CUMMINGS CASE BBC neutrality v press opinion

I'll post links for newspaper front pages later...

(Guardian, May 2020) BBC swamped with complaints about Newsnight intro on Cummings.

OFCOM fine China-funded station

a rare example of broadcast news bias being declared by the TV/radio super-regulator OfCom (the quango!). They've previously banned Press TV (funded by Iran) + warned RT (previously known as Russia Today, obvious funding!) though the Tory government + right-wing press wanted them banned too. 

Chinese state TV broke Ofcom rules with biased Hong Kong coverage.

SOCIAL MEDIA Facebook international free speech panel

The very name may suggest an in-built bias reflective of the no-tax, no-boundaries, no-statutory regulation stance of Zuckerberg and his fellow digital oligarchs? A very mild touch of 'independent' self-regulation comes to Facebook.

Journalists, politicians and judges to sit on Facebook's free speech panel.

A detailed analysis of how Facebook thrives despite the appearance of crisis with the #stopfundinghate campaign - pointing out that many companies that would have paused advertising for pandemic reasons can now virtue pose, others are buying up reduced-rate slots, and its global rise continues with a major purchase in India. Which, like the Phillipines, now has an authoritarian leader because of successful exploitation of Facebook and it's laissez fairs refusal to regulate political speech.

Too big to fail': why even a historic ad boycott won’t change Facebook.

PRESS GENDER AGENDA John Terry v Wayne Bridge case

UPDATE: I'm going to throw this example of 'family values' grandstanding by the pro-Tory press, conveniently condemning a scientist (as Michael Gove famously said, "we've had enough of experts", and Johnson, like Trump, is finding them damnably inconvenient) while failing to do what newspapers across the rest of the world are doing: exposing the shambles of the government response to the pandemic.

At the heart of the reportage are details and images of the 'mistress' the errant scientist had over. The French press would marvel at the idea of this as a story, but the right-wing Johnson cheerleaders cheerfully dip into the 1950s when it suits them. The extra-marital record of Johnson has clearly slipped their mind - but the 'public is interested' distortion of the public interest defence for breaching privacy is okay - she's both a lefty climate change campaigner AND lives in a £1.9m house. Champagne socialist bingo!

The prurient headlines about Neil Ferguson are a huge distraction.

A huge scandal about an affair. Look at the post title again - what's missing?

...

Read this feature article, + the answer is in the 1st paragraph...

Betrayal and bombast: the surreal story of the Terry v Bridge scandal.

A decade old story (2010) whose value is in showing how utterly the public knowledge of this is defined by the inaccurate, intrusive reportage of the tabs/mids especially. There's a nice paragraph on this point, making an explicit link to Leveson (2012):

For the big tabloid beasts, a different sort of reckoning was coming. The News of the World was mothballed in the midst of the 2011 phone-hacking scandal; elsewhere, declining sales have slowly eroded the once-frightening influence of the printed press. The Leveson report in 2012 exposed some of the industry’s more scurrilous practices, as well as the culture of shaming and invasion that defined them for decades. “There is ample evidence,” Leveson wrote, “that parts of the press have taken the view that … anyone in whom the public might take an interest are fair game, public property, with little if any entitlement to any sort of private life or respect for dignity. Where there is a genuine public interest in what they are doing, that is one thing; too often, there is not.”