Here are all the comments on the scrapped Kuenssberg petition. You know, the petition David Cameron condemned in the House of Commons today because it was accompanied by a storm of sexist abuse? Well, here are the comments in their entirety and out of 35,000 people who signed, there is virtually nobody whose comment can be seen as remotely sexist. See for yourselves. Can you spot the one sexist comment I found?
The comments show the petition was overwhelmingly signed by decent, concerned people who were sometimes quite eloquent. Also that the petition supporters are gender balanced and several specifically identify as feminists, and as supporters of the BBC. But neither Cameron, the Guardian and mainstream media nor 38 Degrees itself has any qualm about writing off all these decent citizens as a misogynist rabble.
The data link was left by a commenter on this site – I strongly suspect a mole within 38 Degrees has got it out. It is absolute proof that the politicians and mainstream media journalists have been pushing a plain lie about the nature of the campaign, and that 38 Degrees have colluded.
David Babbs of 38 Degrees appears to be setting new standards for lying. Now that the comments are public, he has changed his story and told Media Lens the abuse was not on the petition, it was on connected social media. I have repeatedly asked 38 Degrees for the evidence of abuse, but they absolutely refuse to show it. We have had five people searching all day. So far we have one single tweet, which was nasty – it called Laura K by a expletive reserved for women. And it did refer to the petition. But it was sent by a young man, 90% of whose comments referred to football and 100% of whose tweets used similar expletives. I unreservedly condemn what he did, but he was hardly a supporter of Corbyn or member of Momentum, as all the media are telling us. So far that is it – one young idiot – we have found nothing else.
But even if there are more nasty examples of abuse, that is not the fault of the 35,000 good people who signed the petition. And there is a disconnect between two establishment narratives, both unproven. One is that Kuenssberg has been a victim of terrible misogynist abuse since appointment. The other is that the abuse was caused by the petition. I utterly condemn any such abuse, but it does not negate the genuine concerns of the petitioners. Regular readers know I myself receive constant abuse, somethimes death threats. It does not mean I am not frequently in the wrong!
Now the lies have been thoroughly exploded. Of course the fact Cameron has been involved in peddling the lie may now be leading to some creative design, backdating and history creation in assorted Government establishments.
Serious question: how do we know the comments in the spreadsheets aren’t the moderated ones? That would still mean, of course, that no journalist would have seen the deleted comments, but it is a question that needs asking. It also doesn’t explain the almost total lack of such posts on Twitter – please, if you haven’t already, take the time to search for the words Kuenssberg (careful with the spelling), petition and a range of common sexist terms. You don’t need a Twitter account to do so. For ‘bitch’ I found four of the kind that have been complained about (I’d like to call the people who wrote them twats, but that would be bad), ‘c*nt’ without an asterix zero and ‘cow’ one (except that was as a…verb). Please try it yourself and let us know the results. It’s very, very, very important that people are honest about what they find. The internet is full of the most horrendous sexism, much in the same way as there are lots of repugnant anti-semites out there (infinitely more on the right than on the left, obviously, for reasons no-one seriously needs to have explained to them), but it seems that on this occasion at least that unpleasant fact has been unpleasantly exploited.
Re comments: Do we know if there are any ‘moderated ones’? It seems, on the face of it, and the time-stamping, not.
If there is a facility for moderation, why would the whole petition be pulled?
What has the abuse on Twitter got to do with this petition? Does it not predate this petition? Does the petition reflect the offensiveness of any such comments? (no, on the evidence)
That’s why I looked for references to the petition. There were two or three such comments from the previous couple of years, but the articles weren’t referring to them. I was under the powerful impression from the Guardian articles that there would be very many more. Twitter is very relevant in that while it could easily be claimed that such comments were quickly moderated (in which case, who saw them except the moderators?) the same is blatantly not true of twitter, and I for one do not believe that misogynists avoid twitter and only use Facebook, Instagram and, er, Snapchat.
BUT WHAT HAS TWITTER COMMENTS TO DO WITH THE PULLING OF THE PETITION?
As I referred to above, as you would know if you had read the article you are commenting on, 38 Degrees claimed that most of the abuse was on Twitter. Please take the time to read Craig’s posts of the last few days and relevant articles from the Guardian before commenting further.
My own comments are there – complete and unedited. I suspect the rest are the same.
I suspect that a fair few Tories will be staying up all night making up names and insults on the change.org petition.
