The media

Oborne and the Trojan Horse affair

A previous column about the right wing journalist Peter Oborne ( Solidarity 661 ) described how this one-time “conventional conservative” had been transformed by the Iraq war into someone feted by sections of the left. I described his politics as “right wing isolationism”. That column described Oborne’s largely uncritical admiration for Islam and Islamic regimes, including some ultra-reactionary Islamists. I will now go on to examine Oborne’s long-standing interest in the Birmingham Trojan Horse affair — an alleged plot or campaign by some conservative Muslims to take over Birmingham secular...

The Tory that (some) lefties love

There is a section of the left that seems to love it when an avowed right-winger backs their cause. The Morning Star recently quoted, with approval, Henry Kissinger in support of their line that Ukraine should capitulate to Putin. But for a significant section of the left, the journalist Peter Oborne is the right-winger of choice. This can be explained by Oborne’s political evolution from being (in his own words) a “conventional Conservative” working for right-wing publications like the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph , to being transformed by the Iraq war into someone who (again, in his own...

Why banning Russia Today is a bad idea

A few years ago, when I was working on the Bernie Sanders campaign, one of our volunteers came to me with an interesting proposal. It turned out that he worked in London for Russia Today (now known as RT). He suggested that I or another campaign spokesperson might make an appearance on one of their shows. It would be good publicity for the campaign, he said. I politely declined and explained why. RT is a propaganda arm of the Russian state and I wanted nothing to do with it. Nor did I want the Sanders campaign to be associated with it. This week Ofcom banned RT from broadcasting in the UK...

Defend the BBC!

Most of us are acquainted with the phrase: There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Yet when the Government announce that they are going to scrap the licence fee there is a resounding lack of fuss. Because the licence fee is unfair right? It’s a flat tax that spreads the load evenly among an uneven populace. However, with the much-maligned licence fee we actually have something beautifully valuable: a stake in our broadcasting. Let’s be fair it is a small stake for a corporation that produces a dizzying array of output on a daily basis and can compete with much better funded and much less public...

The campaign against Stonewall's "diversity champions"

A sustained campaign against the LGBT rights charity Stonewall has been fuelled by anti-trans campaigners. Stonewall has long represented the mainstream of the LGBT movement. It is a charity which since 2001 has provided a “Diversity Champions” scheme of support for businesses and organisations on workplace bullying and LGBT inclusive policies. 900 organisations are members of the scheme. Many of the policies it advocates have become standard-issue corporate equality, and it is now much easier for LGB people to be out at work and protected from losing their jobs or discrimination. Yet official...

Facebook and its plan for “proper empires”

The future is not what it used to be. The tech giants were once seen as harbingers of a new utopia even by some leftists, but no more. Facebook has seen its moral stock crash, first with its role in the election of Trump and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Social media is now subject to harsh criticism even by some of those who made it (see Netflix’s The Social Dilemma ). In recent weeks, the cache of documents released by ex-Facebook employee Frances Haugen has further damned Facebook. At the same time, Facebook’s rebranding as Meta points to plans that will make its commercial proposition...

The harm of social media

Since it was released in early September, the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma has attracted much attention (Netflix/Exposure Labs: Dir: Jeff Orlowski 2020).

Brexit shows... no point defending the BBC

The Cummings-Johnson-Gove clique have made no secret of their contempt for the BBC and desire to bring it to heel. They believe the result of the EU referendum and the 2019 election give them an opportunity to mount a “culture war” on the supposedly “liberal” and “metropolitan” BBC. Their approach so far, has been to follow Trump’s “fake news” strategy — in which politicians aim to escape accountability by convincing enough supporters that all criticism is based on the lies of a biased “liberal” media. But now there is clear evidence of a plan to fundamentally undermine the independence of the...

Save BBC from the Tories? But what BBC?

The recent resignation of BBC director Tony Hall has once again thrust the question of the role and the future of the BBC into the spotlight. Hall’s resignation comes at a time when redundancies, cuts and reorganisations are being announced, along with calls for a rethinking about what the BBC does and how it does it. On 29 January it was announced that 250 jobs were to go among journalists and production staff. The scrapping of the popular Victoria Derbyshire Show, announced a few days previous, is indicative of what this will mean for the programme schedule. Although the reasoning behind...

A Labour newspaper?

Should the labour movement have its own newspaper? That is the question posed by Richard Burgon, currently running for Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. Burgon, speaking to Novara Media, said that a Labour freesheet could mimic the Evening Standard or the Metro. The various editions of the Metro currently have a total circulation of 1.4m, and the ES has about 800,000 around London. That makes them two of the most-read newspapers in the UK. Burgon was attacked by Ian Murray, the most right-wing of those standing for the deputy leadership: “We are a party aspiring to be in government, not a...

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