Newspaper Watch

Here is Nesrine:

The RSF originated in the west of the country, among the formalised remnants of Arab militia which in the early noughties, in partnership with the government, brutally suppressed rebellion by marginalised African tribes. The group is now repeating the ethnic warfare that the international criminal court determined constituted genocide at the time: targeting victims based on their ethnic profile, killing thousands from non-Arab communities, burning their infrastrucure, and pushing hundreds of thousands of survivors into Chad in order to claim their land and prevent their return.

She’s still not strong enough about this, is she? Reality being that the Arab north – or significcant elements of it at lesat – have been oppressing, murdering and enslaving the largely black south and west for generations.

But, of course, it’s the British and their racism which is to be pointed at.

American journalists that is:

Now, we learn of the latest relationship-repair steps: a $40m licensing fee from Amazon for the great honor of producing a documentary on Melania Trump. The behemoth company stated that it is “excited to share this truly unique story”.

So, Amazon – which Bezos does not run any more but how much he influences, well…..- makes a business decision on a documentary. Ho Well.

Sadly, the Amazon-Melania deal has much the same flavor as the rest of these relationship-repairing moves – not just by Bezos but by others of his ilk. Amazon, it turns out, wasn’t the only one in the running for this dubious prize. Paramount and Disney reportedly were outbid.

“The billionaires are all lined up on one side, on the side of billionairedom, begging for the right to throw money at the decadent final years’ potentate,” wrote Josh Marshall in his Talking Points Memo. “It’s the powerful versus everyone who doesn’t want to lick the boot of power.”

The kowtowing, whether by Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or quite a few others, is not mysterious.

Still, the knee-bending and ring-kissing – intended to stack more billions on to already towering piles – is a dark sight. Darkness that democracy just might die in.

This is the death of democracy.

Jeez, the pomposity of this.

‘If you are black, you are finished’: the ethnically targeted violence raging in Sudan
Refugees tell of attacks on darker-skinned people and non-Arab groups by Rapid Support Forces and its allies in Darfur

That column from Nesrine on the vile racism of her origin country. She’ll look up from her complaints about Britain and deal with matters closer in time and place.

Right? She will?

Yep, real soon now…..

The opinion editor at Die Welt has resigned after the conservative German newspaper printed an article from Elon Musk justifying his support for the hard-Right AfD.

Eva Marie Kogel said she handed in her resignation after the newspaper went to print on Friday.

No, really, well done there. Your paper prints something you don’t like then leave the newspaper.

More people should act on their ethics. Sure, sure, the ethics could be wrong and all that but standing up for them is novel in public life these days….

Journalists at the Daily Mirror have been offered bonuses to write sponsored articles promoting household products as the newspaper’s publisher for new sources of revenue.

Staff at Reach, which also owns the Express and regional titles including the Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo, have been offered an extra £60 if they create “affiliate content” that generates more than £600 in revenues.

The scheme, dubbed the “affiliates cash challenge”, was recently expanded to increase the maximum monthly amount payable from £120 to £180.

Reach has stepped up its focus on sponsored content as it grapples with a sharp decline in advertising revenues.

You’d think that someone in the same business would be able to write an article about it. No, this isn’t “sponsored” at all, This is affiliate, as it says. Write an article “My God this is 80% off at Amazon today!” and when the folk pile in to buy it from Amazoin then the Mirror gets 4% (or whatever it is) as a commission from Amazon.

Sponsored means the Mirror is being paid by an advertise. Afficilate means hoping to be paid on commission.

Sigh.

On the other hand it would be easy-peasy to round up an army of folk to write such pieces for 10% of the Mirror’s affiliate take on them. Jeebus, bite yer hand off.

If there were any winners from Donald Trump’s first term as president, the New York Times has a strong claim to be one of them.

Subscriber numbers at the newspaper, which Trump repeatedly described as “failing”, surged from just under 3m to 7.5m over the course of the four-year administration as Left-leaning readers flocked to what they viewed as trusted news sources.

This “Trump bump”, as the phenomenon became known, also paid dividends for The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, as well as broadcasters such as CNN.

Now, as Trump prepares to return to the White House, US media outlets are hoping to repeat the trick. But experts warn that the political and media backdrop has changed almost unrecognisably over the last eight years.

The experts are going to be wrong.

Because such experts always are of course.

But more interestingly what is really happening is that there’s an underlying structural change going on. As I’ve noted many times before the UK has had a national newspaper market for over a century now. The end result of which is a markt delineated not by geography but by class and politics. Titles chase a slice of the demography not the people in an area.

The US market, until the internet, was far more like the British local newspaper market than our national. Now, the internet is making it more like our national. The outcome will be – as I’ve been saying for a couple of decades – something like our national market.

