Monday 21 December 2009

Gaunt toes the party line

The latest entry in the (not quite) daily blog from Sun loudmouth Jon Gaunt is an attack on the BBC. Starting off on Jonathan Ross' salary, it expands into a wider rant about the Corporation and how he thinks it could save money. He says that the first things to be cut should be management salaries and then, with no hint of irony:

the excess in the digital channels that no listens to or watches.

Yes, he still has problems with his grammar. But as Matthew Norman pointed out recently, listener figures for SunTalk, where Gaunt has a show, have never been made public. That must be a measure of how large the numbers are...

He goes on:

The axe then should fall swiftly on the ridiculous Asian network and he should immediately privatise Radio 1 and 2.

It's not hard to guess why he's picked on the Asian Network, is it?

Finally, he adds:

Clearly the BBC's domination of the Internet has to be curtailed as they have no right to effectively, with our money, suppress entrepreneurial enterprise with their almost monopoly position.

Hmm. Complaining about a BBC monopoly suppressing 'entrepreneurial enterprise'? Who could he mean?

Surely not Sky News which, like The Sun, is owned by Rupert Murdoch?

And his views are clearly nothing at all like the sentiments expressed by James Murdoch in Edinburgh in August:

In this all-media marketplace, the expansion of state-sponsored journalism is a threat to the plurality and independence of news provision, which are so important for our democracy.

Dumping free, state-sponsored news on the market makes it incredibly difficult for journalism to flourish on the internet.

Yet it is essential for the future of independent digital journalism that a fair price can be charged for news to people who value it.

We seem to have decided as a society to let independence and plurality wither. To let the BBC throttle the news market and then get bigger to compensate.

In other words: clip the BBC's wings so the Murdoch empire can earn more money.

Towards the end, Murdoch said:

People value honest, fearless, and above all independent news coverage that challenges the consensus.

Honest like Fox News, presumably. The 'consensus' Fox challenges is known as reality.

(Read Charlie Brooker's excellent take on the Murdoch speech)

2 comments:

  1. "People value honest, fearless, and above all independent news coverage"

    ...accompanied by toadying, pant-shitting and above all sycophantic comment pieces that the writer hopes will keep him in the boss's good books, presumably?

    ReplyDelete
  2. When he was presenting a show on BBC Radio London some years ago, Gaunt called me a "racist" because I said that a radio show about London and Londers shouldn't be presented by a man who travels down from Coventry every day. Yet another example of someone who twists words and their meanings to support his own twisted view of the world.

    ReplyDelete

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