Right, but look at the bigger picture: Let's say that the BBC "silences" an incident involving crime, immigrants, revolting vice, etc. etc., and then Baitfart or some other "truthy" site picks up the story and adds a healthy dose of ass-facts and hyperbole to boost its sexiness to masterbait levels. Then the "censored" story goes viral and Hatebook et al. are filled to the brim with progs and wingnuts screaming bloody murder at each other. And then the BBC---along with every other news outlet in the country---publishes a billion articles and editorials about the "controversy" and how terrible, terrible it all is (and of course, Milo & the Boys also get their chance to scream "CENSER SHIP" until they're puking blood). The answer to "why did the BBC relinquish those clicks" is that they ultimately didn't.
Hushing up the rape of several thousand girls over the course of 15 years - they relinquished a lot of clicks. Breitbart was founded 8 years ago, and hasn't yet left a significant mark or carved its way into great prestige. A billion articles and editorials were not published, very little time was spent on this at all and by very few news outlets.
Consider that you only know of Rochdale despite the scale and severity of the depravity that occurred and just how much was covered up over such a long period of time by media and state authorities. Perhaps you also know of Rotherham. Do you know of Aylsebury, Oxford, Bristol, Telford, Birmingham, Wycombe, Harrow, Manchester, Stevenage, Burton, Chesham, Leeds, Blackburn, Blackpool, Preston, Nelson, London, Barking, Derby, Keighley, Peterborough, Bradford, Bristol, Coventry, Bolton, Middlesbrough? I for one didn't until very recently, and I have been and still am tracking this whole shit. Like Rotherham for example where supposedly it's over yet more victims are coming through and they arrested another three men who had the nerve to keep on going even with investigators running about.
Of the newspapers that played the biggest role in breaking the news out to the public, the newspapers that covered the most are the Times (who published the whistleblower's leak of the Rotherham coverup), the Telegraph (Oxford, Derby, Keighley) and the tabloids (Coventry, Bradford, Barking, Blackpool) and the rest by local papers (which you cannot find by searching for any combination of "rape, gang, crisis, England, UK," as the indexes all focus on Rochdale or Rotherham). Editorials and opinion pieces were done by the Guardian, Spectator, Statesman and WSJ.
Checking up which papers are owned by who, the locals are mostly local, but most of the Tabloids, journals and papers involved are either owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Barclay Brothers, Guardian Media Group or were a foreign media group who picked up on Rochdale or Rotherham (CNN, Fox and RT being the biggest foreign mass media to pick up on it, Fox also being a part of Murdoch's media assets).
The most notable thing about this all is that all the mass media outlets that either exposed the gang rapes were either local or owned by one of three people. The Barclay Brothers are quite inconspicuous and keep to their own as long as it's not retail, but Murdoch is a very infamous media mogul who will expand his media Empire at any given opportunity. He is not in conspiracy with the BBC to cover up several thousand accounts of gang rape only to report the great controversy after 15 years, we would've found any such conspiracy in the government probe that's been on for the last 4 years through his media in search for phone hacking evidence. The reason why I also mention why he is infamous for expanding his media is because legally, there are many mass media outlets he is restricted from taking over. He has a vested interest in destroying them, and many people suspect he has already tried his hand at it many times. If he had this dirt on the BBC he would not hesitate to destroy his rival. Moreover Murdoch takes personal glee in making celebrities ugly and powerful people laughing stocks, the biggest headlines and bacon jokes came from the Murdoch press when Cameron's alleged hamoire came to light.
He has zero qualms about publishing things that make people uncomfortable, even I am uncomfortable with how his paparazzi behave like... Well, paparazzi. But the Times deserves nothing but commendation for their investigation that revealed all of these cases and prompted more to come to light (even if only locally). It's about as likely as the Guardian working with the US government to publish the Snowden leaks to get massive revenue, the two are not on speaking terms.
Speaking of the Guardian:Rotherham councillors were foolish to blame 'the Murdoch press' The decision to take Rotherham council under central government control followed the shocking confirmation, by an independent inspector, into its handling of child sexual exploitation.
