Post by Teddy Bear on Oct 3, 2013 14:52:37 GMT
Most will be aware of the altercation between Labour leader Ed Miliband and the Daily Mail, after the latter produced their somewhat condemnation of Ed's father Ralph Miliband.
Regardless of ones personal sense of how justified the Mail were or not in running their opinion of him, it is still an opinion based on certain facts. One is not forced to buy or subscribe to the Daily Mail, or be bound by whatever the opinions put forward by them.
It seems though that since it started, any time I have listened to BBC news or current affairs programmes they have been using them to do their best to demonize the Mail, featuring nearly every time. I can anticipate that Question Time this evening, and Any Questions tomorrow, will also be sure to include this topic. How better to vilify ones competitor while promoting their 'man' than stick the knife in as much as possible, just like we saw with Murdoch and the News of the World.
The article below by Steven Glover talks about the hypocrisy of the BBC in this regard given the way that they reported on the death of Margaret Thatcher. I would say there is a better comparison to show their hypocrisy, which is the way they falsely denounced a serving Tory MP, McAlpine, accusing him of being a paedophile.
I don't recall the BBC given anywhere near the airtime to their own misdeeds, which was far worse than anything the Mail has done against Miliband.
Typically, they show their true (dirty) colours.
Regardless of ones personal sense of how justified the Mail were or not in running their opinion of him, it is still an opinion based on certain facts. One is not forced to buy or subscribe to the Daily Mail, or be bound by whatever the opinions put forward by them.
It seems though that since it started, any time I have listened to BBC news or current affairs programmes they have been using them to do their best to demonize the Mail, featuring nearly every time. I can anticipate that Question Time this evening, and Any Questions tomorrow, will also be sure to include this topic. How better to vilify ones competitor while promoting their 'man' than stick the knife in as much as possible, just like we saw with Murdoch and the News of the World.
The article below by Steven Glover talks about the hypocrisy of the BBC in this regard given the way that they reported on the death of Margaret Thatcher. I would say there is a better comparison to show their hypocrisy, which is the way they falsely denounced a serving Tory MP, McAlpine, accusing him of being a paedophile.
I don't recall the BBC given anywhere near the airtime to their own misdeeds, which was far worse than anything the Mail has done against Miliband.
Typically, they show their true (dirty) colours.
How typically hypocritical of the Left, who danced on the grave of Mrs Thatcher, to be upset about debate over Red Ed's Marxist father
By Stephen Glover
Listening to Ed Miliband and his henchmen in the BBC and elsewhere, you would think that this newspaper was guilty of a smear against his late father unprecedented in the annals of human history.
Some hysterical commentators have suggested that the Right in British politics is well-versed in throwing rotten cabbages at its opponents, dead and alive, whereas the virtuous Left never said a nasty thing about anyone.
Of course, in asserting in a headline that the Marxist academic Ralph Miliband ‘hated Britain’, the Mail was merely offering its interpretation of the facts. Others, including some of his friends and Ed Miliband, have a different interpretation.
But I would not have thought it the most damning or surprising suggestion in the world that a Marxist internationalist might regard this country’s institutions with a jaundiced eye. His utterings bear this out.
Compare the Left’s reaction to this supposedly disgraceful smear to its response to the death of Margaret Thatcher in April. The former Prime Minister was put through the mangle in a way Miliband senior certainly has not been.
Her body was barely cold, and her distraught family were mourning her, as various Lefties poured out their bile.
After Lady Thatcher’s death, Ed Miliband was relatively statesmanlike in his remarks in the Commons. Good for him. But a photograph taken nearly two years earlier shows him with his arm around a Labour councillor, Keir Morrison, who is wearing a T-shirt on which these words are emblazoned: ‘A Generation Of Trade Unionists Will Dance On Thatcher’s Grave.’
Mr Miliband must surely have seen this inscription, and yet was happy to put his arm around Mr Morrison. Both men are grinning in the photograph. Perhaps they are amused by the idea of dancing on Lady Thatcher’s grave.
The point is that she was still alive, and, although unwell, capable of being hurt or offended by this photograph had it been shown to her. Ralph Miliband, on the other hand, is beyond being hurt.
And what has been said about him by this newspaper can surely not be compared to the tasteless and cruel suggestion by a Labour councillor, embraced by Mr Miliband, that he and his pals would like to dance on Lady Thatcher’s grave.
The Labour leader is being — shall we be kind? — inconsistent. The same observation can be made of the hordes of Leftists who are dabbing their eyes in memory of Ralph Miliband, having publicly celebrated the death of Margaret Thatcher only a few months ago.
In Glasgow and Brixton, campaigners shouted from loudspeakers: ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie’, as the mob ecstatically replied: ‘Dead, dead, dead.’ Some were carrying banners, with one proclaiming ‘Rejoice. Thatcher is dead’.
