Anglosphere News Media – Objectivity – Political Interference – Fair & Balanced

Following are excerpts from an interesting article written by Stephen Cushion in The Conversation ‘How UK broadcasting’s key principle of impartiality has been eroded over the years’ with focus and excerpts including BBC, Fox News, US fairness principle, Ofcom, GB News, personalities and public confidence.

It is not just the U.K. or the Anglosphere, one would add further issues which include lack of journalistic standards, journalists being replaced by politicians, think tank ‘experts’, influencers and grifters presenting nativist right wing agitprop masquerading as informed analysis; especially talking points and messaging in a negative and repetitive manner to dominate media spaces and preclude advancing positive issues or policies.

Round the Lineker issue, there has been confected outrage from the above cohort on his comments regarding migration policy, Nazi Germany and eugenics based rhetoric of the 1930s, which were misrepresented as a factual allegation. However, many claim it was true anyway i.e. direct links between UK’s (US, Australia, Hungarian & Italian) migration restriction policies, and can be proven.

According to New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, a media assembly line audit by ‘Freedom Works’ of KochNetwork, looked at how their research created an ‘influence’ assembly line including media & lobbying MPs or committees, run campaigns to discredit disappear e.g. climate science or intimidate dissent e.g. refugee advocates. 

The research, PR and talking points often come from the same networks and now transnational using similar content, talking points and methods via Koch, Tanton, Murdoch et al and even Russia and Turkey use similar?

How UK broadcasting’s key principle of impartiality has been eroded over the years

March 29, 2023 12.47pm CEST

A word that was bandied about freely in the wake of the Gary Lineker-BBC affair was “impartiality”. Apparently the gold standard of UK broadcasting, it was something that certain critics judged the BBC sports presenter to have breached in his personal social media posts.

Following Lineker’s suspension and subsequent reinstatement, a review of the BBC’s guidelines over its staff members’ use of social media is underway – not for the first time in the broadcaster’s recent history.

The UK has historically required broadcasters to abide by a set of “due impartiality” guidelines set out and policed by the UK’s broadcasting watchdog, Ofcom. These are designed to prevent the kind of partisanship that has long characterised American media.

Yet there is growing evidence UK broadcasters are effectively free to pursue a style of opinionated and partisan journalism familiar to viewers of US broadcast news and current affairs.

The public deserve more serious debate and scrutiny about the impartiality of broadcasters and how they are regulated.

The Foxification of news

In the US, between 1949 and 1987, broadcasters were required to adhere to the fairness doctrine. This helped to ensure reporting of politics and public affairs was broadly balanced.

As I explored in my book, Television Journalism, more opinionated formats in radio and then television news began to slowly emerge after the fairness doctrine was abolished. This was because broadcasters were no longer obliged to reflect different political perspectives.

In 1996, Fox News was launched by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. It pursued a highly partisan brand of journalism that favoured conservative and Republican perspectives.

Over successive decades, this “Fox effect” paved the way for more partisanship in the US, with channels such as Newsmax and One American News adopting even more right-wing perspectives and sometimes even propagating conspiracy theories. For example, while Fox News initially questioned Donald Trump’s claims the 2020 presidential election had been rigged, the new hyper-partisan channels tended to legitimise his assertions of electoral fraud.

Foxification of UK broadcast news?

At the turn of the century, concerns about a so-called “Foxification of news” spread across the Atlantic. But a systematic analysis of Sky News and BBC News between 2004 and 2007 showed broadcasters were broadly conforming to rules about “due impartiality”.

Just a decade later, however, new broadcasters such as GB News, UK News, LBC and Times Radio, have pushed the boundaries of the UK’s rules on impartiality.

The new channels tend to deliver more opinionated and partisan journalism. Critics, for example, have highlighted GB News’s late-night opinion-based programming, and drawn attention to the channel’s dubious claims and conspiracy theories.

Enhancing public confidence

Ofcom recently issued a clarification that politicians can present in “non-news” programming outside of election periods. This was defined as programming with “extensive discussion, analysis or interviews with guests – often live – and long-form video reports”.

In the case of GB News, this represents a significant part of its routine output – meaning much of the channel’s airtime is free to adopt a partisan perspective.

If the public is to remain confident in broadcast journalism, it is essential Ofcom is transparent about how it applies editorial standards of impartiality. Public support for impartiality remains high, and research also shows people expect broadcasters to be fair and balanced rather than opinionated and partisan.

Ahead of the next general election, voters need to have confidence not just in the broadcasters that inform them, but in the regulator that polices them.’

