Young people in UK abandon TV news 'almost entirely'

The Guardian via sott.net

 Young people in Britain have almost entirely abandoned television news broadcasts, according to Ofcom, while half of the country now gets its news from social media.

While the average person aged 65 and over watches 33 minutes of TV news a day, this falls to just two minutes among people aged 16-24, according the media regulator's annual news consumption report.

The decline has been driven by audiences moving away from traditional live broadcast channels, where they might watch a popular drama and leave the channel on during the evening news bulletin, towards watching catchup content from streaming services.

The shift could have major implications for British politics, given services such as Netflix do not provide any news. Political parties have traditionally considered the BBC's 10pm news bulletin to be their most important outlet for getting their message across to large swaths of the public, which in turn can shape policies being proposed and how they are presented. TV news is still the main way that the British public learn about current affairs, however, in part because older viewers have remained loyal to traditional services.

Ofcom's research also suggests that people are increasingly willing to wade into online arguments about news. "There is evidence that UK adults are consuming news more actively via social media. For example, those who access news shared by news organisations, trending news or news stories from friends and family or other people they follow via Facebook or Twitter are more likely to make comments on the new posts they see compared to the previous year."
Comment: With Big Tech censorship going into hyperdrive social media users will end up consuming the same fakenews they were fed by the mainstream TV channels if they're not careful: Facebook Teams up With Mainstream Media to Directly Censor News Websites

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Syrian Crisis Shows US Empire Losing Hegemony as Western Mainstream Media Losing Grip Over Narrative

Comment: If you are going to read one article this week then it should be this one. Perezalonso offers a good summary of the moat egregious disinformation that passes for mainstream news on the Syria crisis.  

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Andrés Perezalonso
Sott.net

  © South Front

 Hassan Diab appears in the video of the victims of the 'chemical attack' in Douma.
Later the boy explained to Russian media how the event was staged.

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 Two of the most remarkable facts concerning the April 14th attack on Syria by the US, UK and France are:

1. Materially, the attacks were completely ineffective, as explained by Joe Quinn's article About Those 'Nice, New, Smart' Missiles And The 'Chemical Weapons' Sites in Syria. The Syrians understood this, which is why they were celebrating rather than mourning when the sun came up.
2. They were carried out hours before the OPCW mission reached Syria and right after the Russian Ministry of Defense began showing testimonies of local doctors denying there was a chemical attack in Douma. This suggests F.UK.US. were in a hurry to make a show of force before the facts could be properly analyzed while distracting attention away from the evidence.

Rather than demonstrating strength, these facts speak of weakness, impotence and a desire to compensate with theatrics. The US knows it cannot go too far in its pursuit of regime change in Syria because it risks paying a heavy price at the hands of Russia. Even if it could take out all Russian forces in Syria, it is not willing to lose any ships, aircraft or personnel and thus lose its status as the supreme global military force. Furthermore, there is always the risk of escalation, which is madness when it comes to nuclear powers. The Americans are acutely aware that they are playing with fire, which explains how careful they were to stay away from Russian targets. The attack was carefully measured to appear stronger than last year's, yet not strong enough to provoke Russia into action. This could also explain, in part, why the Trump administration is seeking to replace US troops in Syria with an Arab force, as it is much safer (and cheaper) to fight with proxy forces.

In the aftermath of the strikes on Syria, and as more information is coming out about the chemical attack that never was, it is becoming increasingly clear that Western mainstream media outlets are also losing their dominant positions and their grip on the narrative.

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UK to launch anti-Russian propaganda war as ‘Fusion Doctrine’ defense plan unveiled

Comment: Russia doesn't need to propagandize anything. It just listens, watches and observes the juvenile and desperate mess British intelligence is determined to create for itself.  What these clueless numbskulls are actually tasked with doing is to feverishly counter the logical conclusions that the UK is attempting to set Russia up as part of its cold war strategy. What's more, very few non-Western countries believe their lies anymore. A little more leeway for objectivity perhaps?

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RT 

Britain is preparing for a counter-propaganda war against Russia amid allegations that the Kremlin is spreading fake news regarding the poisoning of Sergei Skripal. 

