Two Things

Interesting Guardian editorial today:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/27/eurozone-crisis-christine-lagarde-morality-tale

Obviously it's all the fault of the undeserving poor. They have brought us to this state with their health care needs and pensions. Now we must wait for the noble bankers to help us out of our misery with their graciousness. 


This was followed by a revelation that BoJo's former communications chief, Guto Harri, an ex-BBC man himself, threatened the Beeb over an interview with a biographer of the philandering Mayor of London:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/may/27/guto-harri-press-campaign-against-bbc

Harri is a man who has championed the integrity of NewsCorp.

Ye gods above.

It's one thing the Beeb nursing folk like Jeremy Clarkson, whose neo-libertarian views can rightly be regarded as the comic outpourings of a deluded tosspot with a vocabulary considerably more extensive than his understanding: but when they start nurturing folk like Harri you really have to wonder if, within the very environs of Broadcasting House itself, there isn't some secret self-destructive inner cabal working strenuously for the beeb's demise: undermining from within, as some sort of "fifth column".

Never mind, when Roops has persuaded the Tories to dismantle the BBC and asset strip the bits, and all we shall be left with is pay-per-view and Fox, maybe we can download everything we want to watch from the bit-torrent sites. Of course, by then we shall have no in-depth unbiased news reporting, or analysis: but what do the common folk need of such fripperies when they're holding down two or three jobs just to pay the rent? That is if they can find two or three jobs…or even one.

You see, it is my contention that, in the media, a strong private sector needs a strong state sector to balance it. Each keeps the other virtuous. Some of the lunatics who call themselves conservatives would get rid of the Beeb - the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation. How precisely are these folk "conservative" I wonder, if they are prepared to throw the Beeb under a bus to conform to some bizarre ideological notion of the limitations of government. As for the Harri chappy he comes across as being a bit distastefully Judas-like, which in the modern world is no doubt "realistic" or "sexy".

Bah humbug. You shall get the media you deserve, no doubt. And hopefully I will be dead by then.

Sing if you love the oligarchy.

The best things in life are free,
But you can keep 'em for the birds and the bees...

(no subject)

Yet more thoughts on the media.

My natural newspaper (the Times) has been barred from my house since 1982 or so: when "Dame" Harold Evans (as Private Eye would style him) left the Thunderer for pastures further from the sty. So I read the Grauniad. But then again the greatest crossword compiler of the modern age, Araucaria, will not work for Murdoch and sets mainly for the Grauniad. So some small win there then.

When I have that spare hour or two, an Araucarian crossword is one of the great joys of the world. Solipsistic intellectual masturbation is such a good look, don'tyerthink? Especially when I'm flailing around for answers, being a trifle dim of brain at present.

It's always comforting to know that there are folk out there who are so clever that they make even the cleverest of the rest of us (and I'm not quite that, alas) look slow. Such folk are meant for us as reminders…and perhaps to help us avoid the descent into hubris, lest we all become like unto a media baron or mediæval monarch.