#GB News - an alleged news channel

[lost-carcosa]

[zot3-flopped]

The overlap between Dan Wootton and One Direction is so painful. DW started out on the worst tabloid at the time, the News of the World. He worked initially in showbiz gossip journalism, which is how he has links with Simon Cowell (who kept a few such people as 'friends' in order to get his projects and contestants in the tabloids). He also worked on Lorraine (daytime tv) and now is a right-wing tv presenter on the very worst channel.

Recently it came out that he used to use a pseudonym to get young male wannabes to do 'tasteful' nude photo shoots; he would then blackmail them. He is alleged to have blackmailed, under this pseudonym, lots more men; there's a suggestion that this is how he has had any sort of career advancement. His ex-boyfriend has accused him of being abusive. The man is rotten to the core.

Harry did stop giving him interviews at some point and since then he's written a couple of really strange articles, one of them saying he'd 'given Harry the chance' to come clean about his sexuality (as if it's his business) and since he hasn't graced him with the interview about it, he's going to call him a queer baiter.

Maybe he's still holding out for the payday interview, because if you wanted to out Harry it wouldn't necessarily be that hard to do, going by random people posting-then-deleting things on Twitter.

But even given the fact that this guy is a Grade A Absolute Shit, he has said Larry ain't a thing: funny, that!

Much of Wootton's info was based on behaviours he and other Sun staffers observed in London clubs and at showbiz parties, so if he didn't see or hear about Harry flirting with men there, he wouldn't believe it was happening. Harry is way too discreet for that kind of behaviour so Wootton decided he must be straight.

Agree that Wootton is 'rotten to the core'. He's even been fired by the fascist GB News channel, although unfortunately the charges against him were dropped.

As far as the breakdown of relationships in 1d went, and the future of the band, Wootton was a true industry insider and definitely knew what was going on in 2015. Nearly everything he wrote in this infamous article from nine years ago turned out to be accurate.

[twopoppies]

Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for wootton www*theguardian*com/uk-news/2023/aug/03/mailonline-suspends-dan-wootton-as-allegations-investigated Also to your anon about denying larry, if Louis was being pressured about his mother’s cancer and Felicitie’s drug use and having to do trade offs, those players responsible for that are still very much present in the industry.

Very good point. And fingers and toes crossed that Dan Woottytoot goes down in flames.

Dan Wootton has been suspended by MailOnline after allegations emerged that he used a pseudonym to secretly offer his colleagues tens of thousands of pounds in return for sexual material.

The GB News presenter has had a lucrative job writing a twice-weekly column for MailOnline since 2021 but it has not appeared since the allegations were made public by his ex-boyfriend last month.

Wootton is also under investigation by his former employers at Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, where he worked for more than a decade as a celebrity journalist. The company has hired an external law firm to investigate claims Wootton targeted current and former Sun employees with offers of money in return for explicit images.

A spokesperson for DMG media, the parent company of MailOnline, confirmed Wootton would not be working for them for the foreseeable future. They said: “We are continuing to consider a series of allegations which Dan Wootton – who has written columns for MailOnline since 2021 as one of several outside freelance contributors – has strenuously denied.

“The allegations are obviously serious but also complex and historic and there is an independent investigation under way at the media group which employed him during the relevant period. In the meantime, his freelance column with MailOnline has been paused.”

The spokesperson did not immediately clarify whether Wootton would continue to be paid by MailOnline. The journalist is running a crowdfunder to pay for his legal fees.

Wootton continues to present a nightly primetime show on the rightwing GB News channel, rallying supporters against a supposed leftwing plot to have him cancelled. In a statement two weeks ago he accepted having made mistakes in his past but denied criminal wrongdoing.

Wootton’s lawyer has since told the Guardian Wootton denies many of the allegations that have been levelled against him by his ex-boyfriend and reporting in Byline Times.

Full article here

[theinconvenientlifestyle]

GB News has paid Conservative MPs more than £660,000 in appearance fees and salaries since it launched, against just £1,100 to Labour MPs, Guardian analysis shows.

The payments, recorded in the parliamentary register of interests, come amid growing concerns among centrists about the channel’s sway over the Tory party’s direction.

Some Conservatives also say they have worries that if Paul Marshall, the hedge fund owner who has a 41% stake in GB News, gains control of the Telegraph titles in a process that is due to resume next month, this could entrench a populist echo chamber for the party’s MPs and supporters.

“It would be a worry if we ended up with what you might call a monopoly of opinion in the Conservative media – as a party we’re not fans of monopolies,” one former cabinet minister said.

The amounts paid to MPs give only part of the story in that many other parliamentarians, including from Labour, regularly appear on the channel without payment. But the £660,262 handed to Conservative MPs in the past two years illustrates the way GB News has transformed UK political broadcasting by routinely using sitting Tories as presenters or contracted pundits.

The biggest single beneficiary was Jacob Rees-Mogg, with the former business secretary paid nearly £325,000 in the last year. He currently receives slightly more than £29,000 a month as a presenter for 40 hours of work, or £729 an hour.

Lee Anderson, who was hired as a Tory MP but is an independent since losing the whip at the weekend over alleged Islamophobic comments, is on a salary of £100,000 a year, plus £50 extra a month to display a GB News logo on his X profile page.

The other big earners are the husband and wife MP team of Esther McVey and Philip Davies, who have been paid just under £130,000 and slightly over £60,000 respectively as presenters.

The only two Labour MPs to have been paid for appearing are Rosie Duffield and Barry Gardiner, who were paid £500 and £600 respectively as one-off guests.

While Ofcom has investigated GB News on a number of occasions, a group of senior broadcasting veterans said last week that the broadcast regulator was failing to properly enforce impartiality rules for a channel that sometimes uses Conservative MPs to interview parliamentary colleagues.

Aides to Marshall say he has no editorial input into GB News and would not seek this if he were to buy the Telegraph titles. But some Tories worry that common ownership could see populist voices such as that of Nigel Farage – a GB News presenter who also writes a Telegraph column – increasingly dominate the Conservative discourse.

Marshall’s views came to prominence last week when the campaign group Hope Not Hate reported he had used a personal X account to like or repost messages including a post about potential “civil war” in Europe because of migration. A spokesperson for Marshall said this “small and unrepresentative sample” did not represent his views.

One centrist Tory MP said: “In theory, if Paul Marshall was going to become the Rupert Murdoch of the Conservative right, that would be a worry. But in real life I���m not sure him owning the Telegraph would particularly change what is there anyway. The Telegraph is already the broadsheet newspaper version of GB News. I’m not sure he would pull them much further to the right. I struggle to see how much worse it can get.”

The Barclay brothers, who ceded control of the Telegraph titles to Lloyds Bank last year after failing to repay a debt, are trying to sell the papers and the Spectator magazine to a consortium backed by the UAE.

The culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, triggered inquiries by Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority into the bid, which is led by the investment firm RedBird IMI. These are expected to report back from about 11 March and Frazer could make a decision soon after, with options including approval of the plan or more scrutiny.

If the Redbird plan is blocked, as has been advocated for by a number of Conservative MPs including Rees-Mogg on GB News, Marshall has been mooting a bid alongside the US billionaire Ken Griffin.

Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and historian of the Conservatives, said the notion of Marshall helping shape Conservative views would in part simply mirror the party’s long history with supportive press barons. But there were some new factors at play, he said.

“The advent of the social media world, which, if you like, GB News is part of, has completely blown up the deference that once existed in the party. It provides an alternative route to fame and fortune for MPs, who probably we would never have heard of,” Bale said.

“In this attention economy, various platforms and outlets have to outbid each other for clicks. So if GB News becomes even more radically rightwing populist then the Telegraph, whether or not it’s owned by Marshall, will have to catch up in order to compete. So there is a kind a ratchet effect.”

A spokesperson for GB News said the lineup of presenters was “entirely a matter for the discretion of the editorial team”, adding: “For the avoidance of any doubt, Sir Paul Marshall has no involvement in editorial decisions.”

[ingek73]

Dan Wootton sacked by MailOnline a day after GB News suspension

Journalist’s column and contract terminated after comments made by Laurence Fox on his GB News show

Jim Waterson Media editor

Thu 28 Sept 2023 15.40 CEST

Dan Wootton has been sacked by MailOnline the day after he was suspended by GB News for his part in an on-air discussion with actor Laurence Fox about a female journalist.