Intelligence services will now be tasked with identifying trolling social media platforms in a bid to clamp down on what is deemed by the UK government as ‘misinformation.’ The new instructions are included in the Fusion Doctrine, unveiled as part of the National Security Capability Review, to be published on Wednesday. It seeks to tackle the perceived threat from Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS), Russia and North Korea.

Increased efforts to tackle fake news come amid security experts alleging, in the Telegraph, that Russia put out more than 20 stories “trying to confuse the picture and the charge sheet” over the poisoning of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury earlier this month. 

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BBC journalists to teach children how to identify fake news

Comment: Hahahahahahahahaha. Ahem. And this from an organisation that thrives on institutional bias and fake news gems like the staging of a chemical weapons attack in Syria.

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The Telegraph

BC journalists are to visit schools to teach children how to identify fake news.

The initiative has been designed to tackle false information that the corporation says “threatens fact-based public debate and trust in journalism.”

Details of the scheme, which will involve up to 1,000 schools, will be outlined in the BBC’s annual plan on Wednesday.

It will includes BBC journalists such as Huw Edwards, Tina Daheley, Nikki Fox, Kamal Ahmed and Amol Rajan.

The details come after Ofcom, the communications regulator, warned that children were being increasingly exposed to fake news, with nearly half of 12 to 15-year-olds finding it difficult to tell fact from fiction on social media. 

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Making sense of Obama's billion dollar hammer: Throwing a piece of meat to placate the dogs

The Vineyard of the Saker
You probably heard it by now: Obama has pledged a billion dollars to what my "beloved" BBC called "European security". The official name for this initiative is the "European Reassurance Initiative". You see, Obama and the BBC apparently believe that Europeans are really terrified and that they believe that Russian tanks might roll into Warsaw, Athens, Rome or Lisbon any moment now. The good news is that Uncle Sam is here to reassure them that he will let no such thing happen and that this additional 1 billion dollars will deter the Russian Bear.

Have you ever read something more ridiculous?
So what is really going on here?

There is a wonderful American expression which says that "to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail". Well, to Obama, the EU and the Ukraine sure does look like nails because the only instrument the USA has used in its foreign policy for many decades now is a "hammer" composed of money and guns. But let's backtrack for a second. 

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Alain Soral on Dieudonné – BBC Two newsnight

www.frenchdissidents.wordpress.com/

See also:  Is a New Revolution Quietly Brewing in France? 

BBC abandoning a pretence of journalism

Even before the Jimmy Savile scandal and the faking of footage and photos in the Syria conflict it had been obvious to me and many others that the BBC was an Establishment den of spooks and career journalists who provide the most blatant examples of propaganda and skin-deep reporting. It doesn't mean anything at all if journalists "on the ground" spout the same old biased crap they are fed in the newsrooms and then claim they have an inside scoop just because they've visited the region. More than any other tactic it is what the BBC omits that is key to seeing how stories are distorted. The BBC has some fine journalists I have no doubt, but some of the most prominent seem to be no more than stage actors delivering a performance. And of course, the litmus test of how BBC News reporting is utterly controlled by money and the Three Model Establishment ( Liberal, Conservative, Zionist) is never more evident in the space given to juvenile hit pieces on the September 11th "terrorist" attacks of 2001. As many alternative media journalists predicted several years ago, since Syria was on the list of regime change countries destined to be destroyed as part of Middle East resource grab it was inevitable that it would come under some of the most transparent examples of news propaganda. 

While the BBC may not deliver the same quality of corporate /intelligence geared reporting as in the USA it is still a pale reflection of what it was pre-9/11. If you want unbiased reporting, the BBC is the very last place you should go. 

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BBC abandoning a pretence of journalism

Voltaire Network| Moscow (Russia) | 6 October 2013

British Broadcasting Corporation, a beacon of international journalism, has proposed us this week two exemplary masterpieces on how to discredit legitimate public queries on high-profile issues.
Richard Galpin, a BBC World Affairs correspondent who warns on his Twitter that “views expressed are mine, not BBC’s” abused this brand by releasing an article “Mother Agnes: Syria’s ‘detective’ nun who says gas attack film faked“ [1].

