This is a photo of the Secretary of State for Scotland addressing the Tory Party Scottish Conference (courtesy of Wings). I have analysed this and other photos taken from different angles, and learnt this.
There are only six rows of seats at the Scottish Tory Conference. The front row has 24 seats, the second 26, the third 28, the fourth 32 (sic), the fifth 34 and the sixth 36. That is a total of 180 seats.
How many delegates does a party Conference have, which only has 180 seats? There is, for example, no separate gallery for the media. In this photo there are, including those standing, less than 200 people.
My wife is a film producer. She is completing her first two feature films as producer this year, having previously done a couple of shorts, including one short as director. In supporting her, largely by making the tea, I have picked up a basic smattering of comprehension of camera work.
The BBC coverage has been, systematically and undoubtedly deliberately, utilising shots that create a completely false impression of the numbers at the conference. This has been done by setting the cameras low and well zoomed in, to show speakers above an apparent tight sea of heads and shoulders. Wider shots and higher shots have been quite deliberately eschewed. Any side shots or front shots have again been quite deliberately low set and highly zoomed. A tight zoomed diagonal shot across the hall will get sixty heads densely in it, and create the false impression of a packed crowd.
I want to emphasise the question of directorial choice. These are deliberate directorial choices to make the Tories look good, and deliberately to present a distorted perspective of the size of the audience (and the strength of the Tories) to the viewer. The media are, in effect, deliberately hiding from the viewer how tiny the Tory Conference is.
This is the only audience reaction shot used – twice – by the BBC during their main news item on Theresa May’s speech to the Scottish Tory conference:
This is of course only the visual representation of a much larger con trick in the boosting of Ruth Davidson. The BBC Politics operation in Scotland was devoted all weekend to the return of Ruth Davidson from maternity leave, and she was touted again and again, breathlessly and shamelessly, as a future First Minister after the next Holyrood elections. Not once did any BBC presenter point out that the Tories currently stand at 22% in Scotland, and that Ruth Davidson’s chances of becoming First Minister are, even with full on MSM adulation, much the same as my chances of being Britain’s Next Top Model.
The myth of the free press in the UK is finished. The media is owned by right wing billionaires, or by the Tory state. Look forward next week to hearing how Ruth shot a round of 23 at Gleneagles. While driving a tank.
Finally, here is a statistic to cheer you up. The 1,200 plus Tory councillors who have just lost their seats in the English local elections represent precisely an astonishing 1% of the entire membership of the Tory Party. Not of Tory councillors, 1% of all Tory members just lost their job. That is a very happy thought.
——————————————
Unlike our adversaries including the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, the Atlantic Council and hundreds of other warmongering propaganda operations, this blog has no source of state, corporate or institutional finance whatsoever. It runs entirely on voluntary subscriptions from its readers – many of whom do not necessarily agree with the articles, but welcome the alternative voice, insider information and debate.
Subscriptions to keep this blog going are gratefully received.
Choose subscription amount from dropdown box:
Worth noting too that at the last election 55% of Tory voters across the UK were aged over 65.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/conservative-voters-dying-off-lord-michael-heseltine-tory-part-elderly-support-base-pensioners-a7798386.html
I was wondering how few were in attendance in Aberdeen today. The ever crafty BBC showed the “crowd” in a very dark light and cropped shots as you say, however even I’m taken aback at such a minute gathering of Tory delegates.
Mundell galvanised by his birds of a feather so to speak, let loose on the SNP, from the safety of him podium. The BBC’s ever loyal Tory Brian Taylor, appeared in a state of orgasmic delight as he interviewed Tory after Tory.
It would appear that the Tories are in a far more precarious position in Scotland than the bias media are portraying, good.
Not clever enough to ‘plant’ a couple of token kilts though
Or to play recorded applause!
Regardless of her, and her party’s, low support, this kind of thing DOES work.