Great Work indeed Craig. Well done
And so many great comments too
This has to be yet more proof that 38 deg is an establishment tool..fro their Latest petition –
CITE THE “SEXIST ABUSE” EVIDENCE FOR SCRAPPING OUR LAURA KUENSSBERG PETITION
I remember John Cole, John Sargent, NICK ROBINSON, Jon Snow, John Simpson, Faisal Islam, Robert Peston, Adam Boulton, Andrew Marr, and probably quite a few more. All great, honest, professional Political Editors for various channels. They all had their own Political leanings, but were scrupulously fair and unbiased in their presentation.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/cite-the-sexist-abuse-evidence-for-scrapping-our-laura-kuenssberg-petition
I felt compelled to sing this one too, if only to remind them in the comments, the Nasty Nick told one of the Biggest Lies ever on bbC news, When after Alex Salmond spent a good 8 mins replying to Robinson’s Question.. Robinson then said on six o clock news that Salmond didn’t answer the Question, Despicable. In fact his lies led to four thousand protesters outside the bbC in Glasgow –
Robinson admitted using a poorly-chosen phrase in his reporting of the press conference but argued it did not justify “marching on the BBC’s headquarters,
He was pissed off with Alex then Lied on the U.K’s most watched news cast
Not Nick Robinson, no https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rU8YU3loeQ
Haaa Rich
Ta for the Reminder of that clip.. What a laugh at the very last second, when a replacement banner was Hoisted. 🙂
http://www.thecanary.co/2015/11/20/nick-robinson-accuses-bbc-anti-corbyn-bias/
Ah yes I’d forgotten about that. Events are moving at a dizzying speed.
He used to be the bear from Bo’ Selecta! No wonder his tail popped out. ;O)
I love that a petition against 38 Degrees has been created on 38 Degrees!
I’ve looked at all the comments on the link provided (https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/e83cce2f-9558-4947-b971-3374d1dc1190/BBC-Laura-Kuenssberg-38-degrees-petition-comments.html).
These are the worst I found “scottish cow” “silly cow” “self centred witch” “vile evil, collaborator witch” “vile women” “a large greasy cog in the propaganda machine” “political shill” (twice) “bigot”
Also “jewish extremist” “crypto-jewish” “zionist motivated”
Maybe somebody else can find something worse on the above link.
Witch and cow are sexist. The fact that people (some of whom may well be dicks) called her a zionist etc is irrelevant to the campaign that has been waged.
(obviously whoever called her ‘cryptojewish’ is an utter, utter prick).
Is Kuenssberg not a zionist?
I would be very surprised if she isn’t a committed supporter of the state of Israel?
It strikes me that someone being paid in the order of two hundred thousand quid annually for talking on TV loses the right not to be called a cow, witch, or whatever.
The feelings that I worry about are not those of beautiful jet setters but their millions of victims: the people on the receiving end of a system that teaches that Jeremy Corbyn is too concerned about the lives of poor people to be taken seriously and ought to dress better.
If some of the latter demographic, say the ‘lower’ quarter of the population, get angry, swear, talk to the toffs the way they talk to each other and threaten to bruise the sensibilities of the elite, that makes me happy. And disinclined to apologise on their behalf. They aren’t the people consuming a small town’s worth of license fees every year, plus generous pensions; they are doing the paying.
I’m surprised more people aren’t angrier. I’m surprised that there were not hundreds of unprintable comments underneath a petition against a volunteer against the poor and the working class. It’s not as if they had many forums in which to voice their opinions. It’s not as if the person sneering at the People’s Champion (for that is what Corbyn aspires to be) hasn’t got a gilded pulpit with a state of the art sound system that blankets the land.
This isn’t about males bullying females, it’s about the poor protesting against the rich exploiting them, and laughing at them into the bargain.
The link is down
Think using this to take down 38 Degrees might be in the game book, btw.
John Le Carre is not dead.
Launching a war in Iraq didn’t take down Labour, it just stuffed it with neo-liberal Blairites, ideologically driven to purge the movement of anyone consistent to their stated beliefs, and keeping to the original aims of the party.
38 Degrees had a brief flourish, but with the help of a few well placed moles, cowards, and/or idiots, they have been corrupted.
What has the war with Iraq got to do with 38 Degrees? With the exception of the fact that this is also being used, among other tactics, to close them down? Do you know anything about them?
So, are all petitions to be taken down, now and forever? Twitter is famously abusive, and I’m sure 100% of petitions have negative comments. By 38 Degrees new standard, they must, in fact, take down every single petition, and thus disband themselves. Same goes for Change.org. Personally, I can live in a world without online petitions, which I generally think are a waste of time, so I welcome this development.
