Thursday 14 October 2010

DOWN WITH THE DEAD TREE PRESS, FORWARD WITH THE CITIZEN JOURNALIST, THE MEDIUM ENABLES THE MESSAGE.


The Filthian, pompous and facetious as ever, is " opening a new style of long 
form blog" or some such shit. It means it is publishing tedious essays by in-house wankers,  the first of whom, sirprise, surprise is its own supreme editor in chief for life.

The repulsive Alan Rusbridger, head of the Guardian Praesideum, has a lecture to prepare for delivery in about six weeks' time and has - phony and and condescending -  asked for assistance from those who cross party swords at Comment Is Free, But Rigidly Moderated. So Not Really Free
At All.

Rusbrudger's beef is that the traditional, centuries-old dominion of so-called journalism - the press and more recently the broadcast media -  is under threat from what he means but refuses to describe as the blogosphere.  How can redundant rubbish like him hang on to their gigs?

Many of the more servile commenters - stereotypical Guardianistas, cunts, in other words -  fall willingly on  Arsebridger's knob and attempt to help him shore-up his worthless, poisonous, faux-liberal, ecologically wasteful, outdated but obscenely lucrative position - Have you thought of so-and-so, Alan; Alan opens an interesting debate, and so on.  Campaigning for the poor and exploiting the charitable status of the Scott Trust, which owns the Filthian, Arsebridger pays himself over ten thousand pounds a week for presiding over the decline of a once truly fine newspaper into  so-called ethical consumerism and lame, cheesy  Coalition-wanking. 

But this delight leapt out of the know-it-all dross.  There is as much, more, between the lines as upon them.  I reproduce it without necessarily sharing its optimism and - obviously - without permission.
  • 11 October 2010 3:58PM
    For many months now, my thoughts on the future of the Fourth Estate have owed much to the late Christopher Hill and The World Turned Upside Down.

    It chronicles that last great period in English history when the shackles of the accepted order - in particular, the role of the church and the state - were thrown off for 20-odd years... until order was 'restored' in 1660.

    The Ranters, the Diggers, the Levellers, etc were all put back in their box; control of the Press became industrialised... and, therefore, beyond their reach. Only in the last 20 years has that power shifted back into the hands of the great unwashed. 

    Give me a SmartPhone and a wifi cloud in Starbucks and not only am I a publisher, now I am a broadcaster.

    Loathe as I am to agree with a Conservative minister, I cannot forsee a 'restoration' of the old order as happened in 1660. Some 350 years of imposition - you *will* watch the news now, you *will* wait until tomorrow to have your news delivered, etc, etc - has gone.

    'We will not pay rent to the masters, bow to the lords...'

    They sought to create a 'common treasury' for all; in their eyes, that was land... they would not be bound to pay tithes to an incumbent Popish priest... in that their issues were intensely local... those were the issues that *really* mattered to them... and to that we also return.

    'What is mine, what is yours... where is meum et teum... it is fallen into the chaos of a higher power...' was - if memory serves - one quote that emerged from the floor of Parliament in those tumultuous times.

    What's my content, what's yours? What if the web is that 'higher power' into which we are now falling; with chaos duly ensuing...

    For me, the challenge is such that we start from the bottom up; start from scratch with the issues that most people care about... local.

    We hand out the tools that the Diggers, the Levellers and the Ranters lacked when it came to the distribution of news and ideas - and we look to new ways of sustaining those ideas, those communities... we build again from the base of the pyramid.

    We look at a world that has turned upside down; a world for which the likes of a Rupert Murdoch has little time nor comprehension; we look to help 1000 flowers bloom where once there were newspapers.

    We go again; from the bottom up....

8 comments:

jgm2 said...

At the risk of being characterised as know-it-all dross what cunts like this Arsebridger lose sight of, is that we who contribute to blogs do so because useless cunts like himself have long since given up reporting. They're no more journalists than a mixed salad.

Just uncritically printing verbatim the lies, half-truths and self-serving shit press releases handed out by the likes of the Maximum Imbecile.

Cunts who sat there while in full view of the world Blair and Brown burned all the fucking money. Right in front of their noses. And said nothing. Lauded it in fact as an economic miracle. The great unwashed all hyped up into hysteria of borrowing and squandering. The roof over their heads getting more expensive every fucking day and all hailed as a great leap forward. You think they'd be railing against the artificiality of it, the idiocy of folk getting more and more in debt for the number one fucking thing on Mazlow's list - shelter. But no.

And then, when the balloon finally went up faithfully reported it, along with Marr and the BBC, as being 100% the yanks and the banks fault. Aye. The bastards. won't lend us even more money. Here, we'll print you 200bn quid and you can all pay yourselves with that. Until the election. when I shall fuck off and sulk indefinitely you ungrateful bastards.

