Newsnight - the 'Guardian's TV Lapdog'

[Teddy Bear]

Ross Clark at the Mail gives a synopsis of recent Newsnight programmes and compares the similarity to how the Guardian reports the same stories.
It includes an interview with slimy Russell Brand, which alone makes the BBC totally unfit for purpose.

Russell Brand and how Newsnight's become the Guardian's TV lapdog

By Ross Clark

BBC2’s Newsnight this week gave an extraordinary platform to comic Russell Brand to promote his guest editorship of the New Statesman, during which he called for revolution in Britain.

While most viewers would have been as bemused as interviewer Jeremy Paxman, perhaps we should not be so surprised the former Guardian columnist was given so much airtime.

With its editor Ian Katz and political editor Allegra Stratton both recently recruited from the Guardian, it is little secret where the sympathies of Newsnight are most likely to lie. This week, the BBC’s director-general Tony Hall admitted that the BBC buys more copies of the Left-leaning Guardian than any other newspaper.

And the more you look, the closer the relationship between the newspaper and the programme appears to be. So is Newsnight becoming the Guardian on the box? An audit of output this month makes for fascinating reading . . .

Thursday, October 3

There’s a long item on the fallout from former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s leak of security information.

Glenn Greenwald, who has been working with the Guardian to publish the leaked information, is given a platform to accuse the British security services of behaving like the secret services of a dictatorship by holding his partner David Miranda at Heathrow under terrorism legislation, and by destroying computers containing leaked information at the Guardian’s offices.

Interviewer Kirsty Wark fails to point out that Miranda was travelling to Brazil with 58,000 leaked British intelligence documents.

The programme ends with an interview that is a plug for the latest film of Marxist philosopher and film-maker Slavoj Zizek — who also happens to be a Guardian blogger. The Guardian has just given him and his new film a warm tribute, calling him an ‘immensely charismatic and funny talker’ and brushes aside his ‘admiration for Stalin which, while falling short of approval for his purges, is more than just an ironic pose’.

Friday, October 4

The programme begins with a report on the disaster in the Mediterranean, where a vessel carrying migrants from Libya has sunk with the loss of more than 300 lives.

Rather than establish what happened and who was responsible, Newsnight interviews Francois Crepeau, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Migrant Rights, who says he thinks the EU needs to accept many more migrant workers to keep its economy going.

He is not challenged on whether this would be a good idea when there is mass unemployment in many EU countries.

On the same day, a blog on the Guardian website carries the headline ‘Lampedusa tragedy: migrants need more than sympathy’.

Tuesday, October 8

Today, there is a huge development in the leaked secrets story: MI5 chief Andrew Parker claims that the Guardian’s publication of material leaked by Edward Snowden has caused the ‘greatest damage to Western security in history’.

Inexplicably, however, Newsnight fails to report this story.
Glenn Greenwald (left), who has been working with the Guardian, was given a platform by Newsnight to accuse the British security services of behaving like the secret services of a dictatorship

Glenn Greenwald (left), who has been working with the Guardian, was given a platform by Newsnight to accuse the British security services of behaving like the secret services of a dictatorship

Wednesday, October 9

Janet Yellen has just been appointed as next chief of the U.S. Federal Reserve. It’s a very important job, and her decisions will affect the entire global economy.

But what Newsnight seems to be most interested in is the fact that she is a woman.

What difference will her gender make, Jeremy Paxman asks Harvard professor Ken Rogoff. It mirrors the obsessions of the Guardian, which in the next day’s paper carries an editorial entitled In Praise of Women Bankers.

Meanwhile, the call by the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University for tuition fees to be raised to £16,000 — reflecting what he says are the costs of educating an undergraduate — gives Newsnight’s anti-elitist team the chance to hint that this reflects Oxford University’s elitism.

The one don who is interviewed about the subject, Frances Cairncross, Rector of Exeter College, just happens to be a former Guardian economics writer.

There’s also a long item on a show by the artist Jeremy Deller, which involves asking working people, children, plus a few celebrities, to read out Victorian writings on the Industrial Revolution.