I jest, but accusations of misogyny\anti-semitism\racism are a serious business. Certain individuals want to tread lightly here, blowback hurts.
Well then, support 38 Degrees against this bullying, or acknowledge at least that they had the perzzang to host this in the first place.
Sorry, that doesn’t work. If they had stood firm, we would all have rallied round them and supported them. If they have been threated with legal action, I am sure a Crowdfunding pitch would have easily raised enough to cover their legal fees, and they might well even have found a lawyer proud to do the case pro bono.
By immediately capitulating, they didn’t even give us the chance to support them. By then blatantly lying about it all, they took away our will to do so.
This trick is a classic puerile ‘ratfuck’ of the sort favored by College Republicans in the USA: fabricate offensive communications and attribute them to your opponent. It demonstrates strict US government control of the Tories and Unionists and their apparatchiks in synthetic NGOs like 38 Degrees. It’s a good sign, actually – with bribery and pedophile blackmail of elites declining in effectiveness, your peoples are increasingly hard to control. These pranks are rear-guard actions of a hegemon in retreat. NATO Europe is breaking up as the Warsaw Pact did, disintegrating inward from the outside. Soon you’ll be at peace.
The link seems to be down. Could a mirror be posted? Perhaps it could be put into a torrent, or even hosted on wikileaks?
The link I used has been taken down … What is going on … The plot thickens …
Link to comments not working…
Keep up the pressure, Craig. 38Degrees has exposed itself as a lightning rod set up and nurtured by the Establishment to keep us pigeons under control. ITV’s News at Ten yesterday was unashamedly unbalanced pro EU Remain, as is everything on the BBC and in our newspapers most of the time.
David Cameron has two tactics to focus on to get what he wants – fear – and stranglehold control of the media. DC has to keep far away from the core issue of UK sovereignty which binds Brexiters of all political persuasions, and to focus on poopooing discussion of the various symptoms of loss of sovereignty. Divide & Conquer is a traditional strategy, and the Brexit campaign so far has been very successfully divided by Remain into disfunctional factions of anti-immigration nutters and disgruntled Tories scared of upsetting Conservative Central Office permanently. The main issue must be sovereignty.
The SNP nearly managed independence last year but media mis/dysinformation, false promises and division did it for them. Cameron’s team used the Scottish referendum as a rehearsal for the EU referendum, and we are watching history being repeated.
Couldn’t agree more,especially about the IndyRef being the dress rehearsal, as I said at the time.
This is really serious stuff, and I’m just grateful that the SNP were wise enough to stop Craig’s political aspirations in its tracks, as Craig, you’re much, much more valuable on the outside, doing what you’re doing.
The Grauniad and the Beeb and now 38 Degrees, which I was always a little wary of, have all been utterly compromised.
As for the Laura Kuenssberg petition, I have to say it was a little rash, being essentially ad hominem, and should have been more carefuly worded.
All this moral heat over nothing, for the 2nd time in a month. What is being buried by intelligentsia tittle-tattle is the total subversion of Islam by a Western-created innovation that you can ex-communicate another Muslim and forfeit his/her life, property, rights, manifested by Wahhabisn in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood.. This is a travesty of Islam, and yet while keyboard warriors sqwabble over petition insults, Europe has topped up Erdogan with 6 billion pounds to continue the fight against Islam, on the pretext of detaining refugees, and the ceasefire sponsored by Russia has been used to re-arm the non-Muslms of Al Qaida who are fighting against Islam.
So absolutely vacant of understanding are the commenting classes, that they take the bait about Cameron lying as if Cameron lying is a great exposure. He is nothing but lies, and always has been. Please people consider what you are being distracted from:
A 5 year war is lurching to a terrible conclusion in which rational, free, pious, tolerant Islam in Syria is being pounded to death by irrational , intolerant, controlled, unreligious thugs. It comes at the end of 25 years of a war against Islam, going by the slogan War on Terror. Do you really think that USUKIS + Europe will become a better place to live in when the main idealogical opponent to Western Capitalist/imperialist/materialism is destroyed?
If you think that, you already have the political leaders you deserve.
Suggest Cameron reads comments on Guido Fawkes for a general idea of right wing online comments and thinking. They are often shockingly rude as are those at many other sites which allow anonymous comments.
CM is a polite haven of dissent.
Craig thank you for doing the medias job!
It is getting downright depressing that the MSMainstream media club just collude in their lies. And silence any rational debate that does not tow the line.
The media’s job is to manufacture consent.
Fantastic work Craig.
Most ominous that the Amazon XML link has now been taken down – what are they scared of?