For more blogs and article about Conservatives, Koch Network, Media, Political Strategy, Populist Politics, Tanton Network and White Nationalism.

Anglosphere Nativism and Eugenics in Political  Media – Language and Social Discourse

Critical Thinking or Analysis: Importance for Education, Media and Empowered Citizens

Mainstreaming Extremism – How Public Figures and Media Incite Nativist Beliefs Leading to Violence

SLAPP Cases – Constraining Media Freedom and Freedom of Speech in Balkans, EU, UK, Australia

Anglosphere Legacy Media: White Nativist and Libertarian Propaganda for Ageing Conservative Voters – Australia, Brexit & Trump

Dumbing Down and Gaming of Anglosphere Media, Science, Society and Democracy

Research of Social Media – Fake News – Conspiracy Theories – Junk Science

Conservative CPAC Event – Hungary – Who Pays for Influence?

Recently the infamous US GOP Conservative CPAC event was held in Budapest, Hungary, with a conference and meeting of minds whether related to the far right, Fox News, ‘the great replacement’, anti-semitism, anti-immigration, Christian nationalism, anti-EU, anti-human rights etc.

Then links to the Kremlin and Putin, from Politico: ‘In Hungary, whose government is overtly pro-Kremlin, documentaries made by state-owned (and supposedly banned) RT and Russia-1 media outlets about the war are being shared widely in multiple local Facebook groups, according to Szilvi Német, from Hungarian fact-checking organization Lakmusz.

CPAC questions of money may not be so relevant as many participants no doubt pay to participate but the other question is not just who may support financially, who is involved with spreading the paranoid white Christian nationalist message globally, from the US and/or Anglosphere through Europe, Russia and elsewhere? 

Further, the article misses fossil fueled libertarian Koch Network think tank links including Hungary e.g. Danubius Institute, and the influential US Tanton Network, while according to John Le Carre (David Cornwall):

‘“There are oligarchs in the West who are so far to the right that they make a kind of natural cause with those on the other side of the world. Both of them have in common a great contempt for the ordinary conduct of democracy.

They want to diminish it. They see it as their enemy. They see – they’ve made a dirty word of liberalism – one of the most inviting words in politics. …. so they’re closing in on the same target from different points of view.”’

From the article are excerpts from comments offering suggestions or a taste of the presumed global architecture of influence and usual suspects:

‘‘Just as far-right militant groups sought to internationalize their movements during those days, CPAC conservatives found new appreciation for international autocrats like Vladimir Putin’

‘they’re Christian dominionists who are only ‘pro-Israel’ because they want their savior to return & slaughter all the Jews’

‘Putin without question.’

‘‘ Viktor Orban is the same figure of revealing envy to the right of today that Augusto Pinochet was when he was ruling Chile with an iron fist.“No rubles” pledge, and demand Republicans do the same, starting with NRA’’

‘BIG OIL and MINING are promoting this crap’

‘Just depends on whether they rely on people like the self-loathing Peter Thiel or the late Sheldon Adelson for 💰💰💰 or believe 🇮🇱 is key to The Rapture as to whether 🇺🇸 is a Judeo-Christian or Christian nation’

‘Rupert Murdoch & family are major sponsors of the downfall of democracy. They have been re-globalizing fascism for decades through their media/propaganda outlets; CPAC is just another “live” astroturf media event (like the “Tea Party” or the truckers convoy) which they invest in to sell their products. Advertising for white supremacy.’

‘CPAC seems to be on-board with the rise of many “little-Hitlers:” Trump, Erdogan, Orban, Bolsinaro. They didn’t get Marine LePen to turn France. Apparently, Boris Johnson has been very much in bed with the Russians. Manafort was supporting Poroshenko, a Putin ally, in Ukraine. ‘

‘the international efforts of Steve Bannon, who links “conservatives” with a slightly different agenda:  Showing a bit of the split in the RWNJ universe, Bannon was once funded by the Mercers, helping them with Cambridge Analytica, and leading Breitbart’

The article starts here: CPAC is boosting the antisemitic Hungarian right. Who’s paying them to do it?

The people who run CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference meetups that feature top Republican elected officials intermingling with the movement’s most notorious conspiracy cranks—but I repeat myself—have been attempting to expand internationally with conferences in Brazil and Hungary in recent years. The premise has been to attach themselves, suction-eel style, to autocratic nationalists in other countries. Whether this is an earnest attempt to promote their hoax-dependent fascism abroad or just another very gaudy grift is debatable.

