Newspaper Watch

It has to be The Guardian that ruins a piece like this, doesn’t it?

It’s a claim that put baldly can sound too vast and conspiratorial to be credible, but there are some parts of the British press that, for a long time, have not simply reported the news, but done their bit to create it, so that it conforms to a pre-existing narrative.

Err, yes?

The media are often not the impartial observers that this scenario assumes. Sometimes, the journalist looks out of the window, finds that it is dry, but ends up giving the impression that it is raining anyway.

There are certain stories that are teased into headlines based on exaggeration and a loose relationship with the facts.

Hmm.

What, you mean like when an Arab Sundanese castigates the British over slavery?

Hell, a kick:

All too often, interpersonal racism is the only form of racism that catches media attention, or inspires public outrage and backlash, while devastating policies and traditions slip through the cracks. This, in itself, is a product of western neoliberalism and its very purposeful construction of narratives that reduce systemic, structural crises like imperialism, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, and white supremacy to individual, interpersonal issues.

Surprised western neoliberalism isn’t being blamed for the paucity of really good 25 cent cigars too.

Esports in Bangladesh: An untapped industry on the rise

It took a moment. Isn’t the point of the whole exercise to tap escorts?

His specific example isn’t all that sympathy generating. Landlord wants to sell, gives 6 months notice, tenants then – well, they stop answering calls, don’t communicate. And that’s about it really.

Except for this:

He wasn’t the only property owner worrying in that time of confusion, but arguably any fall would have to be enormous for him to lose out: the Land Registry shows that Smith bought the flat in 2003 for £162,000; today, similar properties nearby sell for almost three times as much.

Well, yes Aditya. Losing out is losing from the current market value, not the purchase price.

The chief executive of the Guardian has quit after losing a battle with editor Katharine Viner over the future of the left-leaning title.

In a fight between the business reality outside that window and ivory tower progressivism the loser is – reality!

We could have predicted this from reading the comment pages, couldn’t we?

Ms Thomas is said to have favoured a more prudent approach after losses were stemmed by pandemic job cuts. Ms Viner is viewed as the spearhead of newsroom demands for reinvestment.

A GMG spokesman said: “Annette has renewed GMG’s strategy, working with editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, increasing investment in journalism, digital products, and other areas.”

We’re only losing £16 million a year. Spend more!

By the Carter presidency, no one on either side of the aisle cared much about American workers, which is why deindustrialization looks in hindsight like what it was: an economic hate crime perpetrated upon organized labor by the insidious wealth transfer cartel that seems to run everything.

As Stewart Lansley and Howard Reed, the nation’s foremost experts on UBI

That Howard Reed is thought of as the nation’s expert in anything?

If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake
Thomas Frank

Well, yes, thanks for that, Thommo.

Why has the lab leak theory come back now?
That’s complicated. The overt hostility of the Trump administration to China, and the way it pushed the lab leak claims, including a dodgy dossier that was doing the rounds last year, made it a pretty tainted source.

The advent of a Biden administration, which is less hostile to China, combined with the limitations in the WHO investigation, created an environment where some have felt able to ask questions about Covid-19’s origins without appearing to buy into Trump-era conspiracies.

Jeez people…..

It’s pretty depressing, of course, and Amazon did not get to be the retail colossus it is by specialising and indulging individual creativity.

The store that expanded individual retail choice by orders of magnitude did so by not specialising nor indulging individual creativity.

What a plonker – but then it’s an arts graduate at The Guardian…..

OMG, Sky! Murdoch! Racism!

Thousands of YouTube comments on Sky News Australia video celebrate BLM activist being shot in head
Exclusive: The racist and violent comments appear below a video news report about Sasha Johnson who was shot in the head in London

There is a useful little explanation here:

“Sky News Australia published a brief news report on the recent shooting of Sasha Johnson,” a spokesperson said. “Sky News Australia is not the author of user comments on the YouTube platform. We suggest you direct your inquiries to Google.”

It’s also worth considering that the vitriol is the vox populi. And why shouldn’t the people have their say?

Some of the stealth edits that Vox made to its article debunking "conspiracy theories" that Covid-19 originated in a lab leak between its original publication in March 2020 and now. pic.twitter.com/RYxZ2B81mc

— Paul Graham (@paulg) May 24, 2021

The Associated Press has fired a news associate, Emily Wilder, for violating the company’s social media policies, a move that drew backlash from journalists after it became clear that Wilder had been targeted by rightwing media outlets for her pro-Palestinian activism in college.