The TV anchor has been suspended from his lucrative MailOnline column since the summer over accusations he used the pseudonym “Martin Branning” to send sexually explicit messages to former colleagues. GB News declined to investigate these claims of inappropriate sexual behaviour against one of their star presenters, arguing they were alleged to have happened at a former employer.

As a result Wootton continued presenting his primetime nightly show on GB News until this week, when he was suspended over his role in a discussion with Fox about the appearance of a female journalist.

MailOnline has now ended Wootton’s contract, which was understood to give the journalist a six-figure salary in return for two columns a week.

A spokesperson for DMG Media, the parent company of MailOnline, said: “Following events this week, DMG Media can confirm that Dan Wootton’s freelance column with MailOnline – which had already been paused – has now been terminated, along with his contract.”

The media regulator Ofcom has also opened an investigation into Wootton’s exchange with Fox, after receiving more than 7,000 complaints in 24 hours that the channel may have breached the broadcasting code.

Wootton is still facing another investigation by his former employers at News UK, the parent company of the Sun, over claims he pretended to be a person called “Martin Branning” in order to solicit sexual images from his then-colleagues. The company has called in an external legal firm, Kingsley Napley, to investigate allegations against Wootton, who was one of the country’s most powerful celebrity journalists for much of the 2010s.

That investigation is ongoing, with lawyers interviewing Wootton’s current and former colleagues.

Wootton has continually denied sending sexual messages to his former colleagues, responding to the allegations on his GB News show by saying “dark forces” were trying to bring him down with a “smear campaign”.

He admitted making unspecified mistakes in the past but denied any criminal wrongdoing and has since claimed he is being unfairly targeted for having “political views that challenge the orthodoxy”.

He told GB News viewers he would “like nothing more than to address those spurious claims” but “on the advice of my lawyers I cannot comment further”.

Despite Wootton’s denials that he was Martin Branning, a number of people who knew him have come forward to accuse him including his former boyfriend Alex Truby and a model called Andy Lee.

Lee, a performer on the subscriber website OnlyFans, told the Guardian he met “Branning” in person in 2013 – and later realised he had actually met Wootton.

At first Lee did not think there was anything odd about the encounter, saying: “I was always under the impression he was Martin Branning.”

This apparently changed soon afterwards, when Lee claimed he was followed on Twitter by a journalist called Dan Wootton. Lee said he was shocked because the profile picture on Wootton’s account was the face of the “Martin Branning” he met.

Wootton has neither confirmed nor denied that he used the Martin Branning pseudonym and an associated email address. He set up a crowdfunder to fight the accusations against him, which raised more than £30,000, but that has now been deleted.

His lawyer previously said: “For the avoidance of further doubt, our client did not at any time contact current or former colleagues at the Sun with offers of money in return for sexually explicit images, he did not engage in inappropriate behaviour in the workplace.”

Wootton has been approached for comment.

-

Far too late but still

[ik-sue]

Okay, seems like edqey, aka Jupi, aka Malt, aka Evol, aka 120 gb, aka whatever new name they don has decided to cozy up with Ash (Glitchedpuppet aka glip aka purplekelceon aka papaya kitty) so now I gotta respond.

First off, yes, my personal discord server has been used to discuss Floraverse. There is an entire channel dedicated to it, called “Because it hurt.” It’s a private channel only for select people, and it’s clear Jupi shouldn’t have ever had access to it.

Various issues have been covered on other blogs, so I won’t be reiterating what has already been said. Instead I’ll cover my side of various issues.

First: the dreaded R word. Yes, it was allowed in the server early on, I personally have reclaimed it like the F and Q slurs. I was called it constantly as a kid for being special needs due to autism and I will gladly use it with reference to myself. Now I did ban it in my server, it’s the 100th rule.

It wasn’t thrown around like candy, it was used maybe 25 or so times over several months (September through to March). Now users get warned automatically if they use it.

Next off, the alleged racism. I am going to make it explicitly clear, there was and has never been any racism in my server.

The fifth rule in the server literally bans it. One user, Ceddy, was found out to be racist outside the server on his Twitter. Jupi apparently dug through his account and found and listed off to me every instance they could find. He was banned afterwards, as even outside of the server behavior on this is worth a ban imo. Again, nobody was ever racist inside my server, as they would immediately be banned upon me or the mods noticing their messages, and the friends Ive made aren’t that type of people. The same goes for transphobia. In fact, almost every member of my sever save for three or four are trans in some way. The alleged transphobia was someone saying they aren’t comfortable with it/its/itself pronouns but will respect those who use said pronouns and call them their proper pronouns. Why were they uncomfortable with those pronouns? Because they feel like those pronouns are objectifying and dehumanizing, but again, they will respect those who wish to be referred to that way and has continuously used the proper pronouns. Not exactly my definition of transphobic.

Now on to me wanting “revenge.” No, I wanted closure and Ash to take accountability. In fact, Ive never said I wanted “revenge” at all. Ever. I genuinely don’t know where that came from.

The DID situation. A user named Pruffle suggested we go into the floraverse servers under one account and each use the same account. I thought that was an absolutely stupid idea, and wanted to dismiss it and dissuade anyone from trying it, so I came up with the dumbest possible thing to explain how it would work. I said

This was meant to make the idea seem ridiculous. It wasn’t a serious “let’s pretend to have a serious mental illness.” Those who struggle with DID genuinely struggle and need to be shown love, support, compassion, and kindness… so long as they don’t use it as an excuse for their god awful behavior that they can genuinely control. *cough cough*.

Now that that’s all out of the way… Jupi, you’ve done some god awful shit today.

This?

And this?

NOT OKAY.

You do NOT speculate on someone else’s mental health like this. “Iris was off their meds” is an extremely ablest statement. Regardless of whether I need medication to function properly and politely or not, it is unacceptable for you to make this kind of statement. And the second screenshot… why? Why did you tell Ash, the person who groomed me into porn when I was a minor, about my mental health struggles?? Like… what the fuck is wrong with you? Have you no respect for others or did you feel that you can paint me as a bad or flawed person by saying this? I genuinely want to know.

[qnewsau]

Spacey Unmasked: fresh claims against Kevin Spacey

New Post has been published on https://qnews.com.au/spacey-unmasked-fresh-claims-against-kevin-spacey/

Spacey Unmasked: fresh claims against Kevin Spacey

Kevin Spacey says he strongly denies further claims of inappropriate sexual behaviours made in the upcoming documentary Spacey Unmasked.

Spacey told GB News, “I take full responsibility for my past behaviour and my actions. But I cannot and will not take responsibility or apologise to anyone who’s made up stuff about me or exaggerated stories about me.”

“I’ve never told someone that if they give me sexual favours, then I will help them out with their career, ever.

“I’ve clearly hooked up with, you know, some men who thought they might get ahead in their careers by having a relationship with me. But there was no conversation with me; it was all part of their plan, one that was always destined to fail because I wasn’t in on the deal.”

Actor Anthony Rapp made the first allegation against Spacey, claiming he touched him inappropriately when he was fourteen. Other men came forward to allege similar incidents over the years.

A New York court dismissed Anthony Rapp’s sexual assault lawsuit in 2022.

A separate court in London cleared Kevin Spacey of a further nine sexual offences against four men between 2001 and 2013.

However, Spacey’s career came to a halt in 2017 after further accusations of inappropriate behaviour were made against him.

Spacey Unmasked, a Channel 4 documentary, is due to be released next week. The documentary contains accusations from two more actors.

Elton John defends Kevin Spacey at sexual assault trial.

Disturbing allegations against Kevin Spacey at sex assault trial.

Kevin Spacey charged over alleged sexual assaults.

Actor Anthony Rapp sues Kevin Spacey for alleged sexual assault.