Rightly, the cabinet of Rotherham’s metropolitan borough council resigned en masse in the wake of Louise Casey’s scathing report.
Wrongly, the members have spent years denying the truth and had the gall to claim they were victims of a “politically motivated” campaign of lies mounted by the “Murdoch press”.
That was never a convincing defence. So let’s be clear about this: the “Murdoch press”, meaning the Times, deserves nothing but praise for its initial exposure of this vile criminal activity and for highlighting the wholly inadequate political response in its wake.
Seriously, for years people laughed at the Murdoch press for their cruel racism, everything they said was just blatant lies. And to remove all doubt as sarcasm is not apparent on the internet, that was sarcasm, those councilors have somehow managed to lose the moral highground to
Rupert Murdoch. Accusations of racism do ever always serve as a powerful shield against criticism.
These people would have continued to get away with it if not for four men - the fourth being the journalist Andrew Norfolk who didn't want to take on the story but felt compelled to after a whistleblower handed him irrefutable evidence:
"We found clear evidence of a crime pattern that was not being acknowledged or addressed and which was having the most devastating impact on some of the most vulnerable, innocent people in our society." No one was talking about it because they didn't want to appear racist. Of course immediately after Norfolk published this he was also attacked as being racist. Also interesting is that the BBC begins reporting on the rape gangs more in 2013, when James Harding took over as director. James Harding previously worked for the Times and the Wallstreet Journal, both Murdoch outlets, which I think is far from a coincidence considering just a decade before his appointment the BBC rather than report on rape gangs was attacking MPs alleging this, and had actually succeeded in getting one such MP arrested for inciting racial hatred, the difference in how the BBC reported or suppressed this information can't be starker.
Notably Murdoch does not use this information for commercial expansion, which could very easily be done considering his international mass media machine which has its fingers dipped in progressive, liberal, conservative, financial and American conservative outlets. He doesn't use it to attack his rivals, which would make absolute sense. He could possibly even have great influence over the BBC and would never be a position stronger than this, when the topic of licensing fees are up for debate and he may have an inside guy or at least someone sympathetic to him in charge.
The journalists like Andrew Norfolk may have felt a moral obligation, but I don't think for a second Murdoch would hesitate to bring Andrew into compliance or send him off to "diversity training" as our government did, if it did not suit his interests. Besides making for news reports and editorials that sell (especially being the first to break the news), I suspect the fact that the authorities all covering this up being progressives is why the big three of the Guardian Media Group, the Barclay Brothers and Murdorch were the most interested of all outlets, being the first to either report or rereport the story. All three are fighting for narrative control, with the BBC changing narrative depending on who is in charge at the time and whether their reports are released before or after the Rotherham investigation. The Barclay Brothers are elusive so it's hard to pinpoint who they're dealing with directly or if they're dealing with someone directly. Of all the ones likely doing it for the money I suspect it's them. The Guardian are aligned with Labour, with certain caveats given their relationship with Labour has gotten complicated and divisive within the paper as it has with the party. Seumas Milne for example is a former Guardian journalist who has become the director of communications and strategy for Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, and has set up Labour's campaign strategy. The son of a former BBC director, he in turn lobbied for Katharine Viner to take over the Guardian as editor and she has. With Labour undergoing borderline schismatic tension and Seumas's chosen in charge the Guardian is in turn in charge of damage control, distancing Corbyn's labour from Blair's or Brown's labour, providing a counter-narrative and downplaying the full extent of how many gangs there were. Then lastly there's Murdoch who most likely has thrown his money at this narrative (but carefully so as to avoid giving support to Farage) on behalf of someone in the Tory cabinet, not our PM David Cameron, but someone like George Osborne (guy who runs the budgets, sounds banal but at this point probably leads more of the government than Cameron) or Michael Gove (guy who worked for the Times, was put in charge of education but was unseated by Academia who hated his policies for not being progressive enough, was made Chief Whip after this) who is more likely.