The Left-wing MP, and former member of the Labour Party, George Galloway tweeted ‘May she burn in the hell fires’.
Derek Hatton, a former Left-wing Labour councillor from Liverpool, who brought that city to its knees in the early Eighties, tweeted his ‘regret’ that Lady Thatcher had ever been born.
Nice fellows. Perhaps my memory is failing me, but I can’t recall Ed Miliband rebuking them, or expressing any regret over the behaviour of the louts who held parties to mark Margaret Thatcher’s death before her funeral had taken place.
Oh, I shouldn’t forget that the BBC, which has been scandalised by the suggestion that Ralph Miliband was not a paid-up British patriot, gave endless airtime to a long succession of people who wanted to vent their anger and resentment against the just-deceased Margaret Thatcher.
The truth is that Leftists who reach for the smelling salts when the record of one of their own is reasonably questioned require no lessons in the tricks of denigrating or smearing their political adversaries.
We have recent evidence of this phenomenon, even if most of Damian McBride’s victims were in his own party. By his own admission in his memoirs serialised by the Mail, the former Labour spin doctor helped to destroy the careers of two Labour ministers, and briefed mercilessly against others.
Almost every Labour spin doctor of recent times seems to have been skilled at smearing, whereas it is difficult to think of a Tory counterpart so schooled in these dark arts, though it is true that Sir Bernard Ingham, Lady Thatcher’s press spokesman, sometimes hung ‘semi-detached’ Cabinet ministers out to dry.
McBride — like Labour spin doctors Alastair Campbell and Charlie Whelan before him — was an expert in the smearing business. According to the memoirs, Ed Miliband ‘might have problems’ if his exchanges with Derek Draper, another former Labour spin doctor, were revealed.
I strongly suspect that Ed Miliband — a close ally of Gordon Brown, for whom McBride worked — was himself no beginner in this field. The former Blairite minister Tessa Jowell has said she found McBride’s revelations ‘truly shocking’. She evidently believes Ed Miliband must have known what was going on.
And yet this same Ed Miliband presents himself — or more precisely his father — as the innocent victim of an ugly smear. It is an extraordinary piece of legerdemain that has enormously increased my respect for Mr Miliband’s political abilities, if not for his integrity.
What we have seen over the past few days is a show of calculated hysteria on the part of the Labour leader. Of course, no man likes to hear his dead father publicly criticised. But, as I have said, one can think of a thousand more damaging criticisms than the one this paper made against Ralph Miliband.
On one level, Red Ed knew that, as he has bound himself to his father in a series of speeches, he could not afford to let the accusation that Miliband senior had hated Britain go unchallenged.
On another level, Ed Miliband realised that his diatribes against this paper would go down well with the party faithful, and possibly convince the wider electorate that he was stronger and more determined than they had thought.
He may also hope that, by creating such an almighty hullabaloo about his supposedly traduced father 19 months before the general election, he will somehow neutralise a potentially embarrassing issue — the influence of his Marxist father on his own beliefs — and deter the Press from returning to it in the near future.
Let us acknowledge his political guile. But the notion that he is the hapless victim of an overmighty Press is as far-fetched as the suggestion that the Right is more successful in vilifying its enemies than the Left. In recent times, the opposite is much closer to the truth.
Consider that picture of Red Ed with his arm round Councillor Keir Morrison, who wanted to dance on Margaret Thatcher’s grave. He did not give a fig for the sensibilities of an elderly lady and former Tory leader. Without doubt, his late father — who bitterly opposed the Falklands War — would have been very proud.
By Stephen Glover
Listening to Ed Miliband and his henchmen in the BBC and elsewhere, you would think that this newspaper was guilty of a smear against his late father unprecedented in the annals of human history.
Some hysterical commentators have suggested that the Right in British politics is well-versed in throwing rotten cabbages at its opponents, dead and alive, whereas the virtuous Left never said a nasty thing about anyone.
Of course, in asserting in a headline that the Marxist academic Ralph Miliband ‘hated Britain’, the Mail was merely offering its interpretation of the facts. Others, including some of his friends and Ed Miliband, have a different interpretation.
But I would not have thought it the most damning or surprising suggestion in the world that a Marxist internationalist might regard this country’s institutions with a jaundiced eye. His utterings bear this out.
Compare the Left’s reaction to this supposedly disgraceful smear to its response to the death of Margaret Thatcher in April. The former Prime Minister was put through the mangle in a way Miliband senior certainly has not been.
Her body was barely cold, and her distraught family were mourning her, as various Lefties poured out their bile.
After Lady Thatcher’s death, Ed Miliband was relatively statesmanlike in his remarks in the Commons. Good for him. But a photograph taken nearly two years earlier shows him with his arm around a Labour councillor, Keir Morrison, who is wearing a T-shirt on which these words are emblazoned: ‘A Generation Of Trade Unionists Will Dance On Thatcher’s Grave.’