For the latest LGBTIQA+ Sister Girl and Brother Boy news, entertainment, community stories in Australia, visit qnews.com.au. Check out our latest magazines or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

[mediamonarchy]

https://mediamonarchy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/20240401_MorningMonarchy.mp3 Download MP3 Cop a squat on squatters, they is risen and the bromance presidents + this day in history w/#TooBrokeToVote and our song of the day by Hot Beer on your #MorningMonarchy for April 1, 2024. Notes/Links: Image: Something tragic happens in the world, Bugs Bunny shoots memes https://mediamonarchy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/bugs_bunny_tragic_memes.jpg The Day the Laughter Died https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Laughter_Died Andrew Dice Clay born Andrew Clay Silverstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Dice_Clay Rodney Dangerfield born Jacob Cohen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Dangerfield Rick Rubin born Frederick Jay Rubin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin Calls for Impeachment After Federal Judge Appears on CNN, Criticizes Trump; U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton says he’s received threats. https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/calls-for-impeachment-after-federal-judge-appears-on-cnn-criticizes-trump-5617868 GB News shows hosted by MPs broke Ofcom rules; The TV channel is put “on notice” by the media regulator over its use of politicians as presenters https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-68596973 Video: Jacob Rees Mogg hits out at ‘old fashioned’ Ofcom after GB News ruling (Audio) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yy_NBu09AU Cookie Monster hides Sen. Bob Casey’s reply on X after Dem sought campaign donation: ‘Can you chip in?’; Casey tried appealing to several Sesame Street icons including Big Bird, Grover, Oscar the Grouch https://www.foxnews.com/media/cookie-monster-hides-sen-bob-caseys-reply-x-dem-sought-campaign-donation-sesame-street-muppet Does Disney Own the Muppets? (Yes, But Not Sesame Street… Yet.) https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Does_Disney_own_the_Muppets%3F Victoria White Files $2 Million Suit for Police Using ‘Excessive’ Force in Jan. 6 Beating; Federal civil rights lawsuit filed in Washington alleges Metropolitan Police Department officers illegally struck Ms. White dozens of times on Jan. 6 https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/victoria-white-files-2-million-suit-for-police-using-excessive-force-in-jan-6-beating-5617114 Judge Rebukes DOJ Arguments Against Release of Jan. 6 Defendant; Kevin Seefried received a three-year prison sentence for obstructing an official proceeding https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/judge-rebukes-doj-arguments-against-release-of-jan-6-defendant-5617360 Supreme Court Action Leads to Early Release of Jan. 6 Prisoner Who Carried Confederate Flag https://archive.ph/U9DTm LeBron James ‘Very Concerned’ After Squatters Take Over His and Bennifer’s Beverly Hills Neighborhood and Throw Cocaine … Parties https://radaronline.com/p/lebron-james-very-concerned-squatters-bennifer-beverly-hills-parties/ NYC couple sued by squatters who allegedly took over their $930K investment home and won’t leave: ‘It’s absolutely absurd’ https://nypost.com/2024/03/31/us-news/nyc-couple-sued-by-squatters-who-allegedly-took-over-their-930k-investment-home/ Trespassers Welcome: How the Law Protects Squatters https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/News/360282-2024-03-28-trespassers-welcome-how-the-law-protects-squatters.htm Stop stealing from Air Force One, journalists told https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-68702982 Oakland County residents on high alert as thieves return to target luxury homes https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/local/2024/03/29/oakland-county-residents-on-high-alert-as-thieves-return-to-target-luxury-homes/ Chinese illegal immigrant arrested after driving onto military base in California; A top Border Patrol official said the case is still being investigated https://www.foxnews.com/politics/chinese-illegal-immigrant-arrested-driving-military-base-california Illegal migrant who went TikTok viral urging others to squat in people’s homes arrested by ICE; Leonel Moreno entered the U.S. in April 2022 and was placed into alternatives to detention https://www.foxnews.com/politics/illegal-migrant-went-tiktok-viral-urging-...

[sethshead]

Brand’s pre-emptive line of defence – he put a video out on his YouTube channel a few hours before the Channel 4 programme went out – appears similar to the one that Donald Trump routinely advances, that the misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate fell back on when clapped in irons, and that the GB News anchor Dan Wootton used when he too was facing allegations – which he denies – of sexual impropriety. For Trump, his criminal prosecution was a politically motivated witch-hunt by the ‘Deep State’; for Tate, sex-trafficking charges in Romania were ‘the Matrix’ coming to get him; for Wootton, this was all happening ‘because GB News is the biggest threat to the establishment in decades and they’ll stop at nothing to destroy us’; and Brand, wondering whether ‘there was another agenda at play’, hinted that these were ‘co-ordinated attacks’ by the ‘mainstream media’: ‘I’m aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while, watch out, Russell. They’re coming for you. You’re getting too close to the truth.’ You’d think most sensible people would simply eye-roll this line of defence. But here’s the thing: in their many many thousands they did not. Social media filled with people wondering aloud why these women hadn’t complained back then, and chiming along with the line that Brand was obviously the victim of a hit-job because he posed such a threat to the ‘establishment’.   What’s more, the charge was led by a catalogue of high-profile or relatively high-profile media or social media professionals. Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson; Roger Stone, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson; GB News’s Calvin Robinson (‘What is their motivation?’) and Bev Turner (‘This proves you are winning. You’re a hero.’); George Galloway (‘I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but I smell a giant RAT’); even the Telegraph’s Allison Pearson, before the reports were aired or published, mused that ‘my first reaction is to wonder why They [sic] are trying to silence the person’. Laurence Fox, grotesquely, quoted Pastor Niemoller.  [...] But if your first reaction is to tap your nose and raise an eyebrow and, before you’ve even considered the report itself, to speculate about the motivations of the reporting, you’re a damn fool. This falls into the category that my old editor Charles Moore used to call ‘naive cynicism’: a phrase that nicely captures the self-complimenting logic of the conspiracy theorist. If nothing the mainstream media says can be trusted by virtue of its being the mainstream media (and serving as one the agenda of the World Economic Forum, or the paedo-lizards, or Big Pharma, or the Neoliberal Establishment, or the Postmodern Marxist Deep State, or what have you), you are adrift in an entirely post-truth environment. You don’t know more than the ‘sheeple’ who watch the news and read newspapers: you know less. You’ll pick your guru, ‘do your own research’ down a YouTube rabbit-hole algorithmically serving you ever more conspiratorial content, and you’ll lose touch with the boring, fastidious, fact-based-and-needing-to-be-careful-not-to-be-sued work of professional reporters that might help you back to reality.

Brand's pushback is the thought process of a narcissist. His defenders are narcissists. Those falling for his line of defense are either the frequent marks of narcissists and/or people who envy the power, charisma, and impunity narcissists project (but do not necessarily have). In short, his actions make me more likely to believe the allegations than to sympathize with Brand.

I always found his act to be slick and manipulative, with a strong whiff of conspiracism. I was surprised that so many of my peers, some of them victims of suave predators, were so enthralled by his shallow observations. Now I see why. And now I also see why so many rely on naive cynicism, this selective extreme skepticism for mainstream consensus and absolute credulity for tenuous, vacuous woo is so strong in my circles.

[d2kvirus]

Dickheads of the Month: July 2023

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of July 2023 to make sure that they are never forgotten.  

The only conclusion to be drawn is that nobody at The Sun has ever heard of Onlyfans given they twisted a BBC presenter using Onlyfans into “CRIMINAL CHILD PORN” and just kept at that story for the best part of an entire week, only to back down to “HE MET SOMEBODY HE MET ONLINE DURING LOCKDOWN” as if The Sun's editor wasn't at the Lockdown-breaking parties that are part of the Partygate enquiry and “HE WAS A BIT MEAN TO SOMEONE ON GRINDR” when it emerged the source told them the story was bollocks being pushed by their mother and step-father and they should pull it - only to publish it anyway, having sat on the story since May

...and why were The Sun devoting an inordinate amount of time to a non-story to slag off the BBC?  Because proven liar Boris Johnson was refusing to hand his phone over to the Partygate enquiry in spite a High Court order telling him he had to do so and the deadline just so happened to be a couple of days after The Sun broke their non-story

...yet it never occurred to the BBC that, rather than self-flagellate by running the Murdoch copy at the top of all their news bulletins for days on end, maybe they should not talk about the dead cat and instead talk about the news

...while Jeremy Vine was actively telling the accused to reveal themselves solely because he didn't like people saying he was the accused.  That’s right, the same Jeremy Vine who regularly tweets videos to rile up his followers about cyclists was openly tweeting about how much he wanted to throw a colleague under the bus

...meanwhile, the MENSA chapter at GB News thought they were being really, really clever by showing photos of the accused during their programming, albeit their very recognisable headshot had an emoji covering its face

...and then it emerged that proven liar Boris Johnson and his violating a High Court order to submit evidence tot he partygate enquiry conveniently bumped off the front pages, but then it emerged he sat on the news of Carrie Symonds squeezing out another one of his bastard spawn for a week so he had two stories ready to go if he needed to chuck some dead cats on the table