Simply look back some years to Farage’s seemingly regular place on the Question Time panel under David Dimbleby’s leadership. Farage was allowed to build a base from which to put forward his ideals. He was allowed to bring his party from obscurity to mainstream and succeeded in both that and his aim of getting a referendum for leaving the EU. He was not just allowed to do this, he was helped and encouraged to bring a fringe idea forward and have it become mainstream and WIN.
Brexit stands as testament to the the fact that such campaigns by the BBC actually WORK!
Labour is a spent force. Fifty some years ago Scotland turned it’s back on the Tories and adopted the Labour Party as it’s main party. It now looks like aside from their usual rich, self-serving supporters, the Tory Party now benefits from those former Labour voters who were ‘Orange’ in their political/religious outlook and thought that (correctly) Labour were a spent force. Facebook campaigns like ‘Smash the SNP’ etc which have been coordinated by ‘dark forces’ benefit the Tories and have been aided, strangely, by Labour figures such as Kezia Dugdale. They hated the SNP so much that they celebrated Tory wins against them. Kier Hardy will be spinning in his grave at the thought of what they have done. ie betraying their own party.
Not that the BBC see themselves as biased mind, they are so far gone they think they are being fair minded…
Except that Dimbelby was 100% pro-remain, to the extent that when the referendum exit polls indicated a win for leave, he, crestfallen, stated on-air “We’ve lost!”
I wish people like you would stop pretending to yourselves that UKIP and Brexit were caused by Farage’s appearances on Question Time.
Farage was the figurehead for a huge body of public opinion that had previously had no organised voice. At its peak UKIP took 3 million votes, and a majority voted in favour of Brexit in the referendum. In comparison, the Guardian has a circulation of a couple of hundred thousand. Its journalists appear on Question Time at least as often as Nigel Farage.
If you really want to see the BBC trying to manufacture public opinion, take a look at their relentless promotion of women’s football – an activity in which next to nobody has any interest as a spectator sport.
(As a laughable aside, I once wrote to the BBC under FOI asking how many Guardian journalists had appeared on Question Time, and how often. Even though information on all the individuals who have ever appeared on the QT panel is already in the public domain (e.g. on Wikipedia), they refused to answer my question using the usual excuse: “This information is exempt as it is held for the purposes of journalism…”)
Stonky
If the info you pretended to be after was already in the public domain as you say, why did you write to the BBC requesting that information? Was your question not simply intended to waste their time? You complain about the licence fee and how the BBC is not using it properly but you yourself contribute to any waste of (public) funds. Stop abusing the FoI and do somethng useful with your own time.
I wrote to the BBC requesting the information because although I could see all the names of all the people who had been panelists on QT, I don’t know the name of every single person who has ever been a Guardian journalist in the last twelve years. (It was a pretty safe bet that every female panelist whose name appeared in Debrett’s was a Guardianista, but there might have been some others too.)
If that’s too complicated for you to understand get back to me, and I’ll do it in words of one syllable. Failing that, I’ll try Neanderthal grunts. After that you’re on your own.
Now why don’t you take your own advice and go and do something useful. Learning to spell would be a start. Even by your usual laughable standards, “negligeable’ for ‘negligible’ screams “MINER PUBLIC SKOOL BACGROUND!”.
Would probably get you a job as a Telegraph sub-ed, mind you, If they still had such things.
No evidence that tactics by BBC/MI5 often backfire as did their campaign against Corbyn/Labour at the last election.
The promotion of UKIP was to kill BNP (which was feared more by the Deep State due to Nick Griffin’s attacks on the Banking Cartels), but it became a Frankenstein monster with a life of its own, due to the brilliant advocacy of Farage, without whom the referendum wouldn’t have been won, by Leave.
But I don’t think the referendum was held for internal party reasons, but because Cameron wanted to use a Remain result to join the Euro-currency, which is why the calls for a referendum was always a dangerous strategy for Euro-sceptics.
Remember it was Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party that forced Lab and Con to promise a referendum before joining the Euro.
Although no referendum was held, due to little prospect of it being won, Lab and Con nevertheless promoted extensive and expensive PFI mickey-mouse accounting to keep Britain within the rules for joining the Euro when that became politically possible e.g. after a Remain result.
