The other day I came across a story which a lot of people were sharing on my social media feeds since the appalling terrorist attack in Manchester on Monday night. The story, published on the pro-Corbyn ‘news’/’analysis’ site The Canary, … Continue reading
Since the 2016 election in particular, there has been a lot of discussion about how social media helps to disseminate “fake news”, often without really enumerating what that term means. Last week Facebook asked me to fill in a survey … Continue reading
Readers of a certain age will remember the character of Barry Kent from Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole series of books about a young man growing up in the Midlands (of England) in the 1980s and his progression through adult life. … Continue reading
The Sun are OUTRAGED this morning because an “American strangler”, as they call him, has been deported from the USA to this country after serving nearly 40 years in a New York state prison for strangling his girlfriend when he … Continue reading
Last week Jill Saward (pronounced Say-ward), best known for having been the victim of the notorious “Ealing Vicarage” rape attack in 1986 in which she was raped and subjected to other sexual assaults and her father and boyfriend were beaten … Continue reading
Lego ends advertising with Daily Mail after calls for companies to ‘Stop Funding Hate’ (from the Independent) According to this report, widely shared by people I know on social media, Lego have announced that an advertising campaign they had been … Continue reading
How the education gap is tearing politics apart | David Runciman | Politics | The Guardian This was the Guardian’s “long read” Wednesday before last, and it explores how education levels are becoming a dividing line in politics, with the … Continue reading
Update 2: I’ve run a search for the phrases “kuenssberg whore” and “kuenssberg bitch” on Twitter, using both TweetBot (which searches recent tweets) and TweetDeck (which searches all tweets). I really advise that you do these searches for yourself. The … Continue reading
Last weekend David Bowie died, and amid the non-stop media tributes (which have been compared to the relentless coverage of Lady Diana’s death in 1997, although they can’t have really approached that — normal TV programming was stopped for most … Continue reading
This morning I was listening to Vanessa Feltz’s phone-in show in London which is every weekday from 9am to noon. I tuned in just before 10am at which point I was heading out on the M3 towards Andover, and they … Continue reading
I saw a graphic that was presented next to an article for childminders on how to teach ‘British values’, as now required by the government, and the schools inspectorate Ofsted (which also governs children’s homes and childminders) will demand evidence … Continue reading
ISIS: The British Women Supporters Unveiled from Channel 4 (available for 26 days as of this writing) On Monday night Channel 4 broadcast what purported to be an investigation into a group of British Muslim women who supported ISIS and … Continue reading
So, a week and a half after the attacks on civilian targets in central Paris, including a stadium, a concert hall and several restaurants on Friday night supposedly by ISIS (or rather, a group of local supporters), the nonsense in … Continue reading
A letter to … My godson, with whom I’ve decided to sever ties | Life and style | The Guardian When I used to read the print edition of the Guardian, the paper I’ve read for most of my adolescent … Continue reading
I rarely watch Question Time, the late-night show on BBC1 in which an audience gets to ask questions of a panel of politicians and journalists, because it’s on too late (I usually start work at 7am). However, last night the … Continue reading
The other day Tell MAMA, which monitors hate crimes against Muslims, published an anonymous article claiming that certain unnamed “moral guardians of the Internet”, mainly aged between 20 and 35 “who spend their time on Twitter railing against prejudice and … Continue reading
I heard the most extraordinary and ridiculous interview on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning. John Humphrys was interviewing John Turner from the British Air Display Association about the accident outside Shoreham, West Sussex on Saturday in which a 1950s … Continue reading
Yesterday a light aircraft crashed when attempting to land at Blackbushe airfield near Farnborough. The airfield is a former RAF base which has also been a passenger airport, but these days is used for executive jets and for pilots’ training. … Continue reading
Fox Correction: “We Have Made Some Regrettable Errors On-Air Regarding The Muslim Population In Europe” | Video | Media Matters for America Fox News, on which a number of ludicrous and obviously false claims about British and French cities, that … Continue reading
So, on Monday night BBC’s Panorama responded to last week’s massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices by dusting off a 25-minute feature on “British Islam”, in which John Ware, who had fronted a previous ‘investigation’ into Muslim leadership which used … Continue reading