Oh and the BBC wouldn't make any money from this because they are state funded and "state funded." They sell no papers or advertising and are funded by license fees British subjects pay, though they also get funding from other sources - mostly either the British, American or EU. They don't benefit financially from trying to be popular because they don't need to be in order to stay afloat. They benefit in soft power, and how that power is used largely depends on what branch of the BBC you're talking about and who's in charge of what at what time. This is why all political parties and foreign governments accuse the BBC of being biased, because in many ways it is uniquely structured in such a way that it is possible for it to be biased to both sides at the same time. Their attacks on authorities for investigating the rape gangs or for covering them up is testament to this.
Oh yeah and to top it all off, around the time where the BBC started reporting on the rape gangs in earnest was in 2013. After an investigation into the BBC's reporting on the European Union, Helen Boaden the former director admitted the BBC had a deep liberal bias and had failed to reflect the public's growing concerns with the European Union and immigration, during the decade the labour wanted to make Britain multicultural and during the decade labour councilors felt it appropriate to cover up the gang raping of thousands of prepubescent girls.
Yeah I'm going to take a gander here and assume these fluffy cats did all that because they were progressive.
I didn't even mention which ones went to an elite Uni, it'll be obvious enough already (in actuality I accidentally found out whilst looking through these peoples' biographies that some of them are Oxford or Cambridge, but as I did not start searching for this detail from the start I do not have a complete list and would have to start again. Time consuming).
Nothing was really censored because censorship is a fucking joke on the net---the governments know it, Hatebook knows it, and even the BBC knows it.
Our National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review concluded that the BBC was important to national security and increased its budget by a third to counter anti-Western narratives being produced across the world. The Americans need the BBC because it has higher standards than its CNN and so if it wants to get its narrative through it needs a more credible broadcaster. I was most amused when I was abroad and saw two adverts one after the other, one by CNN and the other by the BBC. The CNN prided themselves on being able to report on news globally directly with the people involved, up to and including very powerful people. Feet on the ground! The BBC on the other hand showed them following a story on the development of a village into an urban sprawl over the course of 4 generations; it's quite an unfair competition, and speaks clearly to the benefits of state funded media. Whether it can be possible to have impartial state owned media or impartial media at all, it cannot be denied state owned media can produce some quality media. Why go through such lengths? Narrative control. The European Union, the USA, the UK, Russia, anyone who ever does anything on the international stage wants it, everyone who wants to control their home narrative wants it (CHINA!). Consider just why for both the Western bloc and the Eastern bloc, mass media is a core strategic pillar which receives both public and military funds.
It fucking works.
Heck, if you remember Europol megathread 2013 you'll also remember when I posted that the EU had been spending millions of Euros on going through political articles, comment sections and social media with "public opinion monitoring tools" and "qualitative media analysis" to fight "euroskeptic trolls" in the forefront to the European Parliamentary elections. Israel, Russia, the EU, USA and probably the UK (I reckon they've just not been caught yet) have been caught using hired shills, students, astroturfing companies and masses of fake twitter accounts in order to try and influence public opinion of a topic of their interest. Deletion does not work, but dilution and diversion and ultimately narrative control are entirely within every powerful nation's control. If a bunch of retarded Anons can force self-destructive social movements using a handful of sockpuppets and useful idiots then you can sure as hell bet the people doing military social network analysis have better tools at their disposal.
They just cannot publish it outright because of certain political aspects, as you said, but also because they've got a brand to maintain: their main selling-point is that they're not The Sun. "The BBC is a bland and inaccurate, but at least respectable media!"...so very British, so very safe.
Excuse me shitlord can you stop being so casually racist about Bonglanders, we invented the trench-flensing land battleship and the atomic commie cleaner with Captain authorized missiles - I'll have you know a Briton can be just as drunk and unstable as any madman can
On a more serious note the BBC's selling point is that it is bland and accurate, and they do their job pretty fucking well. Consider that I am their most vocal critic for them being biased bastards but I still respect their work.
It's a well earned reputation, one I find gives them more responsibility to not abuse it.
