A final swipe at the feral beasts

Cherie Blair's final swipe at the Feral Beasts as she and her husband left Downing Street for the last time has attracted the attentio of the BBC's Nick Robinson.

He calls it a"gob smackingly spine chillingly,hairaisingly,extraordinary.

Given that the plan was for the Blair's to say nothing,once again the former PM is let down with a gaff from his wife.

"Goodbye-I don't think I will miss you" were her words on the momentous occasion

Today's media comment.

The feral beast debate continues,Steven Glover in the Indy,argues that far form being baited by the press,the Prime Minister has had a good innings

"

The biggest misconception, which even some of the speech's
critics have accepted, was that Tony Blair has been given a hard time by the
press. Arguably, he has been recently, at least by some titles. But for the most
of his time in Number 10 – from 1997 until the summer of 2003 – he enjoyed by
far the most favourable media treatment of any modern British Prime Minister.
His brilliant achievement, and that of Alastair Campbell, was to square both the
right-wing and the left-wing press."

Peter Wilby in the Guardian maintains that

"Most journalists hunt as a pack. This truth was
marvellously captured in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, where the correspondents assigned
to the African republic of Ishmaelia depart from the capital in a motorised
convoy, leaving Boot, the nature columnist mistakenly sent by The Beast, to get
a world exclusive. Like most human beings, journalists are driven by fear more
than by ambition. "

Robert Worcester interviewed in the Indy was

not impressed by Mr Blair's performance at Reuters last
Tuesday, ........It's the height of hypocrisy from the man who employed Peter
Mandelson, the architect of spin and manipulation

But agreed with some of the sentiments and

feels that an overhaul of British media standards is
long overdue. "Most newspapers, in fact all news outlets these days, have an
attitude and they are aggressive about it," he says. "News is not sacrosanct
it's a commodity, journalism is not a calling it's just another job. Why has it
happened? Because editors don't keep their jobs long if they stand up for good
journalism and behind their journalists."

The Guardian looks forward to the Brown era,James Silver asking,Will Gordon stop the spin?

Brown's communications team is setting out to restore
the public's trust in New Labour by bringing the shutters down on the so-called
age of spin.

But will it be that different

"

At the moment the signs are extremely positive," says Sky
News's political editor Adam Boulton

But:

The suggestion that the age of spin is over is I'm afraid
just spin. Actually there will still be a lot of spin; it'll just go into a
different spin cycle with maybe a change of temperature

.

What the Sunday's are saying on the media

The Sunday Times reports that the BBC

1. "is institutionally biased, an official report will conclude this week. The year-long investigation, commissioned by the BBC, has found the corporation particularly partial in its treatment of single-issue politics such as climate change, poverty, race and religion. "

Adding that there is a

" danger of BBC programmes being undermined by the
liberal culture of its staff, who need to challenge their own assumptions more.
“There is a tendency to ‘group think’ with too many staff inhabiting a shared
space and comfort zone,”

Of cause the fallout from Blair's comments on the feral press continues,the Mail on Sunday speculates that

"

that the hidden hand of Campbell, his former
speech writer, was at work. "adding the

"speech contains amazing similarities to remarks by
Campbell on the same subject just eight months ago

. "

Incidently John Rentoul in the Sindy says

"Not mentioned once in the speech was the Daily Mail,
which is loathed by Blair, his wife and his former press secretary. Blair once
said to John Lloyd, whose Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
co-hosted Tuesday's speech: "The Daily Mail is an extraordinary product. It
springs from the head of Paul Dacre, who has the kind of prejudices and beliefs
no one knows about. I won't go into them. But he is accountable to no one. He
has absolute and unaccountable power."

Andrew Gilligan writing in the Observer speculates

" whether he actually reads his own speeches before he delivers them"

For Gilligan

"

if the power of the media to shape events is limited, the
power of governments, even discredited ones, to do so is huge. We have laptops
and expense accounts; they have the army, navy and air force. When Mr Blair
calls for more 'ordinary reporting', I suspect he means newspapers filled with
whatever launches or announcements the government has decided shall be news that
day."

Staying with the Observer Peter Preston asks that "Panorama needs to find a slot that fits the crime"

"Nobody - from Jamaican pathologists to the entire
Fleet Street pack - came well out of Bob Woolmer's (ultimately) accidental
death. But one reputation among many looks in particular jeopardy. What happens
when the BBC's flagship hits the rocks"

A question of ownership

Polly Toynbee's assertion that "Blair's speech omitted the root of the problem with the media - the ownership structure he did nothing to break ",will I am sure arouse a great deal of comment.

She agrees with Blair's pronouncements saying he was

"

dead right about the British media. It's a fleet of runaway JCB diggers without
driver or brakes, beyond accountability or control even by those who nominally
run them."

And her diagnosis is even worse than Blair's

The newspaper agenda, slavishly followed by the BBC,
reflects a profoundly dystopic image of a society where nothing works,
everything gets worse, public officials are inept, public services fail, tax is
wasted, lethal dangers proliferate, and everyone conspires to lie about it. Then
sententious editorials complain that children are being locked in by frightened
parents!

The problem is something that he has not addressed

"the ownership structure he did nothing to break. Had
he been brave, he could have restored media ownership rules to pre-Thatcher days. She let
Murdoch burn the rulebook to acquire over 40% of newspaper ownership. She
arranged a unique get-out clause in EU media law to allow him to launch Sky.
"

Of cause whether any future politician will tackle the issues seems at the moment unlikely.Without the support of the majority of the press,as both Kinnock and Major found to their cost,you will never be elected.If breaking the ownership monopoly is the way forward we need a major shift in political thought.

What does Feral mean anyway

It appears that the word feral in regard to the media has a wider coverage than perhaps we thought.

This from the Editors Weblog

"Today the political and satirical Croatian weekly,
Feral Tribune, is being forced to close, due to an overwhelming tax debt. The
finance ministry froze the Tribune’s bank accounts because of 68,000 € of unpaid
value-added tax (VAT). "

What does the word "Feral mean anyway.According to Wikipedia

A feral organism is one that has escaped from domestication and returned, partly
or wholly, to its wild state. Rarely will a local
environment perfectly integrate the feral organism into its established ecology. Therefore, feral animals
and plants can cause disruption or extinction to some indigenous
species, affecting wilderness and other fragile ecosystems

However according to Gal Beckerman,the PM's choice of animal was incorrect

"If the press were an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I’ve got my answer. I’m imagining a legion of lemmings, furry and well-intentioned, but ultimately condemned by their nature to follow each other mindlessly off a tall cliff, over the Paris Hilton peak or into the Invade Iraq crevasse."




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