I have backed up the entire file hosted on Amazon in pdf format and its nearly 70 pages in length.
Given The Guardian and 38 Degrees desire this file not in the public domain, could one of the more IT-savvy poster explain how we can host this file, allowing others to see for themselves that Joe Haydon, the Petitioner – was stitched-up by the London media mafia led by The Guardian, and now being used by even the Prime Minister to beat Corbyn with – its quite unbelievable given what we now know about Mr Haydon, the actual ‘comments’ in question and fact that Twitter has zero to do with 38 Degrees or indeed Mr. Haydon himself.
Alas the witch hunt continues unabated, despite efforts to present truth and accuracy by concerned citizens opposed to being lied too.
The link to the comments no longer works…
Yes, I found that too.
“This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.
NoSuchBucketThe specified bucket does not existe83cce2f-9558-4947-b971-3374d1dc1190FC64E281C54E18C2zjuS6N3Fj42uFUYeQGUbd402XhCVi7ERyiti0KAEv2d5gnO12xT+DyzePAl9atTgJksfyrWtNEo=”I wonder why!
A glimmer of truth in a sea of lies
a background article on glimmers of truth in the media, or not
maybe 38 degrees was just submitted with an Establishment embarrassment aDvisory notice?
http://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/snowden.php (Columbia Journalism review: article to appear in The Future of the Free Press in the Surveillance State)
I guess the corollary also happens: pan-continental super-state Establishment co-ordinator, stroking white cat, says to Laura, Beeb, Graun – this Corbi chappy needs a soft-assassination, make sure you do publish that – we’ll tidy up afterwards. The people won’t remember anything after 3-days anyway. . . then the boss of international rescue can come home and take over. . .
The store of comments has also been cached here:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:UEe0lzwst0IJ:https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/e83cce2f-9558-4947-b971-3374d1dc1190/BBC-Laura-Kuenssberg-38-degrees-petition-comments.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nl&client=firefox-b
I saved the webpage too in anticipation of this kind of stunt.
Just in case. Comments copied to Pastebin:
http://pastebin.com/mfSpJ2ni
Saved into a spreadsheet which retains all the links to the comment pages that are still up on the 38 degrees web site. Email me if you need it.
e.g. https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/sack-laura-kuenssberg/comments/789512
Kudos. Also saved it (as html) but your way is so much better.
Thanks! I notice that she’s trending on Facebook now, with the standard line and no mention of any controversy obviously, so it’s particularly important that access to the truth endures. I recall Peter Hitchens’ interview with Owen Jones, wherein he said that one of David Cameron’s recent speeches could have been made in East Germany. With this kind of desperate flailing to shore up a bankrupt ideology that underpins a bankrupt regime, not to mention the surveillance, I think he was on to something.
the cover up continues and one wonders how far the thread is going to pull the jumper apart.
Signed the rather poorly frequented petition Brian, thanks, buit the pressure has to be kept on.
Now, would RT want to run with this story, I’m sure they have got better access to Laura K., via press events both are attending, than we have, unless there’s a way to get into her news feed, or would they shy away from it for being too close to their own corporate knuckle.
what would happen if a petition ask to take down any of their glamorous investigative journo’s for being too close to Putin, hmmm.
Craig
There’s a link in a comment below a piece on the Canary – http://www.thecanary.co/2016/05/11/38-degrees-removed-petition-to-sack-bbcs-laura-kuenssberg-under-establishment-pressure/- to an @38_degree Tweet suggesting the offensive remarks were in direct messages to Kuenssberg – see https://twitter.com/38_degrees/status/730374518372499456.
This strikes me as kind of odd because 38 degrees were telling you to go online and look for them yourself. Presumably if they were direct messages none of us would be able to find them. There’s a contradiction here.
But what can we say if this is true?
First that Kuenssberg has shared these messages with selected people in the media, and, that rather as she and Neil manufactured the news on that resignation, she has perhaps been working with others in an attempt to discredit Corbyn.
Secondly, if what we are talking about is messages (which are 1 to 1 communications) rather than Tweets (which are publications to the world), then we seem to be being invited to believe, by Bates especially, is that any writing which might conceivably lead someone to write someone else a disobliging message, email or letter, has no legitimacy, and must be stopped.
You can’t DM people who you’re not following. Was she abused by her friends?!
…and who are not following you, I meant to say.
Well done Craig, this is a real stinker and you’re keeping good track of the constantly moving goalposts.
Thank you all for the technical assistance. We have now changed the link to the google cache. Hopefully they will work out that you cannot completely disappear it and give up.