Saw the same thing done with Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. I happened to be passing Ludgate Circus that day and noted the sparce turnout. I wasn’t particularly interested and had to ask a spectator what was happening that required so many police. I lingered a while to watch the cortege pass then continued on my way. If there hadn’t been such a large police presence I doubt if the majority of those watching would have paused. They were just curious, like me.
After previous BBC airbrushing of Orgreave and Hillsborough, I wasn’t completely surprised to see on the evening news that they had carefully edited selected moments and chosen shots of the spectators making it appear as if the streets were lined with mourners. The viewer was presented with a totally misleading portrayal of the event,
When it comes to managing news and perceptions the BBC could teach Pravda a thing or two.
Perhaps there WERE thousands on the streets to see Maggie’s cortege pass – but that might have been a similar response to the funeral of Louis B Mayer – thousands turned up , we were told , just to make sure the b*stard WAS dead !
This is also from Wings, it shows the hall what its like when full, obviously the miniscule Tory conference had some sort of curtain pulled over to hide the vast cavern behind the paltry amount of Tories in attendance.
https://mobile.twitter.com/dmatson09/status/1124356084523851776
Good find. Looks like they shrunk the place down to about a tenth of its size to make it look like it was alive with Tories.
In contrast Iain, over 100,000 are expected to attend the AUOB march in Glasgow tomorrow.
https://mobile.twitter.com/auobscot?lang=en
RE “over 100,000 are expected to attend the AUOB march…”
And, no doubt, if the BBC cover it they will find a few stragglers to film and label that the march. Its the same with the police figures for protest marches, they halve the number in the estimate in order to make the following look weak.
Well, it is now the day after tomorrow and tens of thousands marched in allegiance for self determination/independence for Scotland. Citizens,not subjects,exercising their democratic right to do so. Ruth Davidson saying she will ~put a stop to indyref once and for all time~ if she becomes First Minister. Her Conservative and Unionist idea of democracy well hoisted.
The same techniques are used in the coverage of protests. They (all corporate press, UK, US and others) will make a small protest seem large when they want to promote it. Enough people to fill the shot, but not enough for the image to show that beyond that crowd there were few others. The shots of fake-President Guido in Venezuela and his tiny coup are recent examples.
Or of course, the more common case is when they want to minimize a protest against corporate rule, when they focus on close up shots of a few protesters, usually chosen as people their can convince their readers/viewers to hate, and never, ever the big, wide shots that show that there were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets.
It is a long established propaganda technique. It is the visual equivalent of selectively quoting people without providing a contextual setting. It has also been condioned as normal through the recent and increasingly common use of mobile phones as cameras. The default orientation does close lateral cropping as a matter of course.
My default view of any close-cropped shots in any publication is ‘what are they trying to hide?’
It Amounts to More Lies from the BBC.
I hope the SNP get O.S.C.E monitors involved, as Craig advised they should have done in 2014
Contrast the Tory picture in Craig’s post to this one from SNP’s April conference – people had to stand at the back in a Huge hall –
https://www.holyrood.com/articles/news/nicola-sturgeon-launches-biggest-campaign-economics-independence-snp-history
And Tomorrow is the Huge All Under One Banner March / Rally.. 100.000 expected.. I shall be one of them. Don’t Believe what the BC tell you about the size of these Marches
https://www.allunderonebanner.scot/
Fluffy literally glowed when Treeza praised him at the beginning of her address to the Scottish lot. Ruthie got a few words of praise too.
That was after the heckler at the earlier Welsh event shouted out to her to resign. He was hustled out
Fluffy was seated to the right of Javid.
Q. What was Javid doing there? Is he Scottish? 🙂
Here are the stats for party membership, confirming Craig’s figure for Tory partei membership. Pathetic cf Labour’s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_party_affiliation_in_the_United_Kingdom
Spot on. I don’t know the situation well in Scotland, but in England, the BBC have been misleading the public all day over the local elections, with clearly pre-prepared spin from Downing Street. They ask us to believe from the early hours of the morning that a) The Tories and Labour have both suffered comparably poor results – when in fact the Tories have lost 12 times as many seats as Labour and in their own heartlands and b) the voters want the government to “get on with” Brexit when in fact the Tory votes went to Remainer parties in the form of the Lib Dems and the Greens. This accompanied, of course, by establishment-led attacks and trolling on Corbyn.