In either case, the American far right has been falling over itself with admiration for the emerging Hungarian autocracy, with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in particular promoting far-right nationalist Viktor Orban with a vigor that far eclipses his praise for any Republican here. CPAC Republicans are open in praising Hungary’s autocratic descent as being the road America itself should travel, but have been slightly vaguer in explaining why. That is because the Hungarian fascist movement is Extremely F–king Nasty, full of the same bigotries and conspiracy theories that animate neo-Nazi movements here and actual damn Nazis where they still exist elsewhere.

……Recent CPAC events in Budapest, Hungary, boasted a notorious Hungarian antisemite, one who has publicly declared Jews to be “stinking excrement,” among their featured speakers. “Stinking excrement” is just one of the xenophobic and genocide-supporting rants that Hungarian television screamer Zsolt Bayer is known for. As reported by The Guardian, Bayer was a featured speaker at the allegedly conservative conference, holding forth as part of a speakers list that included Donald Trump, Mark Meadows, Carlson, and others…

….That has been a pattern. Carlson and other Republican would-be strategists have been experimenting to find what human targets American conservatism can be most riled to panic over. It might be more surprising if Carlson and his writers were not looking to European fascist groups for a supply of new genocidal tropes…

…We previously speculated that CPAC’s new international push could be a genuine attempt to promote fascist thinking abroad; that is probably the most charitable interpretation of their moves, even if it isn’t the most likely one. Even before the Trump era, CPAC conferences were a dodgy blend between ultra-powerful Republican elected leaders and absolute conspiracy cranks. …

…..Just as far-right militant groups sought to internationalize their movements during those days, CPAC conservatives found new appreciation for international autocrats like Vladimir Putin. They allowed their existential panic over what would happen to suit-and-tie white racism in a nation in which white conservatives held less power than before to lead them to an obvious conclusion: We need to scrub out whatever parts of democracy are allowing that to happen. The international leaders willing to rewrite the rules of elections so that they always came out on top became the standard-bearers for American conservatives now increasingly convinced that such rewrites were now of dire American importance, and here we are….

….In short, a very large chunk of the top Republican party officials, strategists, and government officials have faced indictments of late for secretly working the levers of power available to them for their own personal profit. Being “important” in American politics has long been a way to make millions by going abroad to advise wealthy kleptocrats in other nations how they can best get what they want. Sometimes it’s election advice. Sometimes it’s access to United States government agencies or to lawmakers. Sometimes it’s help crafting propaganda messages to justify authoritarian moves that may or may not be killing people in the streets. You know: Money.

Sure, it is possible that the American right is now having a raging erection in the direction of Hungarian would-be dictator Orban because they just happen to all hate immigrants, Jews, and the ever-shifty Roma. But it’s more possible that top Republican strategists are being paid far more money than we know to promote Orban and Hungarian autocracy as The Natural Order of Things, and that promotion involves getting other top Republicans to trek all the way to Budapest to give a thin sheen of legitimacy to a bunch of well-heeled fascist monsters….

….What kind of conservatives make the trek to Budapest to hobnob with Europe’s own home-grown reactionaries? The kind who have money, and want more money. Everybody’s looking for a sponsor, after all, and American billionaire money isn’t that easy to come by.

Welcome to fascism, the franchise. You provide the money; we’ll provide the youthful and the ambitious, people more than willing to promote whatever message the propaganda machine has found to test best in order to boost your own power by stripping it from others. There’s nothing complicated going on here.

Oh, by the way: I am specifically not saying that Carlson specifically might have agreed to host a segment bashing “gypsies” in exchange for a check from one of the Hungarian racists he’s been so oddly promoting lately. That would be completely irresponsible of us and, after all, Carlson assuredly has plenty of money and would not cash such a check.

He just found himself having really, really strong opinions about gypsies and asked his team to put together a segment warning Americans that gypsies were coming to their towns to do crimes and poop in public places. As Fox News hosts sometimes do.

For more articles and blogs click through below:

US or UK Sanctions on Murdoch’s Fox News Support for Putin’s Russia?

Madison Grant – Eugenics, Heredity, Class, Immigration, Great Replacement, Conservation and Nazis

Koch Industries – Putin – Russia – Ukraine – Koch Network – Think Tanks

World Congress Of Families WCF, Russia, The Kremlin, Christian Conservative Nationalists, Dugin, Conservatives and US Evangelicals

Russian Dark Money – Influencing British Politics, the Conservative Party, the GOP and European Right

Trump’s White House Immigration Policies and White Nationalist John Tanton