It is amazing just how far you can get with the right family connections plus a slavish devotion to licking the arse of the powers that be. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Patrick Wintour, as talentless a piece of servile scum as ever disgraced the once fine profession of journailsm.
Here we have quite possibly the worst piece of political journalism in British history. Even given that it is supposed to be a puff piece by someone as openly critical of New Labour as Himmler was of Hitler, it is pathetic. What information precisely is it meant to convey?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/wintour-and-watt/2010/mar/26/alistair-darling-gordon-brown
The astonishing thing is that the completely intellect free Wintour is actually the political editor of the Guardian. I get so angry about the Guardian because it was once – within my lifetime – truly a great newspaper.
I offer £100 cash to anyone who can show me a piece of genuine journalism by Wintour – and to make it fair, commenters on the blog can vote whether it is genuine or not. On the debit side, allow me m’lud to enter this atrocious Blair apologia:
Tony Blair to tell Chilcot inquiry: war stopped Saddam building WMDsFormer PM expected to tell inquiry that without military action Saddam would have built WMD using the team of scientists he had assembled for the task
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/29/tony-blair-wmd-saddam-hussein
Not a single word of scepticism about the bonkers Blair narrative from Wintour.
In fact, I should be fascinated to know if anyone can unearth any evidence that lickarse Wintour has ever asked any New Labour politician a sensibly critical question.
Why precisely is Wintour’s £220k a year salary and expenses paid by the C P Scott trust and not by New Labour?
If the Guardian is so bad why do you quote it so often as raising valid issues as in previous blogs?
For example Guardian on Manningham Buller
‘There is a good article in the Guardian by Vikram Dodd on Eliza Manningham Buller’s professed ignorance.’
Well I can always make use of a hundred quid, I bet I can find something from his student days where he investigation some genuinely investigated and wrote about some paint drying.
Dear Mr Patrick Wintour
Please can you give me an example of something you wrote which is good. Someone promised me £100 if I can find anything that you wrote that is a genuine piece of journalism.
I believe the person who made the promise is a man of integrity and will promptly pay up if I provide him with an article.
And I think I can make use of a £100, I’m not sure how yet, but I am sure I’ll be able to think of something.
Thank you
Edward Goldberg
Do you think he will email me an example from his student days, or do you think he has never known how to write?
But anyway, I have nothing to lose. If he has never wrote anything worth printing, I haven’t lost anything. If he can dig up a piece of crap from the olden days, I’ve just made myself £100 quid!!!!!!!
Hahahhahahahahaha
I did an internet search but all his stuff was crap, so I emailed him to see if he has some genuine pieces of journalism that haven’t been printed.
Well done, Mr Goldberg. Hilarious! Surfeit of Blatcherite propaganda, Wintour’s speciality, it would appear, and the cloacal torrent of lifestyle shite, are why I stopped buying The Guardian two or three years back. May the preposterous, and preposterously overpaid, ‘political editor’ rise to your ingenious challenge. I suspect, however, that whatever little sense of humour he may possess will fail on this occasion to come to his assistance.
The most ridiculous thing about Blair’s ‘threat from Iraq’ nonsense was the idea that if Saddam got nuclear weapons or other WMDs he would immediately committ suicide by using them on nuclear armed states or their allies – despite the fact that when he had chemical warheads for his scuds in the 1991 war he didn’t use them, because he knew the counter-strike could have been nuclear.
The other idea was that he would hand them over to Al Qa’ida (who weren’t even in Iraq and who would have been as likely to target Saddam with them as any of his enemies if he had given them some)
Is anyone still in doubt, whether Bliar is a complete shit, or not?
We have lived through this creep’s hubristic, murderous and costly adventures–and seen this Faustus prosper.
There is only one stone left unturned and that, is to try him through the ICC at The Haig.
Whatever book is written about him, which attempts to justify his actions, will be in the fiction department.
Maybe a “Mossad-style” trial awaits this malignant creature–this would be useful to any Bliar biography.
If he were a real journalist with any integrity he wouldn’t have a staff job.
It’s all explained here:
http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/newspeak.php
I hope it’s a real £100: none of that dodgy quantitative easing stuff!