...and then we had Jeremy Kyle in his Talk TV bully pulpit talking about the BBC’s morals.  Yes, the same Jeremy Kyle whose morning talkshow has a literal bodycount thinking he can lecture any form of life about morals

...but karma put the boot on the other foot really f’n fast, as within a couple of days TalkTV were oddly reluctant to say why Tom Newton Dunn had vanished from their output, while GB News were pretending that nobody could notice the obvious lack of Dan Wootton on Dan Wootton’s show after it emerged that Dan Wootton had a history of abusive and controlling behaviour (and that's just the tip of that particularly sordid iceberg) and yet, for some strange reason, neither channel thought that either of these cases was in the public interest

...but then GB News had the genius idea to let Dan Wootton back on the air, meaning that Dan Wootton sat there bemoaning “dark forces” which were trying to take GB news off the air - in spite the minor detail about the Byline Times investigation into his activities posing as “Martin Branning” began three months before GB News’ existence was announced

...and because Dan Wootton is a shameless grifter, his response to the second round of allegations of his pattern of behaviour going back a decade was to go on his GB News how - because GB News still let him on air, making their hysteria about the BBC accused even more ironic - and started panhandling for people to pay his legal fees due to these “leftist allegations” which, by this point, also involved News UK as they were named as paying £1m in settlements and handing out NDAs to make allegations about Wootton go away

Billionaire manchild Elon Musk demonstrated what a big business brain he has by introducing a new Twitter policy: people who aren't dumb enough to pay him to use a free platform are only allowed to see 600 posts per day, but those who are dumb enough get to see 6000, which is a very clever thing to do for a platform that requires views to get ad revenue - and all because him walling up the platform due to paranoia about ChatGPT only served to make the site DDOS itself .  Also, if somebody can remind me, what did he say about Twitter Verify being a “lord & peasants” system...?

…unsurprisingly, this led to billionaire manchild Elon Musk having one hell of a meltdown when Treads went live and picked up the sort of userbase that his gaggle of incels and crypto shills could never hope to manage.  So he tried to sue Threads for copying Twitter, somehow failing to comprehend that the people he sacked in mass layoffs are free to take their expertise anywhere they damn well like if there is a job offer, before resorting to posting “Zuck is a cuck” in the belief that did anything other than make it obvious just how pissed off he was

...and then it was suggested that billionaire manchild Elon Musk had been siphoning off Tesla funds to build himself a glass house, as per the Wall Street Journal, which is literally a plot point of Glass Onion

...but then billionaire manchild Elon Musk had a brilliant idea: chuck as much Twitter ad revenue as he could at a handful of his favourite fashy content creators in the belief that it made the platform look financially stable, and definitely wouldn't cause any issues like countless other content creators asking why they weren't getting the ad revenue and reluctantly having to be told that it's because Elon was throwing it at accounts like End Wokeness or beanie-wearing testicle Tim Pool to try and look successful and anybody else would have to sit there with nothing, which of course is guaranteed to never, ever blow up in Elon’s face the second people learned this and noted how much this looks like a pyramid scheme

...and then billionaire manchild Elon Musk had another one of his genius ideas, where he decided that Twitter would from now on be called X, because two decades of not just brand recognition but actually contributing to the English language is not as important as him using the name he wanted to use for PayPal before he got booted from the company for being a moron with terrible ideas

...and on the subject of billionaire manchild Elon Musk having terrible ideas, after rebranding Twitter to something nobody would ever call it, he decided to change the sign on the Twitter offices in San Francisco there and then - only to have the police show up and tell him to put it back up as he did not have a permit for all the equipment on the street because, as always, he didn't think something through

...and then billionaire manchild Elon Musk decided that a Twitter user posting literal kiddie porn was not grounds for a ban, instead their account was reinstated after the photos were removed even though Musk admitted the account had broken the law...which means, yup, go ahead and guess what the political stance of the kiddie porn tweeter happens to be

...but wait!  Billionaire manchild Elon Musk had yet another genius idea, this time erecting an abysmlally-constructed X on the roof of Twitter HQ - an X which lit up at night with strobing lights...strobing lights that the apartment building across the street really appreciated

To nobody's surprise, waffling gargoyle Nigel Farage was talking absolute bollocks when raging about his bank closing his account (but not naming that bank, as Coutt’s is hardly a bank for salt of the earth people) due to his political stance, and in fact closing it because he no longer had the £3m in savings to justify it - and then he flounced off when he was offered a NatWest account

...and then ultra-relatable nice guy Rishi Sunak waded in claiming that the waffling gargoyle was being denied “basic services” as if anybody could walk into Coutt’s and open an account

...and because waffling gargoyle Nigel Farage was determined to keep whining, not least because the British press had been publishing his version of events and not reality, he continued whining on Newsnight - only to have a complete meltdown when it was broken to him that Coutt’s actually could have closed his acocunt years ago but let him off the hook as he was paying his mortgage, leaving him ranting that all bank managers are “woke” and “remainers”

...which led to Rishi Sunak effectively changing how the entire UK banking system operates in order to placate Farage, although the letter he received from the head of NatWest made it abundantly clear what Coutt’s position was - and that position was accept the NatWest account you were offered when you fell below the terms of owning a Coutt’s account or fuck off

...and then it turned out that Paul Marshall had been shorting NatWest stock.  Yes, the Paul Marshall who owns GB News and employs Nigel Farage on that very same channel, who was using one of the channel’s hosts foghorning about his Coutts’s account for over a week to pocket millions thanks to the waflfing gargoyle spending over a week crying, aided and abetted by both the British media and the British government the whole time

It didn’t take long for Robert F Kennedy Jr to stop “asking questions” to sounding like a fashy little dickhead, with him suggesting that Covid was ethnically targeted to spare the Chinese and Jews - and then try and deny the video of him saying this was actually him

Unifying force Keir Starmer has yet another genius idea: elocution lessons as a standard part of the education curriculum.  Of course, if he wanted to suggest young people being able to express their thoughts and feelings clearly was a good thing, he wouldn't have had a couple of young protestors bundle a pair of protestors calling him out for his green energy u-turn at the exact time he was saying how important it is for young people to express themselves...

Alleged headmistress Katharine Birbalsingh continues to be an advertisement for state education by accusing Jess Phillips of saying she isn't Asian - when the quote, making reference to the Chronicles of Narnia, was “You're not Aslan” - and, as always with Birbalsingh, rather than admit a mistake she instead went off on a meltdown accusing Phillips of systematic racism against her while also trying to say a screengrab made an L look like an I, when her “proof” is based on accusing Phillips of organising a dogpile on her 45 minutes before Phillips tweeted about her lunkheaded tweet about Ike & Tina Turner (which Birbalsingh didn't apologise for and made all manner of absurd excuses)

The worst thing about Johnny Mercer making himself the main character of the Tory party for a few days is it meant we had to watch him being such an obnoxious, bullying dick on Question Time that even Fiona Bruce was stepping in telling him to cut the shit, while his wife Felicity Cornelius-Mercer was fighting his battles for him on Twitter which mainly involved her getting insanely triggered by Carole Vorderman that she was yelling about her even when nobody mentioned her - and then it turned out that Felicity Cornelius-Mercer had been waging a harassment campaign against Vorderman since at least April

The minivan taliban that is Moms for Liberty are now openly calling for the murder of Joe Biden, which is perfectly normal and definitely not a reason for the FBI to start paying attention

Nancy Astor fangirl Rachel Reeves continued to prove her suitability for her key role in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party by openly accusing Ken Loach of being an antisemite during a Guardian interview - and when asked to back that up with so much of an atom of evidence, all she could do is stammer and harrumph

Of course it didn't occur to Bob Iger that it wasn't unions being “unrealistic” but studio CEOs such as Bob Iger (funny, that..) who were being unrealistic in thinking that their writers were happy getting residuals that wouldn't cover the bill for a meal for two, or that the actors and teamsters unions would not side with the writers union

...which led to Disney having to rope in staff form their parks to attend the Haunted Mansion premier wearing their Cruella De Ville costumes, meaning that we had the visual of Bob Iger demanding a literal Mickey Mouse outfit show up so that he didn't look like he was “losing”

...and then it appeared that NBC Universal wanted to get on board the dickhead train, as they hacked down the branches of the trees on the sidewalk outside the Universal lot to deprive the strikers of shade during an LA summer - which promptly saw Universal receive a phone call from LA City asking why they had taken a chainsaw to the branches of LA City trees

