What are they putting in Sky News‘ office coffee machine these days, crystal meth?
You’d think so, judging by the behaviour of Sky News presenters Adam Boulton and Kay Burley today….
But first a few words of explanation.
One of the most highly-trending topics on Twitter during the past day or so has been #don’tdoitnick. It’s been an attempt by twitterers to stop LibDem leader Nick Clegg forming an alliance with David Cameron’s Tories. Part of the action was a flashmob on College Green this afternoon.
It’s outside Parliament and always chosen by publicity hungry demonstrators, because a] it’s small and thus makes the protest look huge and b] it’s easy for the major media outlets to get to (especially as this afternoon, pre-El Gordo’s resignation announcement, they had bugger-all else to do).
In this YouTube video, Sky News presenter/reporter (I hesitate to dignify her with the title ‘journalist’ in this instance) Kay Burley interviews one of the protesters. She gets very shrill indeed, not to mention political, and starts shrieking at the quietly reasonable interviewee:
Sky, or rather Murdoch’s News Corp, supports the Conservatives, the party the twitterers are there to try and stop the LibDems forming a coalition with. If they were to form a coalition, the Tories could be the next UK government. There’s a palpable conflict of interest there, and Kay Burley’s not even making a pretence of being a disinterested reporter.
The protesters wouldn’t let it lie. “Sack Kay Burley! Sky News Is Shit!” – not only did they heckle her on live tv:
but before the end of the afternoon #sackkayburley became one of the top trending hashtags in the UK.
But it wasn’t just one shrieking Murdoch presenter – it was two. This wasn’t an isolated incident; cut to later the same day, and here’s Sky’s senior political reporter losing it in an interview with Blair’s former spin doctor Alistair Campbell:
Boulton and Burley are hardly the Bill O’Reillys of UK tv, (USAnians would probably find their behaviour quite tame in comparison), but it’s clear to see that they are from the same stable.
All use the classic News Corp interview technique – shout loudly in order to drown out reasonable argument and if that doesn’t work, try to intimidate the interviewee out of challenging you further by the use of force majeure (ie turning off the camera).
But what these Murdoch employees really have in common is the whiff of panic they give off – it may be panic that they are no longer at the cutting edge of making and reporting news, or panic that any mere civilian should think they have the right to challenge them; or it could just be panic about the continuing existence of their jobs, as the news narrative (despite their blogs and online presence) slips out of their hands and into that of the public’s, via social networks and mobile devices. Or it may well be all of the above.
Whatever it is, it’s bloody good fun to watch.
UPDATE If only for completeness’ sake, here Boulton bollocks Ben Bradshaw.
This could be our next PM (or not, as it turned out not long after I posted this – P):
The Prime Minister Of Primrose Hill
Who is David Miliband? Why all this hoohah?
Once you get over the resemblance of The Right Honourable David Wright Miliband MP to Star Trek’s Commander Data he would on the face of it appear to have all the necessary qualities to be a model New Labour leader, not least because of the blood he has on his hands; he voted very strongly for the Iraq war and he voted strongly against investigating the Iraq war, despite his later protestations of ambivalence.
Miliband went straight from Oxford into a thinktank, to becoming a well paid special adviser, to being parachuted into Parliament via a rotten borough safe seat. You see? Perfect. He’s our very own real life Pitt The Very Very Younger.
But this Minister of The Crown, responsible for foreign policy, didn’t even know until corrected by a civil servant that the government whose interests he represents abroad had given a knighthood to Sir Robert Mugabe. See for yourself on BBC’s Question Time:
(Mind you, former Tory minister Douglas Hurd hardly comes off much better, but he is ancient).
Want more? To show how unqualified Miliband is, when he got the job he had to ask the public for advice he’s so bereft of knowledge and ideas.
Today we learn that despite Miliband’s myriad public assurances, the UK has been proved complicit in the dissapearance and torture of people to Diego Garcia. He was duped, he says:
Miliband ‘duped by US’ on rendition
24 minutes ago
David Miliband is facing fresh claims that the US imprisoned terror suspects on British territory.
Campaigners said the Foreign Secretary allowed himself to be “duped by the US on a colossal scale” following new claims of interrogation on Diego Garcia, a UK-controlled island in the Indian Ocean.
A former senior American official told Time magazine that in 2002 and possibly 2003, the US imprisoned and interrogated at least one terrorist suspect on the island.
Mr Miliband has repeatedly denied claims the US has detained terror suspects on British territory.
But the anonymous source, described as a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings, told Time a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said “high-value prisoners” had been held and questioned on the island.
The official also claimed the US may have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia’s territorial waters.