Deller, who won the Turner Prize in 2004, is a favourite artist of the Guardian, whose best-known work, according to the newspaper’s website, was a painting on the Battle of Orgreave — a clash between police and pickets during the 1984 miners’ strike.
BBC's director-general Tony Hall admitted that the BBC buys more copies of the Left-leaning Guardian than any other newspaper

BBC's director-general Tony Hall admitted that the BBC buys more copies of the Left-leaning Guardian than any other newspaper

Finally, we get to the real point of the piece: one of the women whom Deller has asked to read about harsh conditions in 19th century mills is employed on a ‘zero-hours’ contract.

Jeremy Paxman asks Deller in a studio interview whether there is a connection between Victorian working conditions and zero-hours contracts? Yes, says Deller. He says he thinks employers are getting the upper hand again.

The preposterous claim that Britain is returning to Victorian working conditions goes unchallenged.

Thursday, October 10

Newsnight picks up on a story which the Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer, covered prominently a few days earlier. It is the protest by Paul Simonon, former member of punk band the Clash, and other celebrities against the Russian authorities which are holding 28 Greenpeace activists arrested for trying to scale an oil rig in the Arctic Ocean.

Viewers are shown a film and a gentle interview with Mr Simonon in which he talks about what happened when he joined a similar protest off Greenland two years ago. Then there is a studio discussion between Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace, and Alexander Nekrassov, a former adviser to the Russian Security Council.

But instead of it being a debate between two opposing viewpoints, it turns out that Nekrassov, too, is something of an environmentalist, who wants Greenpeace to redirect its efforts against the retail trade ‘which is producing all this c**p’.

Naidoo goes unchallenged when he asserts that drilling for oil is a ‘criminal act’.

The programme also carries an obituary for the communist Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, who has just died, with a warm tribute from correspondent Mark Urban for masterminding what he calls a ‘triumph of human grit over American firepower’.

The Guardian’s obituary of the general, meanwhile, ran to around 2,000 words and described him as ‘one of the foremost military commanders of the 20th century’.

Such prominence clearly chimed with the Guardian’s blatant anti-Americanism, expressed through its support of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

Tuesday, October 15

Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times, is invited onto Newsnight to discuss the future of newspapers. Exactly why she has been chosen soon becomes apparent: she is there to do the Guardian’s dirty work for it.

Asked whether the New York Times would be publishing any more of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, and which it has shared with the Guardian, she asserts that the Guardian’s publication of the documents — criticised by MI5 chief Andrew Parker as causing immense damage to Britain — ‘is very much in the public interest and informing the public, and it distresses me to see other people in the media being critical’.

She later adds, just in case we haven’t got the point, that Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger is ‘a superb journalist’.

Friday, October 18

There is a long film on those Guardian favourites, Pussy Riot — the three Russian punks jailed after staging a protest against Vladimir Putin in a Moscow cathedral.

It is an uncritical piece which, like much of the Guardian’s coverage of the subject, fails to acknowledge that the women were jailed for disrespecting religion rather than simply protesting against the government, and that huge numbers of ordinary Russians, far from feeling that the girls were standing up for the oppressed masses, support their jail sentences.

Monday, October 21

A long report by Susan Watts asks whether the Army and security services ought to be employing hackers with criminal convictions in order to help with its efforts to defend the country against cyber warfare.

A meeting is arranged between a former hacker, Mustafa al Bassan, and the forensic computer expert who helped to convict him.

A colonel is then interviewed who suggests that the military might just possibly consider employing former hackers.

Finally, the report gets to the point. Mustafa reveals that he doesn’t want to work for the government because the secret services have been ‘stamping on civil liberties’. Yes, it is another piece of Newsnight propaganda designed to help Edward Snowden and the Guardian.

Wednesday, October 23

Russell Brand, whose autobiography was serialised by — you’ve guessed it! — the Guardian, is given a prime slot and interviewed in a smart hotel room (we are not told whether this was at an extra cost to TV licence-payers) by Paxman.

Brand, who has written this year in the Guardian about Margaret Thatcher, football boss Alex Ferguson and being thrown out of an awards ceremony for making a Nazi joke at the expense of the sponsors, Hugo Boss, was given eight minutes for his a breathless rant.