Stochastic terrorist Chaya Raichik thought she was being clever when posting a photo of an empty movie theatre for a screening of Sound of Freedom in spite the film raking it in at the box office, when what she was actually doing was revealing that nobody is paying to see the film and its box office takings are astroturfed to make it look popular when you can count the people at theatres paying to see it on one hand

...and the fact that Angel Studios have a page on their website asking people to buy Sound of Freedom tickets for Angel Studios to give away, with over 11m tickets sold, make it pretty hard for the culture warriors to claim the film’s takings aren't papered and it is playing to empty theatres which are allegedly sold out

It surely comes as no surprise to learn that Nadine Dorries is so utterly pathetic that she is badgering Liz Truss for a seat in the House of Lords in Truss’ resignation honours list, in spite never even attending Commons at any point in Truss’ premiership (or Rishi Sunak’s, for that matter), which also comes hot on the heels that her book whinging about the downfall of her pwecious wickle BoBo is set to launch the day before this year's Tory conference

Once again proven liar Boris Johnson used his Mail column to spout self-aggrandizing bollocks, this time him harrumphing about “Sadiq Khan’s ULEZ” and how he wanted to bring it to an end - which would be news to proven liar Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson when he introduced the Ultra Low Emission Zone in 2015 when he was Mayor of London

In the braincells of the New Hampshire Libertarian Party it is perfectly normal to respond to Nina Turner saying insulin should be free by saying that she should be picking crops for free, and if anyone suggests telling a black woman she should be in the fields picking crops for free is racist it's perfectly normal to double, triple and quadruple down and claim they’re not being racist by suggesting a black woman pick crops for free but they’re being socialist

It hasn't occurred to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party that it might be a good idea to highlight their win in the Selby byelection, but instead they fixated on losing the Uxbridge & South Ruislip byelection by less than 500 votes by throwing Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan under the bus by blaming the Ultra Low Emission Zone for it to ensure the Tory press (i.e. the entire English press) had that to focus on and not the two seats the Tories lost for the weekend’s news cycle, the ULEZ brought in by Khan’s predecessor as mayor (and also outgoing Uxbridge & South Ruislip MP) the proven liar Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson and extended by the transport secretary Grant Schapps, both of whom are Tories as noted by Khan when wondering what the hell Starmer’s mob were going on about, though Khan stopped short of suggesting that maybe if Starmer didn't tell the local party their choice to stand in the byelection was “wrong” and imposed the candidate on them that might have pissed off just enough people who were considering voting Labour that it could have lost them 496 votes

Remember how Colleen Ballinger caused a sizable chunk of the internet to cringe themselves to death with her ukulele nonpology to grooming allegations?  She then went and released her ukulele nonpology to grooming allegations to Apple Music and Spotify, while also flinging copyright claims at any Youtube commentary channel that featured clips of her ukulele nonpology to grooming allegations which she had decided to monetise like a normal person would

On the subject of sending nudes to people, Marjorie Taylor Greene has reached the point of batshit insanity where she's now emailing links to a video showing a nude Hunter Biden to all her constituents who have subscribed to her eNewsletter, all at the taxpayer’s expense

According to Petronella Wyatt there are two women in London hospitals who went to Turkey for cosmetic surgery only to have both kidneys removed.  Before boarding a flight back to London.  And not dying before they got to the airport

...but because Petronella Wyatt seems to think that writing articles is in her best interests, she also accepted her Tufton Street brief to slag off Carol Vorderman and sounded like a spiteful, elitist cow - and she promptly had to threaten legal action against people who replied to her attempted character assassination by reminding Wyatt that she had an affair with the then-married proven liar Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson and had to have not one but two abortions during the affair, the affair which got proven liar Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson booted out of Michael Howard’s shadow cabinet when he lied about it

If somebody could explain to Ben Shapiro his hysterical screeching about the Barbie movie makes him look utterly ridiculous even by his standards, with him barbequing Barbie and Ken dolls at one point, that might help him grow as a human being - and no, I did not intend to make a pun about his minuscule height

Walking disaster area Lee Anderson though it would be a good idea to film an edition of his GB News show on the Houses of Parliament terrace - and was promptly dragged in front of the the parliamentary standards committee for breach of conduct 

Somebody really should give SSSniperwolf clear and concise directions into how to take an L, because her response to jacksfilms calling her out for stealing content and getting rewarded for it, not least by Youtube making her a keynote speaker at VidCon, was to accuse him of sexism or being jealous as if Jack doesn't have a track record of calling out users who steal content going back to the bad old days of =3 or Jinx 

I don't suppose that Jason Aldean has tried not singing some dogwhistling shite, regardless of the size of the town or city he is trying it in?

Remarkably pathetic display from Max Schrader during a Tottenham press conference on their pre-season tour of the Far East where he brandished a Bayern Munich shirt with Harry Kane's name on it, which got him chewed out in the press conference and his press credentials revoked the second the presser was over, which of course he whined about in a Bild column while planning his flight back to Germany several days earlier than anticipated

Failed nepo baby Lawrence Fox clearly needs the attention, because hot on the heels of waffling gargoyle Nigel Farage kvetching about Coutts closing his account at the end of June, Fox started harping on about Barclays and his account...while failing to notice the screenshot he attached was not relevant for the year 2023, but would have been in 2014...

[mariacallous]

The home secretary, Suella Braverman, who last week caused outrage by referring to asylum seekers entering the UK as an “invasion”, had been warned by government lawyers that inflammatory immigration rhetoric risked inspiring a far-right terror attack.

Braverman’s comments came just one day after a man with links to the far right threw firebombs at a Dover immigration centre. On Saturday, counter-terrorism police announced they had found evidence that the attack was motivated by an “extreme rightwing” terrorist ideology.

In October 2020, Braverman, then attorney general for England and Wales, was briefed in detail about how hate speech by senior politicians could lead to a terrorist risk. It followed an alleged terror plot against a law firm shortly after Priti Patel, then home secretary, had claimed that “activist lawyers” were frustrating the removal of failed asylum seekers.

After the alleged incident, senior legal figures contacted the attorney general’s office to make clear their concern that inflammatory political rhetoric inspired violence.

In late October 2020, Braverman met in person with government lawyers, the lord chancellor and lord chief justice to discuss the “worrying increase in use of ‘activist lawyers’ rhetoric” by the government, an internal Bar Council newsletter reveals.

At the time, Braverman was so concerned that she contacted Patel to ask her if she would consider toning down her language.

However, last week Braverman doubled down on her choice of language, also referring to “Albanian criminals” in parliament, prompting Edi Rama, the prime minister of the eastern European country, to accuse Braverman of using “purely xenophobic” words.

One prominent barrister with knowledge of the discussions during October 2020 said that Braverman was fully aware that her intervention last week in the immigration debate was incendiary.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, they said: “At the very least, it was reckless. At worst, she knows it’s likely to instigate attacks. It’s either reckless or it’s deliberate and she’s got no concern for the consequences.

“The home secretary’s job is to ensure public safety, not to generate serious risk of harm to individuals.”Another senior legal source, who also asked not to be named, said: “Braverman was told directly of the risks such language was having on members of the profession.”

It can now be revealed that the day after Braverman used the word ��invasion”, prominent far-right figure Mark Collett – who has praised Adolf Hitler, been arrested for inciting racial hatred and has called refugees “cockroaches” – forwarded a message on Telegram from a fellow white supremacist that said: “What’s happening to our borders is an invasion and no amount of pearl clutching will change that.”

Collet, founder of far-right group Patriotic Alternative, stated in a Telegram post the day after firebombs were thrown at the Kent immigration centre: “This attack is the unfortunate result of living in a multicultural tyranny imposed by a globalist system that cares nothing for white people.”

The term “globalist” has fallen under recent scrutiny, featuring in a spike in social media attacks on Rishi Sunak that draw on antisemitic conspiracy theories, linking the former banker to the false notion of a globalist conspiracy. Several prominent figures on the rightwing news channel GB News, including Nigel Farage and Dan Wootton, also used the term after Grant Shapps, who is Jewish, briefly replaced Braverman as home secretary last month.

Far-right elements also attacked the immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, after he rejected the language used by Braverman, with one accusing him on the rightwing Traditional Britain Group Telegram channel of “treason” and referring to his Jewish faith alongside an image of Pepe the Frog, the cartoon character adopted by the alt-right.