It is disgraceful from the alleged national broadcaster. Returning to the Scottish political scene, I fear Davidson is basically your version of Boris Johnson – a poisonous stooge posing as a “colourful character” that the Tories think will keep their party “relevant” (ie in power).
Thanks for drawing attention to this Craig. Still smiling at the thought of you picking up your award for Britain’s Next Top Model ??
Interesting parallel from coverage of Venezuela in the Guardian of all places:
“And in retrospect it is clear the Tuesday video had been closely cropped to mask the fact that there were only a handful of troops standing with Guaidó.”
Allegedly even Trump begin to wonder.
Trump ‘Asking Questions on Reliability’ of US Intel on Venezuela – Report
https://sptnkne.ws/mu6x
And today the MSM are furious that Putin/Trump have telephoned!?
The worst attended gig ever at the Aberdeen Exhibition & Conference Centre!
This ‘trick of the camera’ technique and selected angles is by no means a new experience. On January 30th, 1933, in Berlin the Nazi press maintained a half million people marched in a torchlight procession through the Brandenburg Gate evidently not knowing that to complete such a parade it would have taken one hour for 10,000 men marching in lines of six and that for four hours 50,000 is the maximum number possible.
Apart from the question of numbers the few original photos are blurred or out of focus and there are no moving pictures at all. This was such a success that Josef Goebbels staged two more similar parades within weeks.
Make what you will out of that.
Much was learnt from the good doctor 🙂
Murray
If the Scottish Conservatives are such a negligeable factor in Scottish politics these days, why are you getting so hot under the collar about how their party conference is filmed? One gets the impression you have nothing more important to write about and that this post is a bit of a stocking filler.
By the way, as you seem very concerned about accuracy and bias, the name of the party is the Conservative and Unionist Party and not the Tory Party. Do try and remember for future posts.
I’ll save Craig’s time and explain for you that the article is about the BBC, not the Tory Party. And you have mis-spelled “negligible”.
I think I can work out what’s going on in Bostock’s mind with his use of “negligeable”. It’s see-through!
Quite, let’s stay away from negligés in this blog please, Bostok
How about addressing Craig politely as ‘Mr Murray’?
The apparent deception of the size of the crowd was achieved in two ways, the first was the manipulation of the space – cordoning off the unused area – to give the impression that the meeting was taking place in a fully packed hall. To achieve the apparent effect of the volume or depth of the audience, the seating was arranged in a semi-circle, as Craig indicated, and a wide angle lens was used to be able to take in the whole scene.
An illustration of the illusion wide angle lenses can create is on the wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-angle_lens#/media/File:Focal_length.jpg
In the photograph you can see that the two bottles, both the same size appear more distant from one another in the first frame than they do in the last. However none of the bottles was moved, the distortion is all in the lens being moved from wide angle to narrow.
Clearly the conference picture was choreographed by the event organisers, it was no accident that the cameras were situated where they were, I assume the event organisers had control over that, not the BBC. If, however, the BBC had any awareness of the fact of such manipulation they did not draw attention to it, relying on the viewing public’s awareness of such tricks. The fact that Craig went to the trouble of counting the members of the audience, helps us put the picture into its correct perspective, also contributors posting a better picture of the whole conference hall helped too.
Craig s post was necessary in order for us to get a clearer picture of the event, drawing our attention to an apparent deception by the BBC.
They’ve been called the Tories a lot longer than they have been known as The Conservative Party as any fule kno.
Craig was in Pakistan iirc when the Billy Mitchell BBC QT scandal broke. The audience for that show has shrunk and the show is clearly tightly controlled. He(Mitchell) has appeared multiple times, and was allowed to basically launch into a rhetorical tirade against the SNP spokeswoman. Then pictures emerged of him in animated discussions with show’s producers and the Tory panellist Michael Forsyth Baron Forsyth of Drumlean, before the show.