In it, he condemned the UK’s political system for creating a ‘disenfranchised, disillusioned underclass’ that it fails to serve. Such a phrase would not be out of place in a Guardian editorial column.

[Teddy Bear]

Quentim Letts has taken the time to really elaborate an intelligent view of Russell Brand. Worth reading to get an insight into the BBC mindset that would think that this is a person of real interest and worthy of promotion.

A revolutionary messiah? Who does this grubby darling of the Left think he's kidding?

By Quentin Letts

Russell Brand, the fashionable Left’s favourite comedian, was performing last Saturday in Cambridge. He strode across the stage, hyperactively jerking his limbs. He crouched, jumped up and down, did masturbatory gestures. How they laughed.

In a high-pitched, manic whine, Brand ranted about revolution, religion and sex. Photographs of Gandhi, Che Guevara and Adolf Hitler decorated the back wall, along with several of Brand himself. The audience, many of them pretty, 20-something women, sighed with pleasure. When Brand used the F word — which he did a lot — they cooed in pink-cheeked wonder at his brilliance, his daring.

This was the latest gig on Brand’s Messiah Complex stand-up tour, which is being marketed with a Communist-style image of Brand wearing, among other emblems, a Star of David and a swastika. The swastika as a fashion accessory?

His tour is taking in some 25 provincial venues, many of them university towns. Tickets cost about £50 — no small sum for students — but Messiah Russell, for all his talk of socialism, is as financially rapacious as a privatised-utility chief.

Sex is his selling point, sex the schtick. Those young women plainly were tantalised by him, even though he looks — how can we put this? — a mite diseased. One could make generalisations about women having always been attracted to herpetic Lotharios, but it might be incautious to do so.

Brand, rolling a suggestive tongue round his overbite, whipped himself into a little rhetorical climax as he fantasised about penetrating his pet cat. He said that if the cat did not wish to arouse him sexually, it should desist from walking around his house ‘with its a***hole as the most prominent part of its body’ and its tail standing tall as ‘a furry f*** handle’.

The audience almost wept with laughter, undergraduates’ eyes blazing with adoration as they watched their hero — yes, even as he envisaged having anal sex with an animal. Where is the RSPCA when you need it?

Next, Brand went into a routine about the fast-food mascot Ronald McDonald raping young boys. He envisaged fictitious Ronald’s ‘hard, white clown c*** and bright red pubes’ as he ravaged some innocent.

Brand, by now ranting into his microphone so crazily that the sound was distorted, screamed that the McDonald’s hamburger chain’s mascot deliberately marketed products ‘at young people, obese schoolboys, so you can waddle after them and f*** ’em in your clown shoes, you painted nonce’.

Peals of audience delight greeted this (possibly libellous) scenario. A pederast witticism: how droll.

I hesitate to repeat Brand’s words, even with asterisks. There is a danger, when reporting trash, of elevating that trash, of normalising it and eroding our inner sea walls of revulsion.

But, on balance, it is important for Mail readers to know what this pied piper says, because he is now being projected by Left-wing opinion-formers as something more than a mere trader in larky profanities.

You and I might be tempted to think Russell Brand is simply a low-rent show-off who is making millions out of impressionable youngsters. But the bien pensants of London see him as something more important than that. They regard him as a cultural battering ram with which to create a mood of despair and anti-democratic (you could almost say Marxist) nihilism.

Last week, Brand was anointed as a public intellectual — nothing less than a political saviour — by the New Statesman magazine. The once-serious Left-wing weekly arranged for him to edit an entire ‘revolution’ issue in which he urged citizens not to vote: instead, they should topple the Western democratic system. To the barricades!

The magazine’s staff, impeccably liberal and privileged, and in at least one case stonkingly rich (Jemima Khan, daughter of that unrelenting capitalist, the late Sir James Goldsmith), posed for a photograph with their guest-editor.

The snapshot, which was published in the magazine, was arranged like Leonardo’s Last Supper, with Brand in the midst, a veritable Christ figure. It was hard to know whether to laugh or weep.