On Friday, former skills minister Andrea Jenkyns provoked fresh dismay by referring to immigration lawyers as “anti-British”. In a letter to Braverman, Jenkyns wrote: “You were right to describe this as an invasion and many of my constituents thank you for your candour.”

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The home secretary’s first priority will always be to protect the security of the UK and the safety of its citizens.”

[davidmann95]

"Infinite Frontier": has DC actually learned anything and will things actually be better?

‘Learned anything’ might not be the right way of putting it, because this doesn’t seem to be a refinement on anything they’ve done before so much as - as Bleeding Cool speculated in November (that’s a donotlink so go ahead and check it out) - laying the groundwork for a much bigger shift a little ways down the road to fully digital-first titles collected in trades and only a handful of remaining regular periodicals centered around the biggest marquee names and aimed more at bookstore and supermarket audiences than the comics direct market, presumably alongside OGNs and some prestige/Black Label material. They’re consolidating their titles around recognizable names, making a Walmart-style anthology a tentpole Batman title and experimenting with fewer but thicker monthly comics with backups, and slapping relatively few #1s on even major shifts like Bendis/Marquez on Justice League which would seem to suggest the BIG change is still to come. For now, and again this seems to line up with this being the endgame, the goal seems less than a handful of remarkable titles than linewide consistency; few if any of these books are going to end up all-time classics even if there are several standouts, but even the worst of the bunch look merely tepid rather than total disasters in the making, and in that regard it feels like the improved version of the basic Rebirth creative ethos. They’re here to button up their shirts, demonstrate some professionalism and competence, and prove they can make a model aimed outside the Wednesday Warriors work.

Anonymous said: You know how you wanted Superman writers to start harping on how “he’s just a regular guy” and do cosmic space god Superman? Apparently PKJ has said he plans to do exactly that with Superman in his run. Also seems like Jon will get one of the main books and Clark will take over the other, so Bendis won’t be writing him, he’ll be written by PKJ or Lewis most likely. Interview is on Coliseum of Comics YT channel.

Anonymous said: I don’t think Bendis is writing Hon as Superman. Given that FS seems to be dictating the direction of the line, Lewis or Watters seem more likely for that job. Would prefer either of them, they’re both good indie workers.

Between tweets, this interview that I’ve had relayed to me by a friend, and new solicit material: the plan seems to be that PKJ will only be handling both Superman and Action Comics for about a year, and after a big Action story illustrated by Mikel Janin he’ll remaining on that while Superman goes to someone else. And with very pointed notes that there should be space for both Clark and Jon ‘between the two books’, Jon standing in front of Clark in multiple promotional images, and Superman #29′s mention of “a new Superman”, it seems likely that Jon will in fact be taking on the title himself in the present along with Superman proper (probably as you said with Lewis or maybe Watters - if it’s not a self-contained future book I doubt Bendis is doing it after all) while Clark and PKJ remaining on Action. He even apparently said he was involved with the original 5G plans as they morphed into Future State, and that stuff from that is going to continue to be mined: between this and the Future State Batman being in the Infinite Frontier group shot along with Yara Flor Wonder Girl and the Flash of Future State: Suicide Squad, I think we’re gonna see a lot of legacy characters taking over in the present and that’s when we’ll see the big new wave of #1s absent here (probably paired with some cosmic type like Waverider or Spectre going “events are happening earlier than they were ordained!”). I’d go so far as to guess the digital first vs. few remaining periodicals will be divided between the new generation heroes and ‘classic’ material, though which is which would depend on DC’s priorities and which they feel would be best serviced where.

Further thoughts on the books outside my previous immediate initial takes now that full solicits are out:

* Is Justice League just being used as a catch-all for all the stuff the other ‘Infinite’ branded covers didn’t cover, or is this indicative that Bendis/Marquez Justice League will rope in a lot of characters beyond its immediate cast, given the big DCU group shot for this line was already on Infinite Frontier proper? The solicit mentions Flash for instance being part of the team even though he’s only on this cover, not the main one.

* That Superman Red & Blue is being launched alongside this - with further King stuff in the works for Black Label too - would seem to suggest that DC’s actively going to continue putting together prestige works, rather than putting those entirely by the wayside in favor of the mass-market stuff. There was word awhile back that Black Label might be going under as part of this shift, so glad that a place for a more creatively free approach seems to be remaining intact. Also they got the Final Fantasy logo guy to do a Superman cover, so cool!

* Ok, so it’s a new Swamp Thing altogether, along with more next generation stuff maybe that’ll be an in for me.

* Oh thank god the Batman logo is finally good again after a decade. Not exactly excited though for these Williamson backups with Damian, even should him seeming to rejoin Talia turn out to be a misdirect.

* “In the aftermath of Dark Nights: Death Metal, catch a glimpse of brave new worlds within the DC Universe...but what are these strange planets? As we delve into the parallel lives of the Man of Steel and the Dark Knight, we'll meet new villains, new heroes, alternate realities, and a transdimensional collision that you will need to see to believe! It's the dastardly debut of a cadre of new villains, including the Spider Lady and her poisonous webs, Dr. Atom, who sports a Kryptonite pendant, and the maniacal machinations of the Unknown Wizard! You've never seen Batman and Superman like this before—so buckle up and get ready for the start of a new era courtesy of writer Gene Luen Yang and artist Ivan Reis!” THIS IS EVERYTHING I WANT FROM COMICS, INJECT IT INTO EVERY VEIN IN MY BODY. I assume this is where we’ll see Calvin Ellis given his presence on the Infinite Frontier cover? And is Reis gonna stick around, or will it be a different artist each issue for this multiverse story?

* Spoilers for the apparent new Wonder Woman status quo behind rot13: Fb rfcrpvnyyl nsgre ure nccnerag qrzvfr va Qrngu Zrgny naq gur pbfzvp fgnaqneq frg ol Vzzbegny Jbaqre Jbzna, vg frrzrq bqq gur svefg fgbel ol gur fnzr grnz gnxvat bire ure obbx jnf tbvat gb or nobhg ure svtugvat Ivxvatf. Ohg ab, fur'f va Inyunyyn, orpnhfr fur'f nccneragyl nyy nobhg fbyivat TBQ CEBOYRZF abj. Tbq, cyrnfr yrg guvf grnz fgvpx nebhaq naq svanyyl znxr guvf obbx nyy vg fubhyq or.

* And as one era begins, another ends with Grant Morrison’s alleged final DC comics arriving on the same day in March with Wonder Woman: Earth One Volume 3 and The Green Lantern Season Two #12.

[classyfoxdestiny]

Boris Johnson facing corruption legal battle over £4.8bn ‘levelling-up fund’ that sent cash to Tory areas

Boris Johnson facing corruption legal battle over £4.8bn ‘levelling-up fund’ that sent cash to Tory areas

Boris Johnson is facing a corruption legal battle over whether his party has been funnelling taxpayer cash into Tory areas to give it a political advantage.

The High Court will decide whether the PM’s £4.8bn “Levelling Up Fund” unlawfully and systematically sent cash to areas considered to be “of political benefit to the Conservative party”.

Judges agreed to hear a legal challenge brought by the Good Law Project, stating: “The grounds are arguable.”

The lawsuit, formally filed against Rishi Sunak, Robert Jenrick and Grant Shapps in their government roles, could find that the centrepiece of the government’s so-called “levelling-up” agenda is unlawful.

The leafy market town constituencies of Mr Sunak and Mr Jenrick are among the areas to benefit from an unusual funding formula that critics accused of amounting to “pork barrel politics”.

Campaigners cited an investigation by the National Audit Office, which found that the government’s list of targets for the cash had been published without supporting information to explain why they had been chosen.

The House of Commons’ cross-party Public Accounts Committee had also said the lack of transparency had left to concerns of “political bias” in the allocation of funds.

Forty out of the first 45 schemes to be approved under the fund in March had at least one Conservative MP.

Jolyon Maugham, the barrister who founded the campaign group bringing the suit, said at the time: “If you think that it’s coincidence that Tory marginals are huge beneficiaries I have a fine bridge to sell you. To ensure the Tories don’t use public money for party purposes, the Good Law Project is suing.”

The campaigners cited Chris Hanretty, Professor of politics at Royal Holloway, University of London, who looked at the funding formula and evidence presented by the National Audit Office and government.

“On the basis of the data collated by the ministry and published by the NAO, there is robust evidence that ministers chose towns so as to benefit the Conservatives in marginal Westminster seats,” he wrote.