The economics of that absence of distance any more just mean that is what is going to happen.

Wonder who’s going to have the gumption to be The Sun and Daily Mirror of this new world order?

Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr has had her contract “cancelled” by the Guardian following the Sunday newspaper’s controversial sale to Tortoise Media.

Ms Cadwalladr, an investigative journalist who has written several high profile stories on Brexit, wrote on social media site X that the Guardian was “cancelling my contract after 19 years continuous employment with no pay-off”.

Zero hours contracts – there’s no guarantee of getting space in the paper. You only start to rack up payment possibilities when an editor says “Yes, write that.” If you do and they don;t use it you’ll probably get a half fee. But that’s it.

And given that she’s been happily working on such a contract for 19 year obviously it’s a type of contract that people are happy enough to work to.

Observer appoints first female editor in over a century after controversial sale
Lucy Rock to oversee print edition of world’s oldest Sunday newspaper after Guardian sells title to digital start-up Tortoise

OK, new editor. As is normal there will be a few changes in contributors. That’s one of the ways you edit, by deciding upon who writes for the paper.

So, will William Keegan lose his column? That’s been echoes about Brexit from a previous business section editor for years now. And Will Hutton? He used to be editor himself and there’s a sort of omerta that says ex-such get to keep a column. But given the content of it in recent times I’d guess that it’s more about his GMG (or is it Scott Trust?) role. Which now isn’t an influence, is it?

The European Commission has agreed a zero tariff rate for 99,000 tonnes of beef and 180,000 tonnes of poultry, which is the equivalent of 4 million head of cattle and 600 million birds.

That has a cow at 25 kg of beef. A chicken at 300 grammes. But, you know, journalism and numbers….

The way that American journalism tries, so, so, hard, to insist that the people who actually own a rag should have no influence over a rag:

It was surprising, then, that the Washington Post did not endorse Trump in its pre-election editorial. Instead the writers crafted an endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris which Bezos killed, in his first act of blatant editorial interference since he bought the title in 2013.

“Blatant” etc etc. It’s his fucking newspaper.

This is not just a tendency, it’s even more than just an assumption. They really do believe – as a matter of deep, deep, faith – that the owner’s job is just to keep coughing up for the losses. Journos just get to keep spewing their own prejudices at the masses.

Look, yes, we know, all the journalists are on strike. There’s therefore that dull thud of the barrel being scraped:

‘Everyone is confused’: how to find the right pair of pants

Sounds like an exciting lifestyle to be honest. Scrabbling around under the bed to find your pants not those of previous short term inamoratas of the bed’s owner.

A few weeks ago, I had a terrible realization. I needed new pants

Marks & Spencers is that way, Love.

In theory, this should be a simple errand. Stores are crammed with pairs of every size, shape and material: wide leg, bootcut; high-waisted, elastic waist; denim, pleather.

Denim, boot cut, pants? This is much more exciting than the home life of our Own Dear Queen. Tho’ with the current one in her youth one might ponder a little.

Oh. Ah. Sorry.

They went and found an American to strike break, didn’t they? And didn’t bother to sub for a British newspaper.

Journalists at the Guardian and the Observer are holding a 48-hour strike in protest at the proposed sale of the Observer newspaper to Tortoise Media.

The strike, the first at the Guardian in more than 50 years, is due to take place on Wednesday 4 December and Thursday 5 December.

We’ll find out whether the quality of the paper increases tomorrow, shall we?

Guardian to conceal identity of journalists who cross picket line

Can’t we just read the bylines?

By the end of the week, BBC Verify published a new article conceding that the figures were contentious but without any reference to Neidle, although it still backed the government’s estimates and cited different sources to back up its analysis.

The BBC spokesman said: “Dan Neidle’s analysis wasn’t removed – the below 500 figure was taken out for brevity as it was repetitive. The new piece is a deep dive on the numbers using analysis from the Institute of Fiscal Studies and CenTax to explore the figures as thoroughly as possible in the light of the discussion. This article is clear we stand by our original assessment and it explains why.”

CenTax is Advani and Summers. The very people who suggested the IHT changes in hte first place. They are not, in any manner, neutral arbiters. But that’s how they’re being used….

How do city lawyers and accountants in partnerships get away with paying no NI as “self-employed”? And so on.

The self-employed do pay NI…..

Some opposition is mindless: protests from retailers that the rise in minimum wage rise and employers’ national insurance will cause job losses would carry more weight if they offered an alternative tax rise to pay for the NHS and everything else.

The effects of a specific tax rise have nothing to do with what the money then gets spent upon. Nor even the desirability of that spending. The effects of a specific tax rise are, simply, the effects of that specific tax rise. Deal with it.