That stunt, in turn, earned Brand a prized interview slot on BBC2’s Newsnight, which is run by a former deputy editor of The Guardian newspaper. Russell Brand was being promoted by our state broadcaster as someone with views worth hearing.

Here, apparently, was a Bernard Shaw de nos jours — except that when he had a chance to explain his ideas, unlike the celebrated socialist playwright and thinker, he was entirely incapable of doing so. Brand’s arguments consisted of nothing more than a series of exaggerated assertions which ended with him pleading not to be scrutinised any further because he was merely a comedian.

The Reithian BBC once gave a pulpit to big-brained thinkers such as the scholar Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, novelist and broadcaster J.B. Priestley and dear old Jonathan Miller. Now it was giving us a celebrity dude with a hairy chest, a swastika round his neck and an addiction to F-words.

What is it about this shallow snake-hipster that the Left so likes? Is he an altruist who really cares more about disadvantaged people than himself? His interest in money and his sybaritic lifestyle would suggest otherwise.

Is he a good role model for aspirational, working-class youths? Hardly. He jests about getting wasted, sleeping around, dressing in as confrontational a way as possible. He is the antithesis of the self-discipline, industry and (dirty words, I know) job-securing conformity that a youngster needs to get ahead.

You might have thought Brand’s greedily self-indulgent views on sex, his tendency to judge women chiefly by their looks and to regard any ‘babe’ as a likely conquest would offend the professed feminism of the In-crowd. David Cameron only has to use the word ‘dear’ in a mild manner in the Commons to be denounced by the liberal Establishment as some sort of Neanderthal sexist.

Russell Brand (with his then partner-in-crime Jonathan Ross) used BBC airtime to broadcast the most degrading sexual insults about the granddaughter of one of our best-liked actors, Andrew Sachs. They even cracked jokes about the young woman’s menstrual cycle.

Yet Brand is still idolised by the rich Lefties of North London. I tell you, if he went anywhere near my daughters when they are a little older I would resort to physical violence.

In their privileged cocoon, those who run the New Statesman and Newsnight clearly think it is OK to behave like a Brand. But in the working-class ghettoes they are always telling us about? For the kids on apprentice schemes, or the young parents trying to save for a house, or the volunteers who run Church food banks and give their time as school governors: is Russell Brand really such great news for them?

This is not simply an argument against the Left. I know Labour MPs who recoil from Brand just as I do. The Labour Party has many decent members, people attracted by its past Methodist values. Brand is every bit as repulsive to them as he is to a pastoral, traditionalist rightie such as me.

In the New Statesman, he called on the young to abstain from voting. Is that not at odds with the Left’s desire to lower the voting age to 16?

The same Left often talks of the importance of ‘citizenship’ and of promoting democratic engagement. Yet Brand, like the Labour leader’s father, the late Ralph Miliband, argues that parliamentary democracy is unequal to the task, and he urges his disciples — his brainwashed groupies? — to boycott the ballot box and overthrow the Westminster system.

The BBC would (rightly) baulk at broadcasting such a battle-cry from anyone wearing a neo-Nazi uniform. So why broadcast it when it is made by a sex rocker with a Jesus hairdo and a swastika round his neck? ‘Brand Russell’ is no longer a niche joke or simply an impresario’s wheeze.

Russell Brand lays out his political revolution on Newsnight

During his interview with Jeremy Paxman, which has now been watched online by seven million people, Brand was given extensive airtime in which to promote a ‘socialist egalitarian’ revolution. An embarrassed Paxman did mutter that Brand was a ‘very trivial man’.

But the very set-up of the interview was designed to raise Brand to the level of Important Person. A hotel room had been hired specially for the interview. Newsnight does this when it thinks it has a great scoop on its hands. Brand and the grizzled Paxman were presented as two Olympian intellects, chewing on the issues of our age.

The comedian, who loves to use words like ‘paradigm’ and ‘parameter’ while never quite persuading us that he understands what they mean, relished the notion of political overthrow. He attacked the ‘lies and treachery’ of our elected politicians, the ‘massive economic disparity’ of Britain.

