Guilt by news coverage
The Hain saga takes a sickening new twist and his job looks at risk. This would be unjust and his parliamentary colleagues are rallying round.
It’s trial by media. Even if all the new allegations are true he should not resign or be sacked. Judg
ments will be made by the Electoral Commission and the Standards
Committee. He must hang on until then and not do a Peter Mandelson. In
the case of the
Hinduja brothers, Peter resigned in the face of a media crap storm and
was afterwards exonerated of all blame. There had been no impropriety
the subsequent report found.
Peter was obeying his own rules that if the media make the
politician the subject for a sufficiently long time, they should go.
This is guilt by news coverage. It’s not the seriousness of the
offence; it’s the wide spread of the smears and innuendos. The
lynch-mob hysteria turns every doubt into certain guilt. The Standards
Commissioner has become the ‘sleaze boss’ in an osmosis of guilt by
association. He and the Electoral Commissioner may well find Peter
careless but subject to disproportionate press attacks.
I’ll try again. Please tell me who has been harmed, robbed, deceived, bribed, and corrupted by anything that Peter has done or not done? It is a hideous cock-up by others for which Peter must take the ultimate responsibility. But that does not include loss of the office that he has served brilliantly.
'The Argus crisis will get worse'.
Tonight their front page screams with quivering indignation with a splash story of 20 redundancies at a local firm. The company is insolvent. Earlier in the week the 21 redundancies in the solvent Argus was hidden in a few paragraphs in the middle pages. Only on this site, in the Press Gazette and BBC Wales is this story being covered. The Argus is silent.
An insider warns me that it is not just the 21 jobs that will be lost to give us yesterday’s stale news today, but the site in under threat from the greed gluttons of Newsquest.
My informant tells me that editorial colleagues are devastated. 'They've taken all the cutbacks, all the crap that has been hurled at them and now, in the long term, their jobs could be on the line.' Six were dumped in a cost-cutting binge in 2006.
One of the threats arises from Newport’s new prosperity. The booming city has inflating land values that excite the erogenous greed zones of Newsquest and their Gannett parents. The land on which the Argus stands is worth millions. That’s why they will be printing in Worcester and Oxford.
To do the job properly, I’m told, would need 24-hour shift patterns plus the extras expense of Reuters and another international agency or an upgrade Press Association contract. It seems unlikely that they will upgrade their editorial and cover overnight Newport jobs.
My correspondent concludes, “What a pity we lost our Chapel. The editor's power locally is no more; he is just another body to be pushed around by the mindless morons called management.”
What a lesson in the need for strong trade unions. Argus staff has been cheated in one-sided pensions deal, and either lost their jobs and have a future of insecurity. The redundancy that the company is offering appears to be the basics rock bottom statutory one with no enhancement that solvent companies now routinely give.
Ever night, the Argus flaunts their superior moral superiority and preaches their pompous nostrums. How about an editorial braying against prosperous employers dumping on their defenceless workers?
Finland
There was a great row before the decision was made to build the new nuclear station in the far north of the Finland. The coalition in Government collapsed with the departure of a Green Party minister and his colleagues.
But they did secure an agreement for full-blooded investment in renewables to balance the nuclear decision. Now the plant is two years behind schedule and £1billion over budget. Tragically that £1billion is the money earmarked for renewables investments. It all sounds prophetically familiar. The worry on the future neglect of conservation and renewables here was the main anxiety of Labour and other backbenchers expressed in the Commons this week. We must get organised.
Croeso
Yesterday, this site recorded its biggest ever number of hits. Welcome to those who dropped in for the first time. Please keep in touch. This is a 'Free website' unrestricted by suffocating parliamentary rules.
Recent Comments