Now everyone has noticed how bad @OFCOM is, here is my Top Ten:
1: The BBC are uniquely allowed to manage their own complaints under a system called BBC First. A system where incredibly, out of more than 450,000 complaints, only 18 were upheld in 2021.
2: OFCOM's boards and committees are loaded with ex-BBC staffers. The latest publicly available register of interests has 16 BBC interests registered.
The Cabinet Office has been in the news far too much recently.
Ostensibly and incredibly it's the department of the government responsible for supporting the Prime Minister and Cabinet. In that job it has singularly failed.
Far from supporting the government it has become a liability: the department leaks like a sieve, departmental staff received a large number of FPNs over partygate, two senior staff are married to two of the UK's most disingenuous, most anti-government journalists,
Jan 24, 2023 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
A thread:
Today, Channel 4's @FactCheck account are giving evidence to the DCMS Committee as part of the "trusted voices committee".
This is laughable when you look at their record on fact checking.
Let's fact-check these fact checkers...
Some questions for the DCMS Committee to try out today:
1: In each of the years 2021 and 2022, how many fact checks did Channel 4 carry out on the Government?
2: In the same years, how many fact checks did you carry out on the Labour Party?
Jan 11, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
Pippa Crerar: "Journalist of the Year". Lol. How did she do in 2022 (hint, she works for the Guardian, it went as you are expecting...)
1: Where to start, where to start.....?
The Hunter Biden laptop story. A nice juicy one for a political editor to get stuck into. A story of
the sitting president's son implicated in drugs, "10% for the big man", prostitution, dodgy Ukrainian board seats and money. And then a story of suppression by the FBI, election interference by big tech, finally corroborated by the New York Times and The Washington Post.
She'll
Jan 10, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
A few things I've noticed while trawling through old Tweets from our "leading" "journalists".
1: Without exception they appear to cover everything and nothing. Some minor indiscretion by someone they dislike is in scope but some major scandal by someone they like is out of scope.
This gives them air cover when they don't cover a story. Scotland, Labour, Biden, the US? Generally out of scope, until they want it to be in scope. Unproven allegation against minor Tory backbencher - in scope, every time...
2: There are a number of cases where they have
Jan 9, 2023 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
It's Monday, time to expose more shady journalists using nothing but the power of their own tweets... today, Beth Rigby.
Who is Beth? Well, you'll recall that she was given three month's gardening leave for breaking Tier 2 lockdown restrictions. She also happens to be Sky
News' Political Editor.
Let's have a cheeky look at what she's been tweeting about this past year and see whether she's as professional as she thinks...
My litmus test is to see what coverage she gave two genuine 2022 political scandals - Barry Gardiner's Spy Money and
Jan 5, 2023 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
Right. We've done Peston and we've done Brand - surely the main ITV news accounts are sound? A thread:
This thread looks at the two ITV News accounts, one called @itvnews with 2.5m followers and one called @ITVNewsPolitics which quite incredibly only has 28k followers.
To put that in perspective it is 1/47 of the reach of Peston himself. (Whoever is managing that account should be fired...)
For the items below I'll put the number of Tweets from the main account first and the politics account second.
Let's begin:
Jan 5, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
The problem with Robert Peston and ITV News. A thread:
Today we look at the personal timeline of someone senior within ITV's factory of disinformation. In Peston's case this is someone with 1.3m followers and, like Brand, someone whose personal account isn't covered by Ofcom.
As a result he can tweet whatever he likes. What makes this surprising is that a) he has the Twitter "official" tag which arguably makes this a work account and b) he also has the @itvpeston account which relates to an ITV programme and you'd imagine is subject to impartiality
Jan 4, 2023 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
The problem with Paul Brand and ITV News. A thread:
I started paying attention to ITV news early in 2022. In a strong field I noticed that their coverage of Boris eating cake was even more unhinged than the other channels. A young journalist within the team was particularly
bonkers - in one two week period last year he tweeted one hundred and thirty times about Boris, twice about Starmer, five times about himself and eleven times about other subjects. Odd to say the least, certainly obsessive. So I started tracking his coverage and, now that 2022 is
Jan 27, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
A thread: U.K. and EU vaccine priority groups compared:
U.K. 1: residents in a care home for older adults and their Carers.
EU 1: Germans
U.K. 2: all those over 80 years of age and frontline workers
EU 2: people who look German #EU#COVID#ROLLOUT
U.K. 3: all those 75 years of age and over
EU 3: people who smell German
U.K. 4: all those 70 years of age and over and clinically vulnerable
EU 4: the French including indomitable Gauls #astrazenecavaccine#covid
