30 April 2012 — williambowles.info
A pathetic excuse I know for no new posts but I had a heart attack last week and got out of hospital yesterday. Story to follow coincidentally? the Media Lens piece soon. Not so much on my experiences with the wonderful, beautiful NHS workers who saved my life and took such loving care of me but precisely WHY the NHS is so important, vital and central to all our lives and why we HAVE to save it for all!
14 July 2011 — — Strategic Culture Foundation
Update 20 July 2011
Events move too fast! I wanted to update this piece on Monday but I thought I’d wait until the hearings yesterday, 19 July but aside from the plateful of shaving cream in the Digger’s face and one admission via an email that David Cameron knew all about the dirty dealings in the Dirty Digger’s empire, nothing much happened at all (and even this was not pursued). But then what can we expect from a totally complicit political class?
9 June 2011
The monopolization and digitization of the media has standardized and concentrated the production process. This has resulted in virtually identical output regardless of its source. Not only the nature of the ‘news’ but also what is considered to be worthy of our attention comes at us in lockstep regardless of where we are or the medium, blanketing out any alternate views on the subject.
29 June, 2007
“And so, the end of the Blairite decade. Tributes, applause and a standing ovation at PM’s Question Time. Gushing reflections from fellow politicians and sundry acolytes.
And, of course, the whole panoply of deferential BBC coverage replete with helicopter ‘reportage’ of official cars going to and from the Palace. How abjectly depressing, yet revealing, that so many people, so many institutions, can participate in this mass charade. How intellectually and morally bereft of our political and media ‘guardians’ to observe the constitutional etiquette while the slaughter goes on in Iraq.
26 January 2005
On yesterday’s BBC1 lunchtime news, diplomatic correspondent James Robbins declared that US relations with Iran were “looking very murky because of the nuclear threat”. (BBC1, 13:00 News, January 20, 2005)
On the BBC’s 18:00 news, Robbins again spoke of Iran “where the President is confronting the nuclear threat”. (BBC1, 18:00 News, January 25, 2005)
A previous alert from MediaLens on Iran serves to remind us of the role of the intelligentsia in creating the ‘right kind’ of space for further imperial adventures as the innocuous-sounding quotes above aptly illustrate. But just who are they talking to? After all, if one is to judge by the surveys of the BBC’s news/current affairs listener and viewer-ship, it’s overwhelmingly white, male and over fifty, so frankly, who gives a shit? (see also the follow-up to this).
19 November 2004
We have yet to discover the true scale of the slaughter that the US wrought on Fallujah but one thing is clear, if we rely on the British government for the numbers we’ll never know the truth. On 17 November the Foreign Office issued a response to the report in the Lancet that calculated that deaths in Iraq (excluding those in Fallujah from the current blitzkrieg and those of last April’s attack on Fallujah) were in the order of 100,000 and this number is more than likely to be on the conservative side.
The New Dark Age 