Of course, the real problem here is that Polly wants a large government high tax country. Brits are a little less sure about this – especially when they’re asked to pay those high taxes.

Someone had to pay. Is this a “class”-based budget, the chancellor is asked on the BBC? No, it’s raising money urgently needed for the NHS and all public services. Someone has to pay, and if not the best-off, then who?

Labour chose larger employers, those with more than four employees. And Labour taxed the well-off, those with capital gains and private jets, those joining the 7% with rental properties, and the families of the 7% of children in private schools. Even with the changes to inheritance tax (IHT) on farms and businesses, only 7% of estates are expected to be liable. Pension pots will now pay IHT – but they did previously, until George Osborne changed them as another gift to the wealthy in 2015.

Sad stories of the stricken rich have, frankly, been quite enjoyable to read.

#And of course Polly doesn’t realise that “business” doesn;t pay taxes because it cannot. Nor that of course there’s an alternative – piss less up against the wall.

So here we are. Kemi Badenoch is the leader of the Conservative party. That’s another couple of firsts that the Tories have beaten Labour to. So far, the Conservatives have elected the first Asian leader and prime minister, and the first female Black leader of any major British political party.

But as these firsts started to come quicker and closer together – we now have a brown party leader handing over to a Black one – two things have happened. One, the politics of the party has become more unhinged and its electoral record has tanked. And two, the profile of these mould-breaking new leaders has become more extreme. The two are not unrelated to the success of ethnic minorities in the Tory party. I am sorry to point this out, because there is a sort of ritual now that must be observed when the Tories do well on diversity: you must not speak ill of a person of colour who has been elected to a position of leadership for the first time, and the significance of that moment, above all else, should be respected.

Wrong sort of Black, d’ye see?

Better, faster, stronger? Tech titans’ obsession with turbocharged computer power could be our downfall
John Naughton

First there was Moore’s law, now the Nvidia boss has upped the ante. It’s all fuelling a dangerous conviction that everything can be solved by technology

Twattery.

“Some” things can be solved by technology. So, let’s have more and faster tech to solve those that can be so solved, also, to find out which can be so solved.

He’s also wrong in detail:

Even so, it turned out to be an accurate prediction of how the business of making silicon chips would evolve. Since transistor density is correlated with processing power, what it meant was that computing power doubled every year until about 2010, after which it began to level off somewhat, largely because of the physical limits on the density of transistors that could be fitted on to a tiny rectangle. (Although it hasn’t prevented Apple from getting 19bn of them on the A17 chip inside my iPhone.)

Bollocks. It’s because the rise of cellphones meant that more processing power was devoted to such things as power management and comms. What we used the processing power for cchanged, not the advance in processing power.

Sigh. And this man has a major tech column….

As with many I think he’s more than a bit of a loon given his base beliefs. But as is also common to many I have thought – used to think – that at least he was reasonable with his loonness. If actual hard evidence slapped in hte face – say Fukushima and nuclear – then he was willing to change his mind.

And, well, no:

Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”. But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has complied with 83% of requests by governments for the censorship or surveillance of accounts. When the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, demanded the censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform obliged. When Indian government officials asked it to remove a hostile BBC documentary, X did as they asked, and later deleted the accounts of many critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Last month, X blocked links to a dossier about Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and suspended the account of the journalist who revealed it.

All of that first is a claim that Musk has been obeying the law in those varied countries. Indian law says that in India you may not do such and such therefore Musk – and X – do not do such and such in India. Imagine the shrieking if they didn’t follow local law?

The last is about doxxing. The report revealed Vance’s home address, in detail. That’s against X T&Cs. So, the post was taken down. And?

That is, Monbiot has now shown himself to be – and this is not the first time recently – just another propagandist willing to twist truth for political gain and rhetoric.

Oh Well.

But Trump’s election might also permit even greater opportunities. Musk controls key strategic and military assets, such as SpaceX satellite launchers and the Starlink internet system. As Ukraine discovered to its cost last year, he can switch them off at whim.

Erm, no. Musk didn’t turn on Stalink in hte Crimea at the behest of the Ukrainians. Because to do so would be a violation of US sanctions upon Russian re Crimea. See what I mean about party political rhetoric here?

The Guardian is unafraid. And it’s independent. (No billionaire bosses.) In this media climate, those qualities are as rare as they are crucial to good journalism.

The Guardian is still owned. Is still subject to groupthink from those owners. There’s near no subject where we don’t know what The Guardian will say about it. It’s just that the owners, the groupthink, are effectively the collective that run The Guardian. This really isn’t very different.