Caches are a temporary store. I wouldn’t rely on the Google cache page as a permanent record.
David Babbs and his colleagues at 38 degrees are weak-minded rather than ill-intentioned. Let me quote directly from Babb’s Guardian article:
“…Should a campaign expressing a legitimate opinion be ended because of the actions of a small minority? On the other hand, should Joe, as the petition starter, or 38 Degrees, as a community of millions of people overwhelmingly opposed to sexism, allow ourselves to risk being associated with this abuse?
“It was a difficult decision – and it might not have been the right one – but we agreed to take the petition down.”
What Babbs is saying is that it only takes a handful of people (or perhaps even one) to link a petition to abusive comments (in this case sexist ones) for the whole petition to be trashed. What a gift to opponents of 38 Degrees. If 38 Degrees is led by fools like Babbs, it is a waste of time associating with the organisation.
What is to stop somebody else starting a new petition?Can we not just circumnavigate this “distraction” and move into action? Those well meaning people that signed the petition in the first place can just sign the new petition. We are now a little bit wiser as to the actions the ptb will enact to stop this genuine and important issue from coming to the fore. Lets stick to the reason why we want this petition in the first place. I for one am sick to the back teeth of seeing BBC bias, or would be if I still gave them any of my time, but I stopped watching after a litany of blatant examples of bias, the final straw being its coverage of the Israeli bombing of Palestine one christmas a few years back. Let us not be distracted, for actually lived are at stake. We must stand together and call an end to this establishment in all its manifestations.
Sign this one, Daniel.
https://www.change.org/p/james-harding-director-of-news-and-current-affairs-we-ask-that-the-bbc-review-the-current-political-editor-laura-kuenssberg-s-position
If indeed this is the case and a group of powerful people are conspiring to prevent free speech, then I am very, very frightened. I was one of the people who signed that petition and I trusted 38 Degrees with my views and my voice. I always trusted the BBC news. I always felt that they were the least corruptible channel and the most likely to present unbiased reports, but it is clearly not the case any more. I do not want to live in a totalitarian state, one in which the news is controlled by the government in power. I am hugely concerned about the lack of transparency in government. I want my voice to be heard.
well said Catherine, we all feel equally aghast at this outrage and todays changes to the BBC’s structure is such that it gives half of the votes to party politicians, one step closer to totalitarian news reporting.
It should be listeners who sit on the board and there should be some kind of annual rotation to allow others to be part of their public broadcasting service, but politicians? with their agenda’s and allegiances? this is a bad suggestion.
Laura K. has proven that she is too close to those she likes most, she is biased and something will have to change now that Laura has become the story.
As a near pensioner I can tell you that everything you hear on the BBC news has been politically biased and motivated since day one.
An early classic was the overnight switch from supporting Israel to bowing to the oil producers . When I say overnight i mean that literally. ( 1970’s Death of a Princess and all that ).
One day’s news was completely dismissed as the powers that be decided that oil supply was more important than anything .
The difference now is that you have other outlets and opinions than the telly to inform you .
Corruption and brainwashing is not a new thing .
Listener driven broadcasting – what an utter nightmare for the powers that be.
The links to the petition comments in posts under the Laura Bates Guardian article are now broken.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/11/the-laura-kuenssberg-petition-should-be-condemned-not-just-removed#comments
Instead of punishing all who sign in good faith they should find ip address on those that leave bad comments and ban them from the site for a while.
I think I found four sexist comments: One calling LK a “VILE EVIL COLLABORATOR WITCH!!!” another: “She is a self centred witch” and the third: “She’s a Scottish cow who should keep her name out of UK politics.” and finally “Hate the silly cow.”
Still not enough to take a petition down without external pressure. Entirely agree the way of dealing with this fairly would be to take down the specific comments. Disappointed with 38D.
Yes, all I could find in a remarkably well-mannered but critical set of comments was a couple of references to her being a “witch”, and a couple that refer to her as a “cow”. From the response from 38 Degrees and the spinners in the corporate media, one would expect a non-stop litany of expletives and deplorable sexist remarks. They really are desperate, aren’t they? I said to someone earlier that the “abuse” that I could see would not be out of place on a children’s TV programme, it was that mild. Now, the goalposts have shifted so that the logic is “well, it’s not abuse in the petition itself, it’s other internet-based remarks”. Which means “we are closing down this thing here because of this unrelated thing over here”. Very worrying
It doesn’t explain why my exhaustive searches of Twitter have turned up only four or five comments. I think someone contacted 38 Degrees, and they took them at their word without checking for themselves.
I await the online petition calling for David Babbs to resign