“This evidence is robust in the sense that the effects persist even when controlling for other town characteristics that might justifiably affect selection.

“Choosing towns to benefit a particular party goes against the seven principles of public life (the ‘Nolan principles’), and in particular the obligation to ‘take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias’.”

The Good Law Project has previously challenged the government in court over alleged cronyism in PPE contacts, clean air, and access to remote education during the pandemic.

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22 August 2021

Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest

PA

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21 August 2021

People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London

Reuters

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20 August 2021

People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach.

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19 August 2021

Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire

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18 August 2021

Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families

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17 August 2021

Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing

Reuters

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16 August 2021

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute’s silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week

PA

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15 August 2021

2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival

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14 August 2021

A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident

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13 August 2021

Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening

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12 August 2021

Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair

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11 August 2021

Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges

PA

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10 August 2021

Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London

Reuters

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9 August 2021

The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games

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8 August 2021

Great Britain’s Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan

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7 August 2021

People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen’s Park, Glasgow

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6 August 2021

Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women’s 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14

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5 August 2021

A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran’s new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London

AFP via Getty

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4 August 2021

England’s Joe Root looks on as India’s KL Rahul doesn’t make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham

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3 August 2021

Great Britain’s Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women’s Team Pursuit and Men’s Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan

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2 August 2021

Great Britain’s Charlotte Worthington competes during the Women’s BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics

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1 August 2021

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31 July 2021

James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics

AP

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30 July 2021

Great Britain’s Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan

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29 July 2021

Team GB’s Mallory Franklin during the Women’s Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal

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28 July 2021

Canoers on Llyn Padarn lake in Snowdonia, Gwynedd. It was announced that the north-west Wales slate landscape has been granted UNESCO World Heritage Status

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27 July 2021

A view of one of two areas now being used at a warehouse facility in Dover, Kent, for boats used by people thought to be migrants.

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26 July 2021

A woman is helped by Border Force officers as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, onboard a Border Force vessel, following a small boat incident in the Channel

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25 July 2021

Vehicles drive through deep water on a flooded road in Nine Elms, London

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24 July 2021

Utilities workers inspect a 15x20ft sinkhole on Green Lane, Liverpool, which is suspected to have been caused by ruptured water main

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23 July 2021

Children interact with Mega Please Draw Freely by artist Ei Arakawa inside the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, part of UNIQLO Tate Play the gallery’s new free programme of art-inspired activities for families

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22 July 2021

Festivalgoers in the campsite at the Latitude festival in Henham Park, Southwold, Suffolk

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21 July 2021

A man walks past an artwork by Will Blood on the end of a property in Bedminster, Bristol, as the 75 murals project reaches the halfway point and various graffiti pieces are sprayed onto walls and buildings across the city over the Summer

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20 July 2021

People during morning prayer during Eid ul-Adha, or Festival of Sacrifice, in Southall Park, Uxbridge, London

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19 July 2021

Commuters, some not wearing facemasks, at Westminster Underground station, at 08:38 in London after the final legal Coronavirus restrictions were lifted in England

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18 July 2021

A view of spectators by the 2nd green during day four of The Open at The Royal St George’s Golf Club in Sandwich, Kent

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17 July 2021

Cyclists ride over the Hammersmith Bridge in London. The bridge was closed last year after cracks in it worsened during a heatwave

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16 July 2021

The sun rises behind the Sefton Park Palm House, in Sefton Park, Liverpool

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15 July 2021

Sir Nicholas Serota watches a short film about sea monsters as he opens a £7.6 million, 360 immersive dome at Devonport’s Market Hall in Plymouth, which is the first of its type to be built in Europe

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14 July 2021

Heidi Street, playing a gothic character, looks at a brain suspended in glass at the world’s first attraction dedicated to the author of Frankenstein inside the ‘Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein’ experience, located in a Georgian terraced house in Bath, as it prepares to open to the public on 19 July

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13 July 2021

Rehearsals are held in a car park in Glasgow for a parade scene ahead of filming for what is thought to be the new Indiana Jones 5 movie starring Harrison Ford

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12 July 2021

A local resident puts love hearts and slogans on the plastic that covers offensive graffiti on the vandalised mural of Manchester United striker and England player Marcus Rashford on the wall of a cafe on Copson Street, Withington in Manchester

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11 July 2021

England’s Bukayo Saka with manager Gareth Southgate after the match

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10 July 2021

Australia’s Ashleigh Barty holds the trophy after winning her final Wimbledon match against Czech Republic’s Karolina Pliskova

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9 July 2021

England 1966 World Cup winner Sir Geoff Hurst stands on top of a pod on the lastminute.com London Eye wearing a replica 1966 World Cup final kit and looking out towards Wembley Stadium in the north of the capital, where the England football team will play Italy in the Euro 2020 final on Sunday

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8 July 2021

Karolina Pliskova celebrates after defeating Aryna Sabalenka during the women’s singles semifinals match on day ten of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London

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7 July 2021

The residents of Towfield Court in Feltham have transformed their estate with England flags for the Euro 2020 tournament

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6 July 2021

A couple are hit by a wave as they walk along the promenade in Dover, Kent, during strong winds

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5 July 2021

Alexander Zverev playing against Felix Auger-Aliassime in the fourth round of the Gentlemen’s Singles on Court 1 on day seven of Wimbledon at The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club

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4 July 2021

Aaron Carty and the Beyoncé Experience perform on stage during UK Black Pride at The Roundhouse in London

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A spokesperson for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said in response to the suit at the time: “The £4.8bn Levelling Up Fund is open to all places in Great Britain and will play a vital role in helping to support and regenerate communities.

“The published methodology makes clear the metrics used to identify places judged to be most in need. It would not be appropriate to comment on potential legal action.”

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[ingek73]

GB News suspends Dan Wootton after Laurence Fox’s remarks on show

Broadcaster says it is conducting full investigation after also suspending Fox

GB News has suspended the presenters Dan Wootton and Laurence Fox as the channel struggles to contain the fallout after misogynistic comments made on Wootton’s show.

The rightwing news channel said on Wednesday: “GB News has suspended Dan Wootton following comments made on his programme by Laurence Fox last night. This follows our decision earlier today to formally suspend Mr Fox. We are conducting a full investigation.”

GB News has refused repeatedly to investigate Wootton over separate, unrelated, allegations that he used the pseudonym Martin Branning to send sexually explicit messages to former colleagues.

Wootton, 40, is already facing investigations by both MailOnline, which has suspended him, and his former employers at News UK over these historical claims. As a result he is now being investigated by three separate media groups over a variety of issues.

The latest scandal began on Tuesday evening when Fox appeared on the Dan Wootton Tonight programme on GB News to discuss comments made by the political journalist Ava Evans about men’s mental health.

Rather than focus on her arguments, Fox instead used his time to discuss the journalist’s appearance and explain why he would ignore her in a bar.

He called Evans a “little woman” and went on to say: “Show me a single self-respecting man that would like to climb into bed with that woman ever, ever, who wasn’t an incel.

“We need powerful, strong amazing women who make great points for themselves. We don’t need these sort of feminist 4.0. They’re pathetic and embarrassing. Who’d want to shag that?”

As both Fox and Wootton laughed, Fox added: “Sorry, it’s true though.”

Evans, who posted the clip of the segment on X – the social media site formerly known as Twitter – after it aired, said the comments had made her feel “physically sick”.

On Wednesday Evans said she had received an apology from GB News.

“It was an email from the editor – a very gracious email – basically telling me that what Fox said was not representative of the rest of the GB News outfit,” she told the BBC Newscast podcast.

“That’s actually probably the best apology I could have gotten. Honestly, not to cast doubt on our media landscape, but I didn’t actually think anything was going to happen.

“I don’t want to say I’m pleased by it. I just think that’s probably the best outcome I could have hoped for.”

Evans added that she had received threats in a “really nasty” past 24 hours.

During the discussion on Tuesday, Wootton could be seen smirking, although he did attempt to steer the conversation elsewhere before concluding: “And she’s a very beautiful woman, Laurence, very beautiful woman.”

Afterwards, following a social media backlash, Wootton issued an apology and insisted he was laughing only out of shock at Fox’s comments.

He said: “Having looked at the footage, I can see how inappropriate my reaction to his totally unacceptable remarks appears to be and want to be clear that I was in no way amused by the comments … I should have intervened immediately to challenge offensive and misogynistic remarks.”

