Laura Dodsworth and I have filed a complaint with Ofcom about a report issued by the Behavioural Insights Team and Sky urging broadcasters to use sophisticated psychological techniques derived from behavioural science to persuade people to support the Government’s ‘Net Zero’ agenda. Sky proudly boasted in the report that it was already using these subliminal techniques, which we think is a breach of Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code – in particular, the prohibition on using “techniques which exploit the possibility of conveying a message to viewers or listeners, or of otherwise influencing their minds without their being aware, or fully aware, of what has occurred”. Here is the gist of our complaint, taken from our letter to Melanie Dawes, the Chief Executive of Ofcom:
We are writing to alert you to a broadcast license complaint we have made about Sky U.K. Our complaint concerns a partnership between Sky and Behavioural Insights U.K., Known as the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), a limited company that was partly owned by the Government at the time the report was published. We believe this partnership – and, in particular, Sky’s adoption of BIT’s recommendations about how to help the Conservative Government successfully implement one of its most political contentious policy, namely, Net Zero – contravenes the Broadcasting Code.
The partnership we’re referring to resulted in the publication of “The Power of TV: Nudging Viewers to Decarbonise their Lifestyles” and the launch of Sky’s ‘Sky Zero’ campaign, which recommended that broadcasters make use of “behavioural science principles”, including subliminal messaging (“nudging” in the parlance of BIT, which is colloquially known as the Nudge Unit), to encourage viewers to endorse and comply with Conservative Government policy. Alarmingly, the report recommends broadcasters utilise sophisticated psychological techniques to change the behaviour of children “because of the important influence they have on the attitude and behaviours of their parents”.
The letter is worth reading in full.
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Type in ‘Sean Lock Eight out of ten cats does countdown, Rachel Riley’. Utterly hilarious, filthy and outrageaous in equal measure. Sean Lock was a comic genius.
I suspect that he got more outrageous when he knew that he wasn’t going to live to be an old man.
That said – he was, I suspect, always on the edge of being cancelled.
It was funny in 2008, it’s funny now ….this thread has been running on the Spectator for a few days.
It’s agreed that Doris O’Brien is a hypocrite.
…ah bless…it’s the new way isn’t it…if you don’t like my beliefs and convictions today…. don’t worry I have plenty more that might suit the occasion!!
Do not click on Dory Oh Brian’s twitter unless you’re ready to read some of the most stupid things ever written by man. Absolute king-knob of the virtue signalling blob.
What a fuckwit he is.
He’s far better on programmes about astronomy, provided you can suspend your knowledge of his other personas.
Dory Oh Brian is a prick, always was, always will be.
Once a prick, always a prick.
Comedy is the modern ersatz for culture. It’s basic principle is to supplant continuous movement in circles for substance and it’s implict message is Nothing matters because everything can be ridiculed. Keep laughing, otherwise, you might start thinking and that’s soo boring!
Not everything can be ridiculed though – mock any unfunny lezzer (Hannah Gadsby and Rosie Jones are two good examples) and watch most social meeja come down like a censorious ton of bricks
Hannah Gadsby (born 1978) is an Australian comedian, writer, and actor. They began their career in Australia after winning the national final of the Raw Comedy competition for new comedians in 2006.
[Wikipedia]
Both Hannah and Gadsby, I presume. Do they sometimes fight over control of the single body they’re apparently sharing?
Apart from that, I was trying to make a technical point: Everything is open (or perhaps vulnerable) to ridicule by professional ridiculers. The people who were making jokes about womb-man in 2008 are nowadays probably making very similar jokes about transphobes. I didn’t mean to say that the establishment believes it would be culturally ok to ridicule everything, only whatever they disapprove of today.
So now we all know what a cultural revolution looks like.
It is driven by terror and makes people do things they don’t really want to do out of fear.
The courageous stand up and get devoured. The “smart” ones play along and will flip back if the wind changes direction again.
Like with lockdowns, covid jabs and vax passports. Against, then for, then against again.
The only silver lining is that we get to find out who people really are.
The reason I’m ‘far right’ is that these type of people are ‘far left’.
When someone moves so far left most folk are far right, and I’m most definitely, proudly, unashamedly to their far right.
It’s a relative term, like east and west.
In 40 years I have gone from centre left to far right without substantially changing my position on anything.
My first GE was 1979, and I’ve always been on the political right – by now I probably make Hitler look moderate.
I believe, with respect, Hitler was actually far left.
In modern usage, these terms are simply meaningless labels supposed to signal relative approval or disapproval. People calling themselves left use right when they mean to say “I disapprove of that” and left for “I approve of that”, people calling themselves right do it the other way round. The disapproval direction may be qualified with far or extreme to make it “I strongly disapprove of that!”.
In historical usage after the French revolution where left meant repulicans and right monarchists, this being derived from the sitting order in the revolutionary French national assembly, left converges towards internationalism based on the idea of the universal equality of all people and right converges towards nationalism and valueing individuals for their unique qualities (or condemning them for the lack thereof).
Not if you listen to the woke.
In a completely unconfrontational but curious way, I have to ask for an example or two of the non-change to which you refer. I myself definitely held vaguely leftie views as a student (on some things but certainly not all), which I’ve abandoned over the years as reality has acted on me; but I have changed. Is there anything you can put your finger on, as an example of your not having changed, or is “substantially” the key word here?
Me and many others too
I’ve just discovered that I have a copy on an old back-up hard drive
Groucho knew:
“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”