Story here : BBC Question Time ‘investigating’ after same man gets in audience multiple times https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/bbc-question-time-investigating-after-13971180
You’re repeating yourself. You don’t need to put the words “lying” and “BBC” in the same sentence. They are synonymous. Of course it is possible to lie without working for the BBC but you can’t work for the BBC and not lie, it’s in the job description.
Perhaps, like Pompeo at the CIA, they go on training courses for lying.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-21/i-was-cia-director-we-lied-we-cheated-we-stole
I wonder if there’s a wee certificate at the end, like “Passed Basic Information Warfare”.
Standard trick that most TV shows use when there are actually very few in the audience. How many times have I counted just 6 rows of ten seats that a low wide angle shot portrays as a massive audience? The only exception might be the Graham Norton show that really does seem to have a big live audience.
And what about those Venezuela filmed reports exaggerating opposition crowds into tens of thousands, whilst Maduro’s supporters, who are in the hundreds of thousands, are shown as small groups?
I do think it is odd that only zoomed-in camera angles are used. I haven’t seen the footage, as I don’t watch TV, and I proudly don’t give the BBC any money. However, I have some doubts about the theory presented here.
Firstly, I am not sure pro-Tory opinion is as uniform among ordinary BBC staff as would be necessary in order to achieve this trick. The board and senior decision managers surely lean to the right, and I have no problem believing that MI5 still advise on who should rise up the ranks, as they used to during the Cold War. I’ve known a few folks who worked for Auntie, and while they were not radicals, I judge that they’d certainly would not keep quiet if asked to participate in a misleading propaganda exercise.
Camera operating and video editing are skilled jobs, but they are not very senior, and they are not managerial. These are the folks who (perhaps mistakenly) believe the BBC are impartial and even-handed, and they would balk at the suggestion that they must submit doctored or biased material. True, anyone who is within physical reaching distance of the PM is likely to be security-vetted to some degree, but that’s not the same thing as having camera-persons who are willing to participate in lying.
It occurs to me that perhaps a skilled (and corrupt) editor could take material from a fair-minded camera-person and create the false impression of a crowded conference, but it still leaves open the question of whether BBC staff editors would be willing to receive such instructions from a shady source. Or would the raw footage be submitted to managers who get an external propaganda team to work on it? If so, would regular (employed) editors not complain at being bypassed?
All that said, there are still some interesting questions to answer, and I wonder if they are more to do with BBC staff being unwilling to speak out. There would be likely many BBC employees at an event of this kind, and presumably most of them will see the broadcast footage. Is the effect of exaggerating the size of the conference blatant, and if so, why has no-one said anything?
You are making a fundamental error. The BBC is not “pro-Tory”. It is “pro-establishment”. The established order is things like the Union, 1% economics, Londoncentrism, American exceptionalism, Western military interventions, the EU, and multiculturalism, so the BBC is slavishly pro all of these things.
In Scottish politics the established order used to be represented by the Labour Party, and there was no level of corruption or incompetence that the BBC wouldn’t diligently cover up on its behalf. For example, the complete airbrushing of the Steven Purcell story from its reporting. Let’s suppose that a high-flying SNP leader of Glasgow Council (one of the half dozen most influential politicians in Scotland) had suddenly one night resigned out of the blue and disappeared off the face of the earth, trailing behind him allegations of associations with Glasgow’s criminal drugs gangs so serious that he had been interviewed by a specialist police drugs squad in the Council HQ (subsequently admitted to be true). Does anybody seriously imagine that the story would have been consigned to a couple of hundred words on page 7 of the BBC Scotland website under a headline “Former Glasgow Councillor Resigns”, and subsequently buried forever? We still have absolutely no idea what Steven Purcell was up to.
The Labour Party in Scotland has shot its bolt. The established order is now represented by the Tories, so the BBC is now pro-Tory in Scotland (which really isn’t anything of a problem to the BBC, as the Scottish Labour Party leadership is pro-Tory as well).
