One of my problems with the Daily Mail and similar newspapers is their tendency to misinform their readers. For example, I've read Mailtards re-iterating the falsehood that Gordon Brown sold off all our gold reserves. I am led to understand that we have over 300 tonnes of the stuff left in reserve so that's a lie, a lie that I've rarely seen challenged.

This site and others like it partly exist to challenge lies like that one. The Winterval lie has now been laid to rest, I hope. Credit to all that assisted in giving that lie a decent burial. But what other tabloid lies or half truths do you think ought to be given the type of exposure that this one ultimately received?

Without wishing to invoke Godwin, I refer you to Herr Hitler and his thoughts on lies.

Even when a myth has been well and truly busted, that doesn't stop them. All that happens is that "It has been widely reported that..." gets added to the lie. See, they're not repeating the lie, they're just acknowledging that it's been widely reported. By them and their mates.

Sooner or later, it gets adopted into the Generally Agreed Myth, and any attempt to prove otherwise will be met with accusations that you are just part of the propaganda team for the PC brigade, or you don't live in the real world (whatever that is) or...well, you probably get the idea I hope.

People often want to believe convenient fictions, because they play better into the narrative that makes more sense of everything than generally messy and chaotic reality does. And ultimately because it's easier to adopt a pre-configured set of 'facts' and opinions than to research and think things out for yourself.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

I always find it funny that the people who go on about Brown selling off gold reserves cheaply never mention the huge profit Brown made when he sold off licenses to mobile phone companies.
When the bidding began on the licenses they were valued at around £2bn and by the end of the process they went for over £20bn.

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www.newshuddlines.blogspot.com

Ah yes - the Big Lie - the doctrine of Herr Goebbels. You're dead right of course. The other one regularly trotted out is that Gordon Brown maliciously "raided" private pension funds in 1997, leaving poor pensioners struggling to get by as a consequence. Which is bollocks, of course. The abolition of tax credits on pension fund share dividends was part of a redistributive measure which private pension funds could easily absorb. That some chose not to is regrettable, but is down to those funds, not Brown.

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

There is of course the whole prisons-are-five-star-hotels myth which has clearly become part of Mail/Express/Sun mythology and continues to be encouraged by them. I think people who proclaim that to be the case should be forced to spend a week sharing a locked cell with two thugs and an open WC in Belmarsh, after which they should be required to write an essay saying whether they still think it's comparable to the Savoy, and why.

This is, of course, the Alternative Reality that Nick Davies describes in Flat Earth News. The world (the flat earth) as newspaper editors and politicians would have us perceive, rather than the real one we actually inhabit. There are many alternative realities...

I think, to a certain degree (may need to revisit Davies), it's about conflict. And that in turn fuels the Living Soap Opera (the idea that public life and newsworthy events are, and should be presented as, episodes in an ongoing drama played out for the benefit of the masses).

Journalists love drama and hyperbole. Not just print ones either. Drama shifts papers, gets people tuning in, following your blog or whatever else. If the drama can be supplied by events, great. If not, the drama has to be supplied. And just like any other soap opera, it boils down to Who's Shagging Who and Who Hates Who?

So, how to supply dramatic conflict? Well, how about suggesting that not only do YOU (and PLY) not have something, but that THEY (and PNLY) have taken it. It's not enough for us all to be in the shit. We have to have someone living it high on the hog to project our envy and hatred onto.

Seriously, look for how often it appears in news coverage - the idea that not only is something (that most PLU would arue is a very reasonable thing to wish for) denied to us, but it is contrasted with PNLU living the life of Riley, or somhow 'having it easier' than the rest of us. Even when this involves torturous distortion of relevant facts - a classic being the "Asylum seeker lives in mansion with hundreds of kids all paid for by YOU" - missing out the salient fact that the person in question most likely never sees the money required to keep them at a basic subsistence level, but as a lump sum it SOUNDS obscene, and provokes the necessary envy.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

What I am worried about is how little of this is coming under the scrutiny of Leveson.

For example just last week (I think) the Littlejohn column repeated (and I am not making this up)
the Bolivian cat saga.

How many hoops did that blogger guy have to go through to get the correction printed for Winterval?

There is no PCC investigation into the BC/AD nonsense because the BBC choose not to complain, and individual complaints from member of the public are not allowed.

Winter of Discontent anyone? And in particular, the dead going unburied.

Leveson is about structural issues, and I think this one will be covered by accuracy and balance. We can only hope that something like Canada's Radio Act (under which it is actually against the law to represent falsehood as truth in a newspaper) is enacted. I think that would catch the public mood, too.

There was a point made I think in the New Statesman that said if the opposition upon entering government had bought back the gold reserves that of the 13 billion lost, 5 billion would have been saved.

Here is an article from the time
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/337685.stm,

If you read that back in 1999 you could understand why they did it, so the question really is this? What was Gordon Brown supposed to be? A psychic?

And who knows how much was made from said purchase of foreign currency?

I remember the 3G licenses being reported as a bad thing at the time.
It was upsetting for Vodaphone/Mannesmann (who should get stuff free, or with a student discount or something).

The dead going unburied during the "winter of discontent" has proved a potent political myth that the Tories have exploited to the full since 1979, and do so even to this day. The reality of course is that bodies certainly did not go unburied, and the public sector strikes against Callaghan's pay policy only lasted a few weeks and were substantially over by early February. And of course the issue that ultimately led to the fall of the Callaghan government was Scottish devolution, not industrial relations.

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

I loved that New Statesman article about Osborne costing us money by not buying gold.

The gold story endures because it's fairly simple- asset sold at the wrong time. Like if Joe Public sold his house when everyone "knew" the prices were about to go up.

This is good in the FT (non-paywall):

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5788dbac-7680 ... z1jqC1mrJ2



This bloke reckons he's got Ed Balls and Ed Milliband because they were copied in on emails to do with the gold sale. Has he tied George Osborne in with the current recession too?

http://richardwillisuk.wordpress.com/20 ... old-sales/

I'll ask him for his tip for the 3.30 at Lingfield tmrw.

While three million unemployed and the country ripped asunder is neatly forgotten.