You may be right about the CIA owning BBC, for all I know/care, but the more important point is that all news outlets are fuckin pwned by click-pushing, outrage-pimping, content-farming social media, and all social media (as well as the CIA) are owned by the <0.001% financial elite, as can be expected. If you're trying to figure out who's pulling the strings behind this mess, you should always keep in mind that the ideology of The City/Wall-Street/Illuminati-Pyramid is under no circumstances PC or progressivism or SocJus or any of that soppy hippie shit. Hint: it starts with "m" and rhymes with "honey."
Technocrats, Plutocrats, Bureaucrats, Aristocrats - you name your fluffy crat, they can't do jack when the public gets mad. Unless of course, the public adores them and is with them all the way. You can achieve this with progressivism!
Have Merkel telling Zuckerberg to police "hateposts" with of course, German media also helping to destroy hateposters in real life for their social media comments. Of course Zuckerberg gets right on it!
Here's Huffpo contemplating whether twitter should start censoring haaaateeerrrs and here is them doing just that in 2012 on the behest of German authorities again. Go read the "Bild declares war on hateposters thread" again and it's easy to see it's been used to crack down on legitimate criticism in the name of something so fucking bizarre as hate...posting?
I don't understand why progressivism finds hate so abhorrent that every evil of speech is hate this and hate that. First hatecrimes, then hatespeech, then hatefuck and now hateposting.
"In theory, there are a variety of ways that shadow-censorship could be applied on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Users may be automatically unsubscribed from blacklisted feeds without notice. Social media analytics can be selectively edited after the fact to make some posts look more or less popular than they really were. Individual posts or users can be flagged so that they are shown in as few feeds as possible by default. Or provocative content that originally escaped selective filtering may be memory-holed after the fact, retrievable only by the eagle-eyed few who notice and care to draw attention to such curious antics.
In each situation, the result is to manipulate network dynamics so that individuals end up censoring themselves. No-knock raids and massive anti-sedition campaigns are unnecessary.
To control sensitive information today, you can just make people believe that no one else cares. Eventually, they give up, cease their broadcasts, and move on to something else."That article notes that these practices already take place in places like reddit, or tumblr where users are shadowbanned for voicing unpopular opinions. But there's far worse which this article fails to address, things like delisting or lowering appearance on search indexes or simply making someone's twitter or facebook posts unreadable to anyone else through any method, overt like censoring (without deleting) or sliding. You won't know no one else is reading your post, no one can read your post, either you will give up and be demoralized or you will continue wasting energy preaching to a void. Companies are already capable of controlling narratives for commercial purposes and you'd be a fool to assume authorities don't do it either.
And they do.BRUSSELS - Google has received more than 1,000 requests from authorities to take down content from its search results or YouTube video in the last six months of 2011, the company said on Monday, denouncing what it said was an alarming trend.
"Unfortunately, what we've seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different," Dorothy Chou, the search engine's senior policy analyst, said in a blogpost. "We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it's not."
Many of those requests targeted political speech, keeping up a trend Google said it has noticed since it started releasing its Transparency Report in 2010.
"It's alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship," said Chou.
The censorship report offers an overview of which officials have asked Google to delete content and why.
In one case, Spanish regulators asked Google to remove 270 links to blogs and newspaper articles criticizing public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors.
So far Google has not complied. In March, Spain's highest court asked the European Court of Justice to examine whether requests by citizens to have content removed were lawful.
In some countries, Google says it has no choice but to submit to these requests, because certain types of political speech are unlawful."
And of course if it violates any of the laws restricting freedom of expression in the West Google must comply. This was in 2011, the problem has since gotten worse and amusingly searching for Google delisting abuse or Google censorship leads to a long page of how to report others abusing delisting or how "
the EU busted the myth of Google censorship." Guess who the EU asks to forget links they don't like?
Well no surprises there it's Google. That latter article also highlights that British ISPs block users from accessing "extremist" material online and of course China's great firewall is no joke either. The future of censorship is now, it's no longer a crude tool that provokes people to anger. Nah, now people love it and want it, or don't even know it's there.
Poll
21 (27.3%)
Author
Topic: Does the Internet discourage intellectual discussion and debate? (Read 28453 times)