The People's Assembly held a march and rally in London yesterday that achieved very little press coverage. This may it be by chance. It may be by design. in the Guardian report it says:
The Metropolitan police refused to provide an estimate. A police spokesman said the force had received no reports of arrests.
A spokesman for the prime minister declined to comment.
This fits into recognised theories of change.
First they ignore you.
Then they ridicule you.
After they violently oppose you.
Then what you said was right all along.
There's little comfort in being ignored. But it is part of a process. The important point is not to give up at that stage. That's exactly what they want.
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There’s always Pravda and Al-Jazeera.
Feels a bit… You know… Odd, to say that.
Russian media, being the free press and covering the stories that we don’t hear about. It’s not like we’ve got censorship or anything like that: of course we’re haven’t, that would make us one of *those* countries.
You know, the sort of place where there’s pervasive surveillance and people die in police stations. We’re British, we’re not even a tiny little bit like that.
It makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable
The only report i came across was on RT which gave it a decent slot in its news including a brief interview with Owen Jones whilst on the march. It looked a sizeable event. I think you are right, Richard, the ignoring and marginalisation of anti-austerity protest is systemic.
yep, i go to RT or Al Jazeera for global news on the box these days.
first noticed the BBC bias when they failed to cover George Osbourne getting booed at the Paralympics. went viral and yet didn’t even get a mention on their website.
This feature of the “free press” is not news: but the fact that the BBC is equally biased in what it decides is “news” was not so clear to me in the past. It is glaringly obvious in the context of the Scottish referendum, however, and has been widely discussed. There are many who are angry about it: and it is not at all clear to me why the BBC should risk its reputation in this way. I presume it is because its independence has been undermined from the time of the fatuous introduction of “market values” by John Birt and his successors. And, of course, the utter inability of our politicians to recognise that there is a value in a truly independent news outlet.
As with so many things, the actions of our plutocrats have cleverly placed me in a knight’s fork. I believe in a public sector broadcaster to counter the concentration of our press in a few partisan hands. But that is no longer what the BBC does. The outward form and funding arrangements remain: the substance has changed utterly, through “capture” by an ideology which does not declare itself. And so I now find it difficult to justify the license fee. Therefore I am aligned with the plutocrats themselves, much to my dismay, because I see no prospect of reinstating the values which underpin the case for that form of funding.
They really are quite clever, are they not?
Have you ever studied the BBC’s coverage during the General Strike of 1926? On the radio only, of course. It was a government foghorn then, and it’s one to this day. And paid for by us.
Only the forms of our illusions have changed. They have actually remained true to their Establishment ethos. Their surface leftism and apparent commitment to wider democracy, of the sixties, has long, long gone.
Treat the BBC and its presentations like an exercise in anthropological analysis – the culture of a Borneo hunter-gatherer tribe, for instance – and try to see the familiar as strange, and the strange as familiar.
Or just get your news from t’interweb. GCHQ’ll know what you’re reading though!
Well put. Reith himself had right wing sympathies and was hardly sympathetic to the strikers. There’s a lot of sentimentality about the BBC and it was pioneering in the 60’s and seventies (when it was safe to be so!) but is now dumbed down to the point of no return.
You have to put in significant research to get at something close to the truth.
The tentacles of Fascism are going to embrace the Internet soon so that Alternative Media is shut down.
Reminds me of the protest at the Conservative Party conference in Sept 2013. Police estimated around 50,000, which was reported to be one of if not the largest ever protests in the city of Manchester. Got home to watch the coverage on the BBC TV news….not a sausage.
Almost inevitably
50,000+ – I was there (although didn’t do much marching). It was finally covered briefly on BBC at midnight.
A 25 second clip without commentary on the BBC website. Yet on radio 4 we had details
of 60 people signing a letter 9I think to the Sunday Times) about the danger of EU regulations to the City of London.
As discussed previously on these blog comments, I think the Tories put the frighteners on the BBC when they got into office – they basically said “too many negative reports about us and we’ll shut you down – or slash your funding”. This would all have been done behind closed doors so I wouldn’t expect to find any formal record of such a meeting, but I’m sure it took place. And then the ConDems proceeded to slash BBC funding by 20% anyway. But that’s what you get for tame capitulation… as Ed Miliband is about to discover.
There may well be a second factor: BBC management may well be Tory sympathisers and so quite amenable to the Tories from the word go. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me. Some of the main presenters – Humphries, Nick Robinson etc – have Tory written all over them.
I agree
Howard, I think you have scored a “Bullseye” with your remarks. I’m sure the Tories would let it be known that they would carve up the BBC like a Christmas turkey if it didn’ behave.
The Tories might of course still do this……
After all the BBC is very vulnerable …. the “Jimmy Savile” scandal or precisely the action taken under Operation Yewtree hasn’t helped in this respect.
I had an evening function in London on Saturday and was staying at the Langham which is just next to the BBC centre where the protest started. On arriving at about 3.30pm the protest had moved on but left the usual huge amount of rubbish / discard signs on the streets.
The head valet had naturally been outside with the security all morning and estimated at least 10,000 but less than 20,000 compared to previous events.
All I can tell you was that there was at least 20+ black Socialist Workers Party placards lying around discarded on the street. It would seem the usual suspects came out in protest as they do on every left wing protest.
20 out of 50,000
You think that proves anything do you?
Just the usual suspects – by that I assume all those disadvantaged by crass Condem policies.
I hope it didn’t spoil your evening function too much…. I’d hate to think you had suffered in any way.
I get the impression that the BBC takes its news from the news agencies, probably Reuters and News International,and this automatically introduces a bias – just look who controls them. Sky News offers the same service as the BBC and it is necessary to watch Al Jazeera, RT and dare I mention it, Press TV, in order to get a fuller picture from which some sort of fair judgement may be reached.
I think it was Churchill who said “once war has been declared, the first casualty is the truth.”