as its new food critic, with a front-page launch and expensive publicity shoot.
Last June, the scandal merchant Isabel Oakeshott was exposed for withholding a cache of emails detailing Leave.EU co-founder Arron Banks’ multiple meetings with Russian officials, which might have been of interest to the Electoral Commission’s investigation into the financing of the Brexit campaign. During the following days she was invited on to Question Time and other outlets, platforms she used to extol the virtues of Brexit. By contrast, the journalist who exposed her, Carole Cadwalladr, has been largely frozen out by the BBC ...
The Conservative MP Mark Francois became hot media property the moment he made a complete ass of himself on BBC News. He ripped up a letter from the German-born head of Airbus that warned about the consequences of Brexit, while announcing: “My father, Reginald Francois, was a D-Day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German, and neither will his son.” Now he’s all over the BBC ...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/22/political-monsters-media-jacob-rees-mogg-platforms?CMP=share_btn_tw
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Mark Benson
Perry Benson