Instead of a guild, practitioners are hired to do their masters\’ bidding, even when that can mean spreading disinformation and disregarding evidence.
Instead of a guild, practitioners are hired to do their masters\’ bidding, even when that can mean spreading disinformation and disregarding evidence.
I like that she admits the right-wing press is more popular (she uses the words “emerging dominance”) and bemoans that Murdoch “assaults” the BBC.
Of course it hasn’t occurred to her that the BBC is supposed to be neutral, not rabidly left-wing to counter-balance a popular private sector right-wing press?
Well in fairness Polly is not hired by anyone to do anything.
Like certain British judges there is no need given the depths to which she will stoop on her own.
“If the Sunday Sun soars, he will be back owning some 40% of press readership”
She seems to believe that companies own their customers. Toynbee also usually refers to something like ‘80% right-wing press’, which is based on readership, without discussing why more people buy nominally ‘right-wing’ papers than buy nominally ‘left-wing’ ones.
Polly is incapable of discovering the beam in her own eye.
So if Poll’s columns starting preaching the benefits of free markets, competition, personal responsibility, Climate skepticism, Nuclear power etc., she would still receive funding from The Guardian?
“…without discussing why more people buy nominally ‘right-wing’ papers than buy nominally ‘left-wing’ ones.”
False consciousness, obviously.
Well, not obviously, but it’s the most flattering explanation. And I suspect that’s what matters.
There’s a number of reasons Murdoch gets demonised by Guardianisti, not least their semi-religious need for demons (I see Tesco has becoming their latest) to bolster their sense of self-righteousness.
Another (and I reckon the most important) is transference: they can’t criticise the newspaper tastes of the working class directly but they can’t suppress their snobbery – it comes out in loathing of the Sun and therefore Murdoch.
Could we all club together and buy her a mirror. Possibly a distorting one would be even better !
Alan Douglas
People buy newspapers for all sorts of reasons.
My dad used to buy the telegraph for the crossword (even though he’s a life-long Labour voter) a friend of mine (again Labour) bought the Sun for what he felt was superior horse-racing coverage..
Well, KJ, my father used to buy the News of the World for, he said, the golf correspondent. But he still cancelled it when he saw the young me reading it one Sunday.
My dad wouldn’t have the NofTW in the house. The only exception was when i brought home the Frank Bough issue.
Widdershins is right. It is transference.
Like the demonisation of Thatcher. The opening up of the City was one of the great agents of social mobility. The characterising of it as an era of greed is nothing more than it being opened up to narrow boys and bank clerks.
Similarly with Labour’s loathing of grammar schools, which they thought turned working class children into Tory voters.
@ SJH
“Similarly with Labour’s loathing of grammar schools, which they thought turned working class children into Tory voters.”
That does not apply to all Labour voters nor even to all Labour Councillors: I grew up in a working-class town within an industrial conurbation and the town’s Labour-controlled Council – it was Labour-controlled (with a little help from gerry-mandering to prevent the Conservatives who, more often than not, got more votes in local elections from ever winning control) from 1945 until it was abolished in a local government reorganisation – staunchly supported the town’s three grammar schools (two for boys and one for girls). They wanted working-class boys (and girls) to have a decent chance even if it meant that the likes of Ken Clarke voted Conservative.
The opposition came largely from Socialist ex-Public School boys like the two Tonies (Benn and Crosland). [By the time Ed Balls attended Nottingham High School it had changed from admitting students solely on merit to fee-paying, but does not qualify as a Public School.]