Skip to main content

The Daily Cretin (Express) insults our intelligence once more

There is no doubt that we are all in the middle of a serious economic crisis. However, in Britain this crisis is overlaid with a stupidity crisis too. The Daily Express is not noted as the intellectual paper in the UK, but their latest European scare story is more or less total fiction. "Senior Eurocrats" are apparently "plotting to destroy Britain"- even though there is not a shred of evidence for the conspiracy the Express is determined to unmask.


It is total crap. It is a paranoid pack of lies either by fools who know no better or by crooks who are deliberately lying. Either way it is a total disgrace that this garbage can be published in any newspaper that professes to have any concern for the truth.


And that is the problem, the crisis in Britain is as much a crisis of the MEDIA as of the politicians that are taking the blame. When such utter tripe can be presented as a serious contribution to the national debate, and no one condemns the bastards who publish it, then the standard of political debate in the UK reaches a new low.  Even supposed "quality" newspapers as the Telegraph and the Times are subject to proprietorial influence - or corruption- and routinely publish errors of fact as well as of judgement. 


These are the so-called opinion-formers!


The kindest thing is to believe that it is the blind leading the blind. The reality is it is a scandalous disgrace.  The "journalists" who put their name to this crap deserve nothing but utter contempt.


The good news is that "the media" is losing its power to set the national agenda. 
The bad news is that it is not happening fast enough. 


PS, I see the American Newsweek has noted the story as an example of typical tabloid hysteria. When even the American media views the British media with contempt, it is not a good day.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop...

Are the Liberal Democrats Libertarian?

A few days ago Cicero met with one of the better known figures in the Libertarian Alliance, Brian Mickelthwait . Brian writes for various blogs that I enjoy reading- including Samizdata . Ahead of our meeting Brain expressed "scepticism" about the Libertarian credentials of the Liberal Democrats: "My charge was that when you meet a Liberal Democrat you never know what he will believe. The one who talks to you is likely to say what you want to hear. But the others will simultaneously be telling other people with quite different views what they want to hear. So don't vote for these lying creeps." Political parties- all of them- are coalitions of people who quite often disagree with each other. Apparently we are not supposed to "air our dirty linen in public", but actually one of the reasons that the Liberal Democrats appealed to me was that they were prepared to talk about issues and policies amongst themselves in public. The eclipse of the Liberal Party...