After reading all 1465 articles on Journalisted, I’ve finally found one which epitomises the virtues of topical, incisive, intellectually heavyweight journalism, tackling extremely complex issues at the very heart of world politics after what is clearly a diligent in-depth investigation on the author’s part, which should surely have merited an award.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/jul/10/gordonbrown.pressandpublishing
Bliar’s blood money revealed:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1259030/Tony-Blairs-secret-dealings-South-Korean-oil-firm-UI-Energy-Corp.html
Craig,
Depsite all your experience, knowledge and intelligence, you are still an idealist, which isn’t the worst thing to be in these infantile times. You believe in justice and the law, and these are admirably qualities in person. But we live in an era of barbarism and encroaching darkness. An era when something as fundamental as Habeus Corpus, has been trashed. But that’s another story.
Wintour’s collosal salary is paid for two primary reasons, that may, at first glance seem somewhat contradictory and subtle. First, he, and others like him, isn’t being paid so much because of his journalistic talents, but precisely because he doesn’t have talent, but he
The Iraq ruse, is starting all over again, this time in relation to Iran. NATO’s new General Secretary, the renouned political prostitute, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has announced that NATO has to develope an anti-missile defence capability, which might even encompass Russia, to shield itself from the threat posed by Iranian missiles!
Democracy; even in its controlled and neutered, bourgeois form; which is preferable to the deformed and inverted totalitarianism we now live under; democracy is dead, and we won’t see it’s like again, not in our lifetimes. The historical trajectory is away from democracy, even in a compromised form, and towards something else.
And, as I’m now warmed up, one can look at the venerable Whitehouse journalist Helen Thomas, who, if I remember correctly is 86 years old, and has been covering the Whitehouse for 58 years.
She sits at the front and asks awkward questions. Recently she asked Obama, as President, what he knew about which countries had nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Obama avoided the question, and replied that he didn’t want to speculate. She said that she didn’t want him to speculate, but say what he knew. She was then drowned out and ignored. Since then Obama, so intelligent, so masterful, so articulate, has ignored her at his press conferneces.
Your offer of a prize made me smile. I once wrote a computer program that converted any given piece of text to look like the work of the Marxist historian, Tom Nairn (it selected random nouns and adverbs and surrounded them with scare quotes). Seems I’m not the only one irritated by his style. Recently he had a piece in the London Review of Books, and Bernard Crick offered a prize of £100-worth of books to anyone who could tell him what it meant. Don’t know if the prize was ever collected. Maybe I should load up the software and see if I can generate journalism a la Wintour – shouldn’t be hard…
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v17/n06/tom-nairn/on-the-threshold
Two opinion polls published in the Murdoch papers, the Sunday Times and News of the World, on Saturday signalled no party would win an overall majority in the election, and failed to agree on which party would be the largest in parliament.
A very useful means to make the electorate believe a hung parliament will come into being through votes rather than electoral fraud.
How convenient to have a government with no opposition to pass the most draconian economic measures and no doubt continue to erode civil liberties to quash dissention.
So a visible totalitarian muppet show with Mandelson at the head, the hard state barely concealed pulling the strings.
£220k pa makes £5.80 minimum wage look like peanuts, and just over £100.00 p.w jobseekers allowance for a couple, like plastic tiddly winks. Talking of which, why did Clegg get the pension amount wrong? They are all living in a cloud-cuckoo land of super-salaries.
You could pay back the entire national debt from these people’s childrens’ piggy banks. But don’t say they haven’t got brains. They’re going to cut our public services to get us out of this recession. The chancellor said he was going to target the super-rich who had benefited the most from the boom years. He doesn’t think that the £220 k pa people are over paid, and need their wages curtailing. They only think that the worst off, whose tax threshold is going to be virtually frozen, are the ones whose wages need to be curtailed.
For Nick Clegg’s information JSA is taxed,if you can believe that, in the same sentence as a annual salary of £220k. These wise people deserve £220 k pa. They deserve hell, for their support for what this country has done in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m in total agreement with both propositions.
Writerman,
Yes. We have lost Paul Craig Roberts and George Galloway.
It’s a bad week-end.
p.s. I’m fully aware that Alistair Darling is taxing over £150k salaries at 50%, but that is not curtailing. These new labour stupidos are still following Thatcher theory that high salaries and interest based profits from banks bring revenue to the country.