'This is a network problem': GB News used her as a 'vehicle for content', says Ava Santina

Fox, also a presenter on GB News, was suspended by the channel on Wednesday morning after politicians and fellow GB News staff expressed their disgust at his comments.

Fox, 45, then turned his fire on Wootton, suggesting his apology and justification for the laughter were not sincere.

Fox shared a screengrab of a private Twitter conversation from just after the broadcast, captioned with the words “Honesty is the best policy”, that appeared to show Wootton posting a number of laughing emojis in response Fox’s comments about Evans.

It is rare for the rightwing GB News channel, which has encountered many controversies and multiple regulatory inquiries during its short existence, to issue an apology.

The media regulator, Ofcom, which has struggled to deal with GB News pushing the boundaries of British TV regulation, said it was urgently looking into a large number of complaints about Fox’s comments.

The media regulator has six separate investigations into GB News still going, with the channel already found to have breached the broadcasting code on three different occasions within the last year.

GB News has close links to the Conservative government, receiving preferential access to ministers and spending hundreds of thousands of pounds a year employing Tory MPs as presenters.

Wootton and Fox’s comments could also cause a headache for Paul Marshall, the hedge fund billionaire who provides much of the financial backing for GB News.

He is putting together a bid to buy the Daily Telegraph but could face challenges if he is not considered an appropriate buyer for the title due to the conduct of his other media businesses.

Lucy Frazer, the culture secretary, said Fox’s comments were “inappropriate and unacceptable”, while her Labour opposite number, Thangam Debbonaire, put the episode in the context of society-wide misogyny.

She said: “Last night’s woman-hating on air has hit a new low. Might want to ask why a national broadcaster would want to keep this man on air. Women are mighty and we will never let voices like this silence us.”

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[dipulb3]

Analysis: Why you won't find Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson on British TV

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/analysis-why-you-wont-find-sean-hannity-and-tucker-carlson-on-british-tv/

Analysis: Why you won't find Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson on British TV

“The mob that stormed and desecrated the Capitol … could not have existed in a country that hadn’t been radicalized by the likes of [Fox News hosts] Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, and swayed by biased news coverage,” wrote Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan.

But are the airwaves of any democracy free of this kind of harmful propaganda and downright fiction? The United Kingdom, for one, comes pretty close.

Though the UK media scene is defined in part by a freewheeling and often partisan tabloid press with its own share of conspiracy theories, its TV news channels largely frame their coverage down the middle, with broadcasters such as the BBC and ITV maintaining high levels of public trust. Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News is no longer on air in the country after failing to generate a significant viewer base.

A big factor in this is media regulator Ofcom, which enforces rules on impartiality and accuracy for all news broadcasters. Those who breach the rules can be censured or fined — putting pressure on TV channels to play stories fairly straight.

Russian state-funded news channel RT, for example, was slapped with a £200,000 ($272,000) penalty for repeatedly breaking impartiality rules in its 2018 coverage of the poisonings of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, as well as the conflict in Syria. It has not been fined since.

“What the impartiality rules do is ensure you cannot have the kind of shock jock culture — [a] far right, or indeed far left, one-sided interpretation of events,” said Steven Barnett, a professor of media and communication at the University of Westminster.

The UK system isn’t perfect. A review of BBC coverage ahead of the 2016 Brexit referendum found that its main news program was more negative on the European Union than Russian President Vladimir Putin. And two new media ventures expected to launch shortly could again push the limits of what’s allowed. But according to experts, the framework has protected against the kind of disinformation peddled by Fox News in the United States.

No Fox News

Ofcom, which was established in 2003, has two important standards that the news broadcasters it licenses must abide by — “due impartiality” and “due accuracy.”

This does not mean that equal time needs to be given on television and radio to both sides of an issue. But broadcasters do have a responsibility at least to acknowledge opposing viewpoints, and to quickly correct “significant mistakes.”

When Fox News was on the air in the United Kingdom, its top stars were found to have violated the regulator’s rules.

Ofcom said that a Hannity program about President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting travel from seven majority-Muslim countries didn’t do enough to surface the viewpoints of those who opposed the order. Ofcom also said that a separate Carlson broadcast following the 2017 Manchester terror attack — which included claims that UK authorities had done nothing to stop terrorism or to protect “thousands of underage girls” from rape and abuse — did not adequately reflect alternate perspectives.

Fox News was pulled off air in the United Kingdom later in 2017 when Murdoch, the billionaire chairman of News Corp and Fox News’ parent company, was seeking government approval to purchase the shares he didn’t own of European pay TV network Sky. (He ended up selling his Sky holdings to Comcast.)

21st Century Fox, the network’s parent company at the time, said it made the decision because Fox News had attracted “only a few thousand viewers across the day” in the United Kingdom, and it didn’t make commercial sense to continue broadcasting. But the move also came amid scrutiny from Ofcom, which had previously slammed Fox’s handling of sexual harassment allegations against former network boss Roger Ailes and former star host Bill O’Reilly, calling their alleged conduct “deeply disturbing.”

Such warnings hint at the trouble Fox News could have faced had it stuck it out during the Trump era.

Hefty penalties awarded to other channels, such as RT, have effectively communicated the consequences of slipping up to media executives, said Trevor Barnes, a TV and radio compliance consultant and former Ofcom official.

“They���re aware that if they misbehave, they’ll be hit with a fine,” he said.

The United States, meanwhile, doesn’t have these kinds of rules — and hasn’t since the Reagan era, when the Federal Communications Commission stopped enforcing the so-called Fairness Doctrine for TV and radio stations. Historians believe the demise of this rule, which required broadcasters to present a variety of views on issues of public importance, paved the way for the explosion of conservative talk radio in the late 1980s and 1990s, which later served as a model for Fox. Those talk radio shows continue to be popular today.

As a cable network, Fox News wouldn’t have been bound by the doctrine, which only applied to broadcast channels. But Julian Zelizer, a history professor at Princeton University and Appradab contributor, said its removal changed the rules of the game.

“It served as a kind of check,” Zelizer said. “It was always on the mind of everyone who was in the news business.”

Now, even members of the Murdoch family are reckoning with the role Fox News has played. James Murdoch, who made a dramatic break from his family last year when he resigned from the board of News Corp, said in a statement on Friday that “spreading disinformation” has “real world consequences.” While he did not mention Fox News by name, it was clear his focus was on the network controlled by his father and brother.

“Many media property owners have as much responsibility for this as the elected officials who know the truth but choose instead to propagate lies. We hope the awful scenes we have all been seeing will finally convince those enablers to repudiate the toxic politics they have promoted once and forever,” James Murdoch and his wife, Kathryn Murdoch, said in a joint statement to the Financial Times.

New networks may test the system

The United Kingdom has largely watched the Capitol riot and its aftermath in horror.

“The events … have been the ultimate demonstration of what can happen when those fundamental pillars of democracy break down: accurate information [and] fair information,” Barnett said.

But two outlets expected to debut shortly in the United Kingdom could test the bounds of the regulatory system, including Ofcom’s appetite for enforcement.

Murdoch’s UK operation, which still controls three big British newspapers — The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times — is working on a new video venture, having recently received a license under the name News UK TV. Details haven’t been announced.

Meanwhile, upstart competitor GB News, which recently secured £60 million ($81 million) from investors, is hiring journalists as it prepares to launch a 24-hour news channel.

“Many British people are crying out for a news service that is more diverse and more representative of their values and concerns,” former BBC host Andrew Neil, who will serve as the chairman of GB News, said in a statement last week. Neil was previously the editor of Murdoch’s Sunday Times and executive chairman of Sky TV.

Critics fear the News UK TV venture and GB News could move to take on the BBC and fill a perceived gap in right-wing broadcasting, sparking concerns about whether UK regulators are up to the task of maintaining due impartiality, or whether Britain could soon have its own Fox News-type problem.

Both outlets may play things fairly safe at first, and Barnes noted that the rules will give them some latitude.

“There’s no requirement under due impartiality for a channel not to have a bias,” he said. “All it requires is you reflect, to a pretty small degree, what the opposing viewpoint is.”

But Barnett is worried that over time, there could be a slow erosion of norms — combined with an anti-Ofcom push from Murdoch’s powerful papers, who may level criticisms of a “nanny state regulator telling us what we can and can’t say.” News Corp declined to comment.

“I will make a prediction that within a year we will see a concerted attack within the Murdoch press on Ofcom,” he said. And if support for the regulator fades, all bets will be off.