He declared that ‘profit is a dirty word — wherever there is profit there is deficit’. Revolution was ‘totally going to happen’ and it was ‘time to wake up’ to that apparent fact. All this on the flagship current affairs programme of public-service television.

It was the same in the New Statesman, where, in a five-page essay, he deplored (catch this humdinger) ‘nihilistic narratives of individualism, peopled by sequin-covered vacuous heroes’.

Was he thinking of himself?
Adroit self-publicist: Brand has cleverly used the New Statesman to finesse his public profile just at the time he is flogging tickets for a tour, says Letts

Adroit self-publicist: Brand has cleverly used the New Statesman to finesse his public profile just at the time he is flogging tickets for a tour, says Letts

He called for ‘spiritual revolution’ and urged Britain to ‘revolt in whatever way we want, with the spontaneity of the London rioters, with the certainty and willingness to die of religious fundamentalists, or with the twinkling mischief of the trickster. We should include everyone, judging no one, without harming anyone’.

In one breath he wants suicidal fundamentalism; in the next he wants no one to be harmed. This is dangerous rabble-rousing, and it is plain deluded twaddle.

A California-based showbiz plutocrat (Brand has just bought a five-bedroom, five-bathroom property with its own cinema in Los Angeles) may be able to recommend rioting with little risk to his own lifestyle. But as we saw in the London riots, it is a more serious matter for the residents and retailers of the streets which were set on fire by louts.

In some ways, you have to hand it to Brand. He is an adroit self-publicist and he has a charisma that is lacking in most of our politicians. Indeed, the sad truth is that someone like Brand prospers in the policy-vacuum that exists with a feeble Opposition party such as the one led by Ed Miliband.

Brand has cleverly used the low-circulation New Statesman to finesse his public profile just at the time he is flogging tickets for a tour which is making him thousands of pounds a night.

His performance in Cambridge — in which, we should declare, he took gleeful swipes at the Mail, accusing this newspaper (inaccurately, so far as I know) of wanting him dead — was artfully done in some respects. He cleverly laced his spiel with passages of self-mockery.

He described his rock-star life as being ‘a tumble drier filled with t**s and money’. And his riff on the language used in advertising slogans, for instance, was wryly truthful. He noted that Dr Pepper, an American fizzy drink, is sold as being ‘unbelievably satisfying’. He wondered: had they forgotten to insert a comma between the two words?

But such shafts of wit were washed aside by the torrent of vitriol, the aggressive focus on sex, the puerile message of revolution against a system in which he himself is prospering greatly. Brand is rich because the very socialism he claims to espouse has, in fact, failed — and in the process nearly wrecked our country.

He makes millions of pounds because our standards of taste and intellect have been flattened by the collapse in education over recent decades.

But for the state-backed secularism and the militant egalitarianism of the Left, a Russell Brand might struggle to gain a following. A population which was better informed by the BBC might realise that this twit has little to offer compared with the spiritual wonders of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

During his Cambridge performance, Brand cited an unidentified sage who once said that ‘tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance’. Is this not the very trouble with Brand himself?

In his lurid, lewd assertions, in his sweeping rejection of all our politicians, in his blanket rubbishing of wealth creation, does he not overstate his case and show himself to be an embodiment of intolerance? Were he himself more open to nuance, might he not see that he is a symptom of the problem, not an answer to it?

Revolution may well be in the air, but it is not the sort that is likely long to smile on Brand. In a Britain changed by Labour’s immigration policies, a religious revolution may be under way, and it has more to do with Islam than Christianity.

Economically, we may be facing a revolution in which Europe will have to dismantle the euro and scrap the welfare systems that have propped up both the needy and the indolent.

I happen to suspect that a moral revolution may well be around the corner. Historically, puritanical purges tend to follow periods of the sort of amoral decadence that encourage the advancement of goons like Russell Brand and his sad army of imitators.

Not being a zealot, I shudder at the social readjustments that may loom.

But Brand will not mind. By then, he will have made enough millions to be living in some ranch in upstate California, boiling himself lobster-pink in a Jacuzzi full of goggle-eye handmaidens, his tour of Britain and his guest-editorship of the long-defunct New Statesman but a hazy memory.