He insists that he interviewed Mother Agnes-Mariam de la Croix, the prominent Lebanese Carmelite nun who is a central figure in Mussalaha, a grass roots movement for reconciliation between all communities in Syria [2]. She is the author of a resonant 50-page report “The Chemical attack on East Ghouta to justify military right to protect intervention in Syria” [3]. The report thoroughly analyses almost every relevant video that was posted on YouTube on the day of attack and reveals a number of facts challenging the established version of this tragedy. E.g., why there are so many unidentified children among those affected in those videos? Why there are almost no women? Why do some of the videos show clear signs of sophisticated overlapping? Why, in many instances, are the same individuals shown as both dead and alive? Where are remaining 1,458 corpses other than the eight whose burials have been documented? And most importantly, where are the missing 65 Alawites children, abducted by the rebels on the eve of East Ghouta attack in Lattakia?

So despite his notion to the interview with Mother Agnes, Richard Galpin hardly cites a single substantial word of her but benevolent “God bless you, my dear”. He fails to present any substance of the report and hesitates to publish a single revealing video still image supporting Mother Agnes’ claims. Instead he relies on questionable assessment by Peter Bouckaert from Human Rights Watch: “She is not a professional video forensic analyst”. But what if the fact that the videos released on August 21 were staged is evident for any attentive observer even lacking diploma in forensics?
Here for example is the short abstract from the report. It refers to the video uploaded on August 21 at 08:32:59 Damascus time. It shows a suite full of inanimate bodies of children and adult males. In a corner it seems that the wrapped bodies in color are those of women.

We have recognized the same room in a documentary of Al-Jazeera (original Youtube link is deleted now – OR). The shooting of the room in this documentary is about an early arrangement of the mortuary groups. We see heredown the same room with only six children and one male. Strangely they are in the same position they will have when the room will be full. It means that it is a scenographic arrangement.

The report is full of such eloquent evidence.
An aspiration to discredit Mother Agnes was the clear objective of utterly biased Mr.Galpin’s piece. Notably that was the first significant coverage of Mother Agnes’ report, released on September 11, in a mainstream media. And she was merely slandered and mispresented. Mr.Galpin was wondering about the motives of the nun: “she fears the minority Christian community in Syria will be jeopardized once Syrian government is overthrown”; but failed to assume that somebody can be motivated by a simple human desire to unearth the truth. Indeed, this virtue is not endemic for professional journalists today.

We would prefer to attribute this fault to the personal correspondent’s peculiarities rather than to the drastic fall of reporting standards of BBC, but another show released 2 days later is leading us to an opposite conclusion. That is a Newsnight interview by BBC top presenter Kirsty Wark with Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who made public Edward Snowden’s revelations on global Internet surveillance programs of the US security services in June. Jonathan Cook was very straight-forward about interviewer’s skills:

Throughout the interview, Wark abandons even the pretence of doing what journalism is supposed to be about: interrogating the centres of power and holding them to account. Instead Wark mimics adversarial journalism by interrogating the US journalist Glenn Greenwald about his role in the NSA leaks, as though she’s a novice MI5 recruit.

The Coming War With Pakistan

BBC rewrites 10 years of history and declares Pakistan the new enemy.

Activist Post

BBC are propagandists whose lies have killed people. Their documentaries are made upon request by special interest groups whose narratives are sewn verbatim into what would otherwise look like a "documentary." With BBC's name attached, it is hoped, these tissues of lies are then able to gain traction and begin rewriting reality. Their recent hit on Pakistan is not the first time they have been caught peddling wholesale lies dressed up as "documentaries." Earlier this year, they also cobbled together "This World: Thailand - Justice Under Fire," where evidence drawn from paid lobbyists of Western-backed opposition leaders and US State Department cables and used to promote Wall Street and London's corporate-financier interests in Thailand.