And yet, somewhere here lie a few questions that may deserve to be raised. As Foreign Secretary, for instance, was it right for Mr Miliband to place his private life ahead of his public role in such a high-profile visitation? Would he have delayed the transatlantic trip by just a couple of days had the guest been the head of a less translucently repugnant regime than Saudi Arabia’s? Was he, in other words, using Jacob’s arrival as an excuse to avoid greasing the wheels of arms trading of a kind he might once, in the mythic New Labour era of “ethical foreign policy”, have openly described as stomach-turningly hypocritical?
If so, Mr Miliband sets himself a challenging precedent. Every time one of the world’s unlovelier tyrants pops along, he will have to arrange another adoption. Admittedly this is easier in the US, where babies can be picked up by citizens almost as easily as an automatic rifle from WalMart. Even so, should Assad of Syria reprise his 2002 jaunt, Mr Miliband will need to return to the States to add Abraham (I just love his commitment to the tripartite Jewish patriarchy; those shared values with the Saudis yet again!) to Isaac and Jacob.
He’s “very flattered” to be a gay icon. His blog, mainly devoted to the glories of you guessed it, David Miliband, costs the taxpayers 40K a year. That’s about 50p per visitor. (For contrast this blog’s costs are pretty much nil.)
This is not a man with an overdeveloped sense of modesty. Miliband is New Labour made flesh – well-off, overentitled, underqualified, utterly blind to his own hypocrisy. He’s another who’s convinced himself that his personal ambition is actually zeal for the public good and not just a lust for power for it’s own sake.
But now this glorified work-experience boy, not content with having been promoted way, way above his level of competence, has got the gall to think he can walk into No.10 as PM, as if the imposition of the unelected and useless Gordon Brown wasn’t bad enough already.
The reading public’s uniformly derisive reaction to this notion can be seen in the comments to his flag-planting article in the Guardian this week; the nation, or at least the Guardian reading bits, are as one on Miliband. A representative sample:
alisdaircameron
Jul 29 08, 9:53pm
Davey-wavey, you’re wrong (again).
New Labour doesn’t need to make its case afresh, or present its policies in a new light, with new packaging and sales pitch.
The public actually know your case and your policies perfectly and only too well, and utterly dislike them and your whole apparatus and outlook which fatally combine arrogance, incompetence, authoritarianism and a failure to grasp what goes on in ordinary, real people’s lives.
We’ve listened to your case ad nauseam and understand it, better than you do, and can see it for the tommy-rot it is. Have you listened? No, and no number of rigged ‘consultations’ will change this, as you are all too convinced of your rightness to realise what a catastrophic course you have plotted.
None of your party apparatchiks have done real work, but simply continued your student politics into a career, inflicting your shallow glibs idea experiments on the populace to disastrous effect, and all you can say is 2We are right, the experiment will work this time. It must, because we’re so clver”.
I’m sorry, “the project” has failed, and as it’s run its course it destroyed a once-noble party and completely betrayed all the masses who wanted something other than rehashed Thatcherism. You’ve screwed centre and centre-left politics in the UK for decades.
Go NOW, and thank your lucky stars that there aren’t (yet) baying mobs to string you up from lamp posts.
Quite.
There’s only one thing the nation has to say to Miliband – DO NOT WANT.
• Gordon Brown is going to resign. He wants to stand down as Labour leader before the next Labour conference in the autumn. But he intends to remain as prime minister until then (if he can).
• Nick Clegg has formally opened talks with Labour. Brown said that Clegg rang him recently (presumably after the Lib Dem meeting) to say he would like to have formal talks with a Labour team.
• Brown is proposing a “progressive” government, comprising Labour, the Lib Dems, and presumably the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP and the Alliance. Electoral reform would be a priority.
5.04pm: Brown says he will “facilitate” the discussions with the Lib Dems.
5.03pm: Brown says he has “no desire” to stay in his position longer than is needed. He would be willing to stay in office until the a new government is formed. But the election was a judgment on him. He is going to ask Labour to organise a leadership election, so that a new leader can be in place by the time of the conference. He will play no part in that contest.
5.02pm: He says he has had conversations with people like the head of the IMF about the eurozone crisis.
So we’ll have yet another unelected PM. Cheers then, Cleggy.
Wait Till They Realise Women Will See Their Tiny Penises
…..What these men pushing this horribly invasive bit of kit don’t realise is that the machine can also see the shape, location and worst of all the dimensions of their willies. …
So much for the reassurances of the Transport Safety Administration.
But the TSA said the X-rays will be set up so that the image can be viewed only by a security officer in a remote location. Other passengers, and even the agent at the checkpoint, will not have access to the picture.
In addition, the system will be configured so that the X-ray will be deleted as soon as the individual steps away from the machine. It will not be stored or available for printing or transmitting, agency spokesman Nico Melendez said.