Wilder confirmed to the Guardian that she was “terminated for violating the company’s social media policies in their News Values and Principles sometime between my start date on May 3 and yesterday”. Wilder said the AP did not detail which of her tweets broke its policies.

Not the individual specifically, the Woken SS.

An awful lot of people are getting fired because of tweets and social media things being said which show they are, umm, less than impartial. Milo might have things to say on the subject for example. So, journalists must be impartial if they’re to work at journalism outlets which consider themselves impartial. And, as with Caesar’s wife, must be seen to be so.

OK, at which point goose and gander, right?

Perhaps not this particular picture, but ones of ‘planes taken from this viewpoint.

It looks like it’s ‘shopped and this specific one even might be. But there is one place where this is actually normal – St Martin (or, Sint Maarten as half the island is Cloggie). The airport runway starts right on the edge of the beach. So ‘planes really do come in – just about – this low over the gamboling crowds.

There’s even a market, as this piccie shows, for capturing an image of each individual airline that flies in there.

Not important or anything, just fun.

Shrek at 20: an unfunny and overrated low for blockbuster animation
The fairytale comedy was a hit with critics and audiences but its toilet humour, glibness and shoddy animation mark it out as a misfire

Folks like it. Therefore it is bad.

Local newspapers have been gutted by corporate owners across the country — but the survivors are joining unions

Let’s raise costs in a dying industry…….

So, landfill stink. Well, sure, real problem. But this:

Some of the hardest hit are residents of a Traveller site situated just metres away from the quarry, where people feel they are being ignored by authorities.

“I think we’re the closest to it, it’s definitely affected our health since we’ve lived here. I’ve had to move on to inhalers, I could hardly breathe,” said Dorothy Price, 76, who has lived at Cemetery Road caravan park for close to a decade.

So not a very mobile traveller then……

The Guardian can provide some fun at times.

Sole of a nation: how Clarks became Jamaica’s favourite footwear
There has long been a unique connection between the Somerset-based shoe-maker and the Caribbean island. It goes way beyond shoes – as a new edition of book Clarks in Jamaica demonstrates

It’s blissfully free of White West Country Boys exploiting foreigners stuff too.

After Michael Manley was elected as Jamaica’s prime minister in 1972 and banned imports of foreign footwear,

They even give us an example of socialist stupidity to delight in.

It hadn’t taken long to get to the bottom of it. Nigel Taylor’s wife, Julia, is a tax accountant who spends much of her working day trawling the website of Companies House. Shortly after Hughes had informed his workers in November 2016 that the foundry would be closing, Julia and Nigel Taylor had undertaken some amateur sleuthing. They found that a new company, Whitechapel Bell Limited, had been incorporated that same month. Its registered address led back to the offices of an East End property developer: Vincent Goldstein.

It emerged that in October 2016, Goldstein had agreed to pay Alan Hughes’s company £5.1m for the foundry. But it was never entirely clear what he intended to do with the place. His company is known for turning former industrial spaces into residential and commercial premises in east London. Given the meagre profits reaped from hammering out tower bells, and the large sum he paid for the buildings, it seemed likely that Goldstein would apply for a change of use, perhaps transforming the foundry into flats. (Goldstein declined to be interviewed for this article but sent me a short statement confirming the details of the sale.)

So, the old Whitechapel bell foundry is sold for property development. OK. Yes, even a bit sad after four centuries but still.

For a foundry in London, it was particularly difficult. Rents rose every year,

How do rents rise in a property that is owned?

The impact of those years, and the egregious lack of accountability for the figures that caused such a crisis reverberate today in many sectors: home ownership, access to healthcare, retirement, and the long held american notion of upward mobility. It was a given in the U.S. that children would go on to live better, or at least more financially fruitful lives than their parents. If there’s anything recent statistics have shown, it’s that this is no longer the norm, and has not been for quite some time.

How am I, a fresh college graduate, supposed to look to the future with the expectation that anything will improve? I, like the class of 2008, am inheriting a job market that is lean at best and more specifically into media – an industry that has continually cannibalized itself in order to remain “profitable”?

I’d probably start by suing the college that has failed to teach you to write.

Hello! I’m currently a senior at The University of Maryland, College Park, majoring in multi-platform journalism

And:

Not only that, beyond defining my worth within the capitalistic notion of productivity, how am i supposed to expect things to improve on a social level? I would argue that many of the events that led to the recession were perfectly aligned with how the pandemic was able to grip this nation with little effort. It is a concentration of power within a group of people who would rather make a profit than acknowledge the humanity of the people they exploit to get where they are.

Still, I suppose if you’re interning at Salon then your role model might well include Amanduh.