Mr Miliband must surely have seen this inscription, and yet was happy to put his arm around Mr Morrison. Both men are grinning in the photograph. Perhaps they are amused by the idea of dancing on Lady Thatcher’s grave.
The point is that she was still alive, and, although unwell, capable of being hurt or offended by this photograph had it been shown to her. Ralph Miliband, on the other hand, is beyond being hurt.
And what has been said about him by this newspaper can surely not be compared to the tasteless and cruel suggestion by a Labour councillor, embraced by Mr Miliband, that he and his pals would like to dance on Lady Thatcher’s grave.
The Labour leader is being — shall we be kind? — inconsistent. The same observation can be made of the hordes of Leftists who are dabbing their eyes in memory of Ralph Miliband, having publicly celebrated the death of Margaret Thatcher only a few months ago.
In Glasgow and Brixton, campaigners shouted from loudspeakers: ‘Maggie, Maggie, Maggie’, as the mob ecstatically replied: ‘Dead, dead, dead.’ Some were carrying banners, with one proclaiming ‘Rejoice. Thatcher is dead’.
The Left-wing MP, and former member of the Labour Party, George Galloway tweeted ‘May she burn in the hell fires’.
Derek Hatton, a former Left-wing Labour councillor from Liverpool, who brought that city to its knees in the early Eighties, tweeted his ‘regret’ that Lady Thatcher had ever been born.
Nice fellows. Perhaps my memory is failing me, but I can’t recall Ed Miliband rebuking them, or expressing any regret over the behaviour of the louts who held parties to mark Margaret Thatcher’s death before her funeral had taken place.
Oh, I shouldn’t forget that the BBC, which has been scandalised by the suggestion that Ralph Miliband was not a paid-up British patriot, gave endless airtime to a long succession of people who wanted to vent their anger and resentment against the just-deceased Margaret Thatcher.
The truth is that Leftists who reach for the smelling salts when the record of one of their own is reasonably questioned require no lessons in the tricks of denigrating or smearing their political adversaries.
We have recent evidence of this phenomenon, even if most of Damian McBride’s victims were in his own party. By his own admission in his memoirs serialised by the Mail, the former Labour spin doctor helped to destroy the careers of two Labour ministers, and briefed mercilessly against others.
Almost every Labour spin doctor of recent times seems to have been skilled at smearing, whereas it is difficult to think of a Tory counterpart so schooled in these dark arts, though it is true that Sir Bernard Ingham, Lady Thatcher’s press spokesman, sometimes hung ‘semi-detached’ Cabinet ministers out to dry.
McBride — like Labour spin doctors Alastair Campbell and Charlie Whelan before him — was an expert in the smearing business. According to the memoirs, Ed Miliband ‘might have problems’ if his exchanges with Derek Draper, another former Labour spin doctor, were revealed.
I strongly suspect that Ed Miliband — a close ally of Gordon Brown, for whom McBride worked — was himself no beginner in this field. The former Blairite minister Tessa Jowell has said she found McBride’s revelations ‘truly shocking’. She evidently believes Ed Miliband must have known what was going on.
And yet this same Ed Miliband presents himself — or more precisely his father — as the innocent victim of an ugly smear. It is an extraordinary piece of legerdemain that has enormously increased my respect for Mr Miliband’s political abilities, if not for his integrity.
What we have seen over the past few days is a show of calculated hysteria on the part of the Labour leader. Of course, no man likes to hear his dead father publicly criticised. But, as I have said, one can think of a thousand more damaging criticisms than the one this paper made against Ralph Miliband.
On one level, Red Ed knew that, as he has bound himself to his father in a series of speeches, he could not afford to let the accusation that Miliband senior had hated Britain go unchallenged.
On another level, Ed Miliband realised that his diatribes against this paper would go down well with the party faithful, and possibly convince the wider electorate that he was stronger and more determined than they had thought.
He may also hope that, by creating such an almighty hullabaloo about his supposedly traduced father 19 months before the general election, he will somehow neutralise a potentially embarrassing issue — the influence of his Marxist father on his own beliefs — and deter the Press from returning to it in the near future.
Let us acknowledge his political guile. But the notion that he is the hapless victim of an overmighty Press is as far-fetched as the suggestion that the Right is more successful in vilifying its enemies than the Left. In recent times, the opposite is much closer to the truth.
Consider that picture of Red Ed with his arm round Councillor Keir Morrison, who wanted to dance on Margaret Thatcher’s grave. He did not give a fig for the sensibilities of an elderly lady and former Tory leader. Without doubt, his late father — who bitterly opposed the Falklands War — would have been very proud.
propaganda.