Do they have three inch thick glasses or are they just wilfully blind to the obvious thought, that 15 years after the Tories demise, they might have had time to invent a less socially caustic revenues system. Mrs Thatcher first implemented the system of buying out your enemies. A fair incomes policy would penalise anybody who agreed with government policy. At the top end, M.P.s would have to pay one million pounds every year for the privelege of being capitalist, war-mongering stooges. Critics of government policy would be paid £60K to criticise government creatively. Foul-mouthed bloggers like ourselves who rant against all the evils that underpin establishment morbidity, would be given £220k salaries provided they kept to their keyboard thumping analyses for five hours minimum every day.
Sounds like an excellent idea to me, anno!
Writerman, Paul Craig Roberts has simply gone nuts. Happens all the time.
Not ‘nuts’ at all and a better human than you I would suggest.
Cessation of journalistic activism
On March 26, 2010, in a farewell column titled, “Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It,” Roberts effectively announced his journalistic retirement. The article, published at Counterpunch.org, begins:
“There was a time when the pen was mightier than the sword. That was a time when people believed in truth and regarded truth as an independent power and not as an auxiliary for government, class, race, ideological, personal, or financial interest.” It proceeds to a bitter chronicle of the demise of American intellectual integrity, particularly that of financial journalists and economists. These have been thoroughly corrupted by monetary inducements to misrepresent and ignore what has been, in effect, the systematic dismantling of the nation’s productive life, in the name of globalization.
He holds the members of his own journalistic profession largely responsible for abetting relentless outsourcing of American industry, thereby gutting the American middle class and effectively dooming the nation’s future. He describes his own ostracism from mainstream media access, the consequence of his relentless and unflinching criticism of the demolition process over the past decade. His column ends, “The militarism of the U.S. and Israeli states, and Wall Street and corporate greed, will now run their course. As the pen is censored and its might extinguished, I am signing off.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Craig_Roberts
^ Larry,
Nuts – an asy explanation – lets hear it from the ‘nutter’ himself:
Good-Bye – Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
March 24, 2010
http://preview.tinyurl.com/yk83dyd
Re Wintour:
A list of articles is here:
http://journalisted.com/patrick-wintour
^
Some more interesting quotes from Paul Craig Roberts article:’Truth Has Fallen and Taken Liberty With It’
_America’s fate was sealed when the public and the anti-war movement bought the government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. The government’s account of 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. Nevertheless, this defining event of our time, which has launched the US on interminable wars of aggression and a domestic police state, is a taboo topic for investigation in the media. It is pointless to complain of war and a police state when one accepts the premise upon which they are based._
…
For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times, producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to cancel my column.
The American corporate media does not serve the truth. It serves the government and the interest groups that empower the government.
@anno:
> …15 years after the Tories demise, they might have had time
> to invent a less socially caustic revenues system
I agree entirely. Closing the income gap with strong redistributive tax policies, and independent monitors to check the outcome, would be a great start.
Jon
While we’re talking about inequality,what about this problem. A fifty-seven year old working man, with less than ten years before retirement, loses his job. He has more than £16,000 of savings tied up ina bond, and he can’t get jobseekers allowance or council tax benefit until he sells his savings and all his money is gone. How much % of £16K you have, is the % of £60 per week you get paid.
Question. Who is going to get worse affected, this person or the owner of a million pound house who has to pay some new wealth tax? They keep emailing me to see if I want to sell off my state pension. Do they refuse to pay state pensions if you have any savings? If new Labour are refusing to pay people’s pensions, what’s going to happen under the born-again Tory gang?
On the original post – do you actually have enough respect for your commenters to vote on something?
Do you read the comments section?
Maybe you should ask them the following:
How many here believe that the Americans went to the moon?
I vote yes.
And again. If you sat on benefits for 20 years, after migrating to this country, your national Insurance contribution record would be complete, and you’d probably slide into a full pension on a third of life contributions. But if you got on your bike and worked for agencies and your NIC record is full of holes, you’re going to get turned away.
There was a lot of talk about pensions for all, during New Labour’s tenancy. What chance of that is there under Cameron? I don’t think a lot of people remember what it was like under Maggie’s regime.
“renouned political prostitute”
Irrelevant *chuckle* from a part-time speeling nerd.
“How many here believe that the Americans went to the moon?”
That’s a strong contender for my “tragic troll of the decade” award. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.