What a lot of balls

Based on a couple of recommendations, I've just picked up a copy of this book...



Flat Earth News

An award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media

"Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession." When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street's unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance.

Working with a network of off-the-record sources, Davies uncovered the story of the prestigious Sunday newspaper which allowed the CIA and MI6 to plant fiction in its columns; the daily newsroom where senior reporters casually refer to 'nig nogs' and where executives routinely reject stories about black people; the respected quality paper which was so desperate for scoops that it hired a conman to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures. He found papers supporting law and order while paying cash bribes to bent detectives and hiring private investigators to steal information.

Davies names names and exposes the national news stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda.

He shows the impact of this on a world where media consumers believe a mass of stories which, in truth, are as false as the idea that the Earth is flat - from the millennium bug to the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, tainting government policy, perverting popular belief.


One of the problems I understand that Nick Davies identifies is that journalists, even if they are pure of heart, no longer have the resources to expend on genuine investigative journalism.

Genuine investigative journalists may spend months or years pursuing a potential story with no certainty of a result worth publishing

Channel 4, for example, has become particularly adept at commissioning and knocking out trash documentaries which clearly took no more than a couple of weeks of Googling and a couple of days of filming on a high street somewhere to produce

The harsh reality of this kind of commercial pressure is, of course, one of the principal arguments used to justify those fuckers at Capita extorting £140 with menaces from every household to fund the BBC

It clearly doesn't work though, as the BBC produces the same kind of vacuous, superficial dross dressed up as investigative journalism as the commercial outlets.

In recent years the main BBC news bulletins have been transformed into vehicles that simply repeat government and corporate press releases; in a way that's far too reminiscent the kind of Propaganda Ministries seen in dystopic fiction to be at all funny

There are, however, noble exceptions to the rule. The BBC is still willing to invest resources in hard-hitting quality investigate documentaries that take over a year to produce and will only ever be shown when the Beeb gets round to it...


"Pandora: Conspiracy theories abound over BBC's London bombings film

By Henry Deedes
Thursday, 4 September 2008


The BBC has found itself under siege from all sides over its decision to make a documentary about the bombings that took place in London on 7 July, 2005.

In June, the Beeb was criticised by the victims' families after it emerged that it paid the expenses of the disgraced academic, Dr Nick Kollerstrom, to appear in a programme about the atrocity as part of the Conspiracy Files series.

Kollerstrom, who denies the Holocaust, thinks the bombers may have been "innocent patsies" set up by elements of the Israeli, British and US security agencies. Now it is the turn of the conspiracy theorists to start spitting feathers.

Kollerstrom and another of the interviewees, the journalist Tony Gosling, claim they were told the programme would be aired some time this month, only to be informed that it has now been shelved until later this year.

Being conspiracists, they naturally smell fish. Gosling says: "We have been told that it is down to legal reasons but this seems to be another tentacle of the war on terror. To be honest, I'm a bit shell-shocked about it. Some of us have put our necks on the line for this."

While the corporation says the documentary will eventually see the light of day, it insists that there was never any plan to show it this year. "It was never on the schedule so there was no set release date," says a spokesman.

"We tend to air these programmes when there is some sort of report to peg them to. It is definitely not for legal reasons."



First off, I no fan of the carefully selected 'troofers' the BBC is going to use in the show

But it strikes me as awfully strange that the BBC is sitting on material for so long that it runs a very real risk of becoming outdated before it is broadcast

So my guess, based on a little hard evidence, is that the BBC was planning to air the program round about now

Now what could have caused the delay?

The BBC spokesperson concedes that these kind of shows are normally timed to coincide with an event such as a government report, or ...a trial verdict

So, have there been any terror trial verdicts that didn't quite go the way they were supposed to recently?


Majority option for bomb plot jury - Thursday August 28 2008

The jury in the trial of eight men accused of plotting to blow up transatlantic passenger jets has been given a majority instruction...


Lordy, lordy what a surprise

Juries, eh? What a pain in the arse - it's about time someone did something to do away with them

and not forgetting the recent trial of three alleged 7/7 conspirators which also went tits up recently

that would be the trial where it was revealed that the alleged 7/7 bombers scattered their personal ID around the tube carriages and took off their rucksacks before the bombs went off

No doubt the excellent and entirely honourable BBC investigative journalists will be able to blow apart any conspiracy theories arising from that little revelation and publish their findings just as soon as the next show trial goes as planned

Confused as to how all those chilling plots fit together? You won't be after you've worked though this pile of balls

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It's intermission time now - touch wood, back in a few days...

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