Elementary, my dear Blackburn
Until recently I was only barely aware of a magazine called the Spectator and its accompanying website, but I’ve noticed it a lot just recently. I’ve noticed it because everything in it seems to be such utter nonsense, and the trolls even worse than elsewhere.
Today its columnist David Blackburn takes the plaudits for the TCF’s new ’most woefully inaccurate journalist of the week award’, with not one but two entries – posted within a couple of hours either side of lunch? - which are simply wrong with a capital W.
First, at 12.43pm, is his suggestion that a political party, well the Labour party anyway, trying to maximise postal votes might be illegal in some way, and that Labour is bound to be up to no good. That brought the trolls out, for sure. He’s simplu wrong with a capital W.
Chris Paul’s already dealt with that one, and got the following comment published:
‘This seems to be speculative nonsense. People with PVs are about three times as likely to vote as those without. Weather doesn’t intervene. Holidays don’t. Illness doesn’t. Work doesn’t. Can’t be bothered less likely. Which is why all parties in close run seats try to get their known or likely supporters on PV. Conflating a perfectly logical optimisation exercise with cheating seems sloppy and ignorant. I repeat: sloppy and ignorant.’
Then, at 2.56pm, presumably after a hearty lunch, Blackburn can’t be arsed doing anything as original as looking at someone else’s blog who’ not sat in the same office, so regurgtitates some of Melanie Foaming Phillips’ nonsense about nursing from the morning.
In so doing he directly insults around 400, 000 trained nurses and all the accompanying Health Care Assistants that work alongside them.
Good work if you can get it.
Again, he’s simply factually wrong, and around twenty years behind the times (as Iain Dale was as well), seemingly unaware that the move to nurse training within higher education rather than hospital-based schools of nursing, started in 1992.
Do Blackburn and Dale not know anyone at all outside their bubble? Have they no idea what happens in the real world? Have they never heard of Google?
Some of the commenters on the nurse nonsense, not so trollish to be fair, try to put Blackburn right, but I think he’d probably left by then (my corrective comment didn’t get published).
Facts wrong? Who cares? He’s at the Spectator. It goes with the job. Not one you’d need a degree for, though, I imagine.
The current lead story on the website is called ‘Two Elementary Mistakes’. That’s a heap of regurgitated crap too, as Duncan shows, but at least the headline’s appropriate.
The Speccie’s descent into far-out wingnuttery and piss-poor, inaccurate commentary/journalism seems like something that should just be funny.
But I’m increasingly agreeing with Sunny Hundal that it’s a worying potent; a possible harbinger of the British rightwing media emulating the American.
Certainly, the threat of this will become considerably worse if Murdoch get’s his way and can turn Sky News into Fox UK.
I’ll never agree nor like the Right, and I’m not a huge fan of cheap populism, either Right or Left. Yet it goes beyond both of those whenever you have journalists who simply don’t mind making stuff up as they go along. And Editors who won’t rein them in.
There’s no journalist who deserves to be paid the sort of salary which ’star commentators’ earn, and I suspect that it boils down to the death of the printing and journalist unions.
Money starved from the newspaper floor, where people’s wingnuttery is curtailed by having to co-exist with other people, is going to commentators who have to do nothing by develop a keen sense of keyboard rage and a relationship only with the nuttiest of ideas bouncing around online, ideas that would never receive grounding if forced to exist socially, passed on face to face.
Dave/Paul S
Then I think we are in agreement.
The response lies in localised media as in LNMF, of that I am increasingly certain, based on limited local evidence. People genuinely like an alternative view. The left can’t take them on nationally for a bit.