And it's not just the Guardian. The BBC, The Sun, The Mail, every cunt just sat there and said nothing whist this manifest idiocy bestrode the land. In fact worse than nothing. Cheered it to the echo. And when the balloon went up they scape-goated the banks, just like Brown told 'em - the better to reignite a fucking class war that I hoped we'd got over in 1997.

The newspapers are not obsolete because they're 'old technology' or 'environmentally unfriendly'. They're obsolete because they no longer do what it says on the tin. Even the expenses scandal was handed to The Telegraph on a fucking plate by a pushy yank and a whistle-blower. There's just no, what's the word, journalists any more. They're all shit. The newspapers are pure shit.

They deserve to die.

a young anglo-irish catholic said...

Well, the people on the nationals are pure shit. It is - or was - a very nice deal thank you very much. Right background, right uni, right face, right place, right time.

Bloggers have huge fun posting a list of Oxbridge-educated Guardian hacks. And what do you have to say that, you champions of the poor?

The pool from which the current national hacks and politicians come from has shrunk so much that Red Steph Flanders has been shagged by at least two Shadow front-benchers.

The chances of some hard-core ambitious northerner coming down on the train and getting stuck in is about zero. No more Keith Waterhouse, who at least knew about the cobbled streets.

The summit of the metropolitan fuck-fest was the Guardian special edition G2 which waded in to try and stop Boris Johnson being elected.

They actually predicted race riots (missed the cycle-by shagging completely) and quoted Vivienne Westwood as saying that if Boris got elected 'it would be a failure of deomcracy'.

As I pointed out endlessly on CiF, what, to the man at the Stoke bus stop, is the difference between Cameron or Blair?

If the national pool of hackery gets any smaller and more up its own arse, they won't sell a single issue north of Harrow.

I mean, have you seen the middle class lifestyle stuff the flog, all of them, every weekend? It only makes sense to Kensal Rise and Hampstead.

Anonymous said...

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I come from roma, I was fortunate to look for your subject in digg
Also I get much in your blog really thanks very much i will come again

call me ishmael said...

I am fine thank you, considering. What, please, signor or signora anonymous, or anybody, is digg?

That's why we call them skymadeupnewsandfilth, chaps, all of them.

Another thing about the Filth-O-Graph and the exes is the way they dribbled them out, to boost circulation. Fair enough, you might say, in a commercial world, but this was a matter of massive constitutional importance, actually the biggest parliamentary story since the Civil War, not grist to Benedict Brogan's wheezy mill. Between themselves and the prosecuting authorities the Filth-o-Graph actually ensured that the expenses scandal, actually widespread acts of criminal, treasonous, conspiratorial offence, were swiftly swept under the carpet and the status quo restored, undamaged.

jgm2 said...

I think the biggest parliamentary story since the civil war was Jacqui Smith getting a full and frank appraisal from the Maximum Imbecile about all those immigration leaks from her department and then deciding that the way to deal with mildly embarrassing leaks was to declare the person responsible a danger to national security and have an opposition MP arrested in the HoC.

And for the Sargeant-at-Arms, the Speaker, Jack Straw, Gordon Brown, The bloke at the Met, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all to acquiesce to such a move. When a child would know that was rather setting a precedent. Arresting political opponents for telling the truth being generally frowned upon outside of China or North Korea.

PT Barnum said...

Yes indeed, Mr I., as you note below, the CiF comment is something to raise the spirits, and does contain what may be a significant truth. After all, why would Marr waste breath on such vitriol to attack we cauliflower-nosed basement dwellers if the blogites weren't hurting him and his compadres in truth filtration?

If one looks at the surviving literature of the Civil War it is obvious how important the pamphlets and ballads were to connecting individuals to one another in a shared language, making movements out of isolated oppressed souls. What Gutenberg made possible then, the interwebs make a hundred times easier now. And so, if one can still hope, the balance may well tip in all our favour.

Dick the Prick said...

I don't think they can stop the forest fire. The Yanks seem to have a good system in that Drudge & the Huff Post seem to be similar to the Torygraph & the Guardian but neither of them have ever been dead tree. I've no idea how the advertising revenue thingy works but that lad who created Facebook seems to be doing all right!

Liberal Conspiracy is always good for a laugh, too.

call me ishmael said...

Few know of Mazlow's pyramid, mr jgm2. Most would shit from their mouths if you spelled it out to them, thinking that shelter was to do with buses. Few know anything. Govament ministers and media pundits alike insist that Aitch is spelt Haitch, that doubt is the same as illusion, whichever one they are under, and that for free is the correct way to say freely.
Few can even speak, much less grasp ideas of anthropology and sociology.

The case you set out -of media complicity in Ruinous economics - is one I have been making these ten years and more, that it is largely gospel in cyberspace yet still denied by influential filth like Marr does grow a bit wearying.

Sometimes MediaMinster bends me to Mr The Dyers Garden's merciless excoriation of the hapless, self-deluding proletariat, to the view that, stupid fucks, they richly deserve everything they get.