You’re also kidding yourself about the notion of “dissenting voices” in the BBC. It’s identical to “progressive thinking” at the Guardian. As long as these middle-class metropolitan phoneys are indulged in their obsession with grievance and identity politics, allowed to peddle their wares, and facilitated in the belief in their moral superiority to the rest of society, there is nothing they won’t do to prostitute themselves to the establishment. And they will dutifully orchestrate public hostility to anybody or anything that the established order believes to be, or wants to portray as, a threat to its interests – the SNP, UKIP, Brexit, Trump, Putin, Huawei, small countries that won’t toe the US line, the “far right”, Alex Salmond, Julian Assange, Tommy Robinson, Jeremy Corbyn…
Thanks Stonky. We probably aren’t in much disagreement about the effect of the BBC, or indeed whether the BBC has any claim to political evenhandedness or social justice.
However, my question – very much from the left – was about whether working people in the BBC would collaborate with a secret plan to fake the news. I am contending that people doing camera and editing work are not pushovers, nor are they likely to see themselves as part of a metropolitan elite who have a “duty” to shape the news for the benefit of “stupid” viewers. I am pretty sure they would object.
I think you are right about the Guardian too. However in this case a policy objective of exaggerating the attendance of a conference would require several non-managerial/technical professionals to be in on the plan. Do you (or anybody) have any views as to how this is achieved? I think this is different to the Scotland cover-up you mention, as such stories can be de-resourced from quite high up.
When the BBC covered the events at the Orgreave coking plant in June 1984, the film was clearly edited to make the viewer believe that striking pickets attacked the police.
When it was proved not to have been the case, the BBC defended themselves by saying that the sequence of events ‘got mixed up in editing’.
I’ve never believed a word spoken by them or an image presented since.
They were designed as the propaganda arm of the establishment and until the advent of crowd sourced news and commentary delivered via the Internet have been enormously successful.
My children in their forties don’t watch the BBC, my grandchildren in their teens don’t know what it’s for and have simply no interest in anything that appears in their schedules, to them the BBC is an irrelevance, entertainment and news can be sourced elsewhere.
Sure the BBC lies about substantially everything. They probably always have, but as cost pressures mount they need cheaper people and cheaper people tend to be more incompetent and hence their lies are more transparent.
This kind of thing has been going on for ever – wild over estimations of crowds they like and wild under estimations of crowds they don’t like.
When Corbyn stood for the leadership of the Labour Party he could get people to listen to him – but they don;t like Corbyn and so there was little reporting about the people that came to listen to him. In the US they massaged the audiences that Clinton could obtain and tried to obfuscate regarding the popular appeal of Trump. Back to the UK and Tommy Robinson can attract people – and so the BBC seeks to un-person these people.
The BBC despises Scottish Conservatives they just despise Scottish Nationalists more.
Think about the kind of people that the BBC despise: Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, Tommy Robinson and Scottish Nationalists. Can you see a pattern here?
No – there is no pattern and the only way the BBC can get you not to understand what is going on is by infecting the brains of its audiences with identity politics.
There is a very obvious pattern.
It seems to me that the BBC has always misrepresented, and it’s always been an establishment propaganda tool, but it’s descent into risible farce isn’t to do with funding. I see two causes, which are perhaps related.
The first is the invention of the internet, which allows mass communication between ordinary people without gatekeepers. This is why there is such an effort to crack down on free speech on the internet, which became apparent to me as soon as I heard the word “cyber-bullying”.
The second is the continuing and accelerating decay of the establishment’s grip on the minds and perceptions of ordinary people. More and more people see the true nature of the powers that be, and hold them in the contempt they deserve. The descent into overt censorship and falsehood is a consequence of this more than it is a cause.
“Sure the BBC lies about substantially everything. They probably always have, but as cost pressures mount they need cheaper people and cheaper people tend to be more incompetent and hence their lies are more transparent.”
I haven’t noticed that they employ cheaper people judging by the row about inequalities in salaries when we learned that John Humphries gets paid a very high salary.