BBC's two-part Secret Pakistan documentary attempts to frame the 10-year foreign occupation of Afghanistan and the lack of progress as the result of "Pakistani duplicity." In reality, even upon watching BBC's "documentary," one can clearly see that the US, UK, and NATO have simply traded places with invading Soviets and now face the same fierce indigenous force fighting against occupation. Indeed, just as Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI supported Afghans during the Soviet invasion, they are very likely to be supporting Afghans now in their current bid for freedom.

Britain’s Own Pravda-Style Propaganda: Part 1

Media Lens

Ten Years Of ‘Involvement’ In Afghanistan

Imagine Britain had been invaded and occupied by armed forces from another region of the world with China, for example, as a significant ‘partner’ in the ‘coalition’. Imagine tens of thousands of Britons had been killed, and millions had fled as refugees. This is how the Chinese state broadcaster might report the invasion ten years hence:

'It’s ten years this week since Chinese forces first became involved in Britain, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for south-east England. So what's been achieved in that time?'

These were the actual words that presenter Fiona Bruce used on the flagship BBC News at Ten:

'It’s ten years this week since British forces first became involved in Afghanistan, and more than five years since they assumed responsibility for Helmand province. So what's been achieved in that time?' (BBC One, October 4, 2011, italics added)

This is BBC 'impartiality' in action. These words were a prelude to a piece by Paul Wood, the BBC’s Afghanistan correspondent, that was a model of Pravda-style propaganda which we will examine further in Part 2.

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Bad News From The BBC 'Replete With Imbalance And Distortion'

May 25, 2011 "Media Lens" -- - One of the main headlines on the BBC news homepage earlier this month read, 'Violence erupts at Israel borders'. Israeli soldiers had shot dead at least 12 protesters and injured dozens more. BBC 'impartiality' decreed that the brutal killings were presented almost as an act of nature, a volcanic eruption that simply happened.

Clicking on the link did at least bring up a more accurate headline: 'Israeli forces open fire at Palestinian protesters'. But the brutality was sanitised, with no details of the many victims. The Israeli viewpoint was prominent with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying that he 'hoped' that 'calm and quiet will quickly return, but let nobody be mistaken, we are determined to defend our borders and sovereignty'.

Somehow a 'neutral' BBC perspective dictated that the lead image illustrating the story was of young Palestinian men throwing rocks in 'clashes' with fully armed soldiers from the Israeli Defence Forces.

The Palestinians had been taking part in annual protests on Nakba ('Catastrophe') day which, as the BBC put it, 'marks the moment when 100,000s of Palestinians lost their homes' on the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Again, the BBC's sanitised version of 'lost their homes' buries awkward history, as though homes had simply been repossessed when families fell behind on their mortgage payments. In reality, more than half of Palestine's native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted and 531 village destroyed (Ilan Pappe, 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', Oneworld, 2006).

After complaints from us, and perhaps realising the newspeak was just too much to swallow, the BBC tweaked the sentence the following day to read:

'Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced out of their homes in fighting after its creation.'

BBC Middle East correspondent Jim Muir was quick to implicate foreign powers in the latest annual Nakba protests, asking the leading question: 'Palestinian protests: Arab spring or foreign manipulation?' and pointing his finger at Syria and Iran. True to type, the BBC journalist's 'analysis' was not a million miles distant from the message being broadcast from Tel Aviv. Jonathan Cook, an independent journalist based in Nazareth, notes:

'With characteristic obtuseness, Israel's leaders identified Iranian "fingerprints" on the day's events - as though Palestinians lacked enough grievances of their own to stage protests.' (Jonathan Cook, 'On an old anniversary, a new sense that change is possible', The National, 17 May, 2011)

The BBC's famed 'balance' should mean that, in the wake of Muir's piece, we see a BBC article about US 'foreign manipulation' of Syria and Iran, and indeed the whole Middle East. Presumably the balancing piece is in the pipeline.

As with the most effective propaganda published by the Soviet newspaper Pravda, there may be something in what Muir says. But the required journalistic emphasis, as ever, is on the misdeeds 'our' officially sanctioned state enemies may be committing, not on the crimes of our own government. [...]