Lower wages for people who know how to do things like camerawork and editing pays for more money for managers and presenters.
Any MSGA baseball caps on sale ?!
I haven’t yet worked out what the BBC line on the results of the local elections in England actually means. They are leading on “Labour and the Tories both lost lots of seats”, and only then do they mention that “the Liberal Democrats and Greens” did well. If EU elections are held in Britain later this month, then how will even a surprise result matter? A lot depends on whether a withdrawal agreement gets ratified by the House of Commons, although that may be stating the obvious. Neither Theresa May nor Jeremy Corbyn seem to be in a strong position, but that may make a Labour-Tory deal more rather than less likely. In the event of an EU election, in itself Chuka Umunna going to Strasbourg with a band of however many followers has hardly any importance except as another blow at Jeremy Corbyn in a possible run-up to a British general election.
The line about “Liberal Democrats and Greens” is partly in preparation for ramping up ChUK, UKIP, the Brexit Party, and Tommy Robinson as an Independent, plus the Liberal Democrats as a choice for some Remainers who would otherwise vote Labour. The Greens? Well perhaps they will be a sensation as they were in the EU elections in Britain in 1989 or perhaps they will fizzle. The danger from the elite’s point of view with the Greens is that they may end up taking far more votes from the Tories than from Labour. (Greenism is basically right wing. He who says class doesn’t matter is saying the ruling class is great.)
Surprised the UK doesn’t do “rent a crowd” yet; a business opportunity.
No need. It’s far cheaper just to rely on the BBC to cover your event.
They don’t? Extinction Rebellion!
The BBC coverage of Brexit has been a long two years of biased reporting. In fact ithis has probably played a part on why the debate about it has been so useless. Throughout this last two years the BBC has presented mainly the view that Brexit was a Tory drama without pointing out that the Tories were a minority government with no mandate whatsoever to carry out such a complicated process that affects us all, and that this process was delegated to a mere handful of people.
When panels contained other than the Tory view, they often included the Blairites remainers who often took this opportunity to undermine Corbyn and often started by saying how shocked they were about AS in the party, irrespective of topic discussed.
I wish someone would do a media study to show this bias.
Dear oh dear: both manifestos of Labour and Tory expressed stated that Brexit referendum result would be respected. They may have been metaphorically perjuring themselves, but Brexit had an overwhelming mandate in the 2017 popular vote.
Whether you like that or not, you should not tell bare-faced lies here.
you can see why tptb are wishing to control user generated content online when connected people are openly skeptical of the BBC & their other initiative partners wrong emphasis
https://evolvepolitics.com/breaking-tories-exceed-worst-case-scenario-after-losing-more-than-1000-councillors-in-catastrophic-local-election-rout/
[Sky] reporter Beth Rigby stating that 1,000 losses would be a “catastrophic” result for the party.[conservative party]
that “thousand” was the apparent ‘worst’ possible outcome ever , checking a few papers this morning, many with no figures given, until (evening) Standard gave this with gains the Tories were down by a net figure of 1,269, …. Labour down by 63
So LAB have just 5% of the losses compared to CON, why doesn’t that fact come across in the news , a Hanslope Park effect?
and further from the evolve politics blog anove despite the Tories’ suffering an absolute rout, the BBC are still attempting to push the narrative that both Labour and the Tories have fared equally badly – with their main headline still stating “Main parties hit by Brexit backlash in polls“.
The mainstream narrative has now become so clearly deluded and devoid of reality, that even ostensibly mainstream commentators have begun to call it out
on the BBC R4 news bulletin at 05:30, I do not recall the BBC actually mentioning the full figure of CON losses, but they did for LAB.
the editors carefully chose to lead “the Papers” section with reviewing briefly the Daily Mail and express , which wrongly tweaked Corbyn’s nipples instead of those of Theresa.
is there a reason why they never review this paper?, https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/theresa-ignores-local-election-losses-14994092
Stopping Corbyn is far more important to the British establishment than stopping Brexit. One thing it is possible to predict with certainty for coming years is that mainstream media will continue to do everything to paint the Tories in the best possible light and Corbyn in the worst possible light.
Is it maybe as simple as a good camera man usually trying to get nice and artistic pictures? Pictures of empty seats are boring. I wouldn’t frame and put up on my wall an empty seat picture; but (if I were a rabid Scottish Conservative) I might frame and put up on the wall the Ruth Davidson shot, which is a “nice picture”. It’s the same as filming a football match – you film the goals, not the boring bits. The cameraman uses his skills to make the image “nice”, whether it’s daisies or a conference.
The Guardian confesses that “others” also distorted visuals of the Venezuelan mini coup that fizzled out: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/03/venezuela-protests-news-latest-maduro-uprising-that-fizzled-
A totally different suspicious trace: some people were not victims although they were a majority in a nation. Example: in the Easter suicide bombings on Sri Lanka no Sinhalese Buddhists were killed although they form 70% of the population. Some didn’t want them hurt.
I don’t complain about the BBC showing the Scottish Conservative conference in a favourable light and all conferences by different groups, which it should do in support of democracy, as democracy is a minority but essential sport!
You do get big crowds for a rally, often about an enthusiastic single issue, but its the anoraks, admittedly some are very well paid, who attend the boring meetings who should be rewarded with respectful coverage of a conference attendance.
Its when the BBC fails to do so it reveals its partisanship and is deservedly denounced, inviting the need to make it democratically accountable and impartial as it should be as the licence fee is paid by all shades of opinion.
Mrs. Murray’s observations about the massive crowds at the Scottish Tory Conference on BBC-tv camera angles, she is 100pc correct. Trump had similar coverage on FOX with his ‘huge’ (Ha, Ha) crowds of support in Washington DC. Farage had similar coverage with his march to London with an attendance worthy of a village green cricket match.
Re. democracy in the UK a giant yawn split the cosmos in this week’s elections, and our twisted media have no clue how to spin the story which is too far off-the-plot. Overall the biggest beneficiaries in the elections were the LibDems and the Greens. The biggest losers by many miles were the Conservatives. No amount of fantasy spin about Labour’s vote collapsing and Corbyn being an anti-semitic neo-Stalin, Nigel Farage becoming the UK’s Donald Trump, Boris Johnson rising, the Rees Mogg dynasty, and the Indie Tiggers can disguise what happened. The Conservatives lost, just as emphatically as Liverpool FC did in Barcelona 0-3.
Few in our media acknowledged the fact that the LibDems are a pro-Remain party, and they did extremely well. So are the Greens.
Can’t wait for a general election. The MEP EU elections will be End-of-the-Pier material.
Puff piece for Davidson in the Guardian reads like a Tory press release.
Ruth Davidson
Ruth Davidson to urge voters to back global vision for Scotland
Scottish Tory leader will criticise SNP’s view of country in speech at party conference
Libby Brooks Scotland correspondent
Sat 4 May 2019 00.01 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/04/ruth-davidson-urge-voters-back-global-vision-scotland
Nine mentions of her name in the short piece. Photo of her and Javid, both grinning.
Note the anti-SNP message.
This morning, the Times have a two page spread promoting Hancock for leadership. The Mail is going for Hunt with details of his striding the world stage around Africa. There is a photo of his Chinese wife hugging a nun and more from him on persecution of Christians. No mention of what the West has been doing to Muslims in the ME and elsewhere.
Raab and Davis are also in the MSM’s frame to replace May. May the Lord preserve us from these puppets..
What do you expect a Scottish Tory to do? Found the Church of the Sacred Heart of Nicola?!
They are unlikely to support the SNP, so stop trying to claim it is an outrage that they are not.
Yes, the BBC should be ashamed of itself, even for pretending to be news channel. And where are the major ‘investigative reporters’ who receive state honours but are silent on hugely significant matters.
See this on Venezuela.
http://medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2019/902-40-000-dead-venezuelans-under-us-sanctions-corporate-media-turn-a-blind-eye.html