Fred Skulthorp has written an excellent piece in the Critic about Marianna Spring, the BBC’s ‘Disinformation Reporter’, pointing out that at least one colleague of hers has reservations about her reporting. Here’s how it begins:
Last Wednesday morning, the German police announced to the world they had foiled a far-right plot to take over the country. The apparent leader of the coup, a minor Aristocrat called Heinrich XIII, was arrested alongside 25 others including a celebrity chef.
That night Marianna Spring, the BBC’s ‘Disinformation Reporter’, took to News at Ten to tell the nation:
Whilst this group predates the pandemic, its audacious plot and its commitment to it perhaps goes hand in hand with the rise of disinformation about COVID-19 and the violent rhetoric that has accompanied that … The legacy [of the pandemic] and the conspiracy legacy that it leaves remains, and it can embolden these fringe groups in a way that just didn’t happen before and that’s really quite frightening.
The COVID-19 disinformation angle was a curious one in a story that has since emerged to be far more complex. Indeed, in deploying Marianna as the lead correspondent on the story, the BBC appeared to be the only ones especially keen to push it.
The group, unsurprisingly, believed some barmy things about not just the pandemic but pretty much everything else currently on the news agenda. Membership of the Reichsbürger, the dissident movement from which the coup emerged, had also risen by 4,500 to 21,000 since 2017.
The rest of her take was just bizarre — not least her implication that prior to the pandemic, mad people have never believed mad things and acted them out. At best, it was the sort of half-baked journalism hardly befitting the News at Ten. At worst, it was a tabloidy attempt to invoke a wider sense of paranoia about further violence in the wake of the “conspiracy legacy of the pandemic”.
I wasn’t surprised by the whole affair. I’ve followed Marianna Spring’s career at the BBC with acute frustration. I don’t doubt she has some talent as a reporter, but I have increasing concern about the way she has been managed at the corporation over the pandemic — and I am not alone.
The ‘Disinformation Unit’ she pioneered now has a deserved reputation both inside and outside the organisation for being a de-facto mouthpiece for the Government during those years. Watching Spring assert on the evening news that the events in Germany were more or less a consequence of “pandemic disinformation” made for uncomfortable viewing. Not least because Marianna and her team’s definition of “disinformation” has in the past appeared to implicate everyone from Peter Hitchens to an NHS doctor. What did she mean by it this time?
Worth reading in full.
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Nazi salute you say? From the Nazi Demon Party maybe?
And they’re socialists, just like Hitler was!
Ah, but those are three right-armed and one left-armed right sort of sincere, compassionate and deeply principled salute, whereas nasty evil far-right Mr Musket’s wrong sort of projected right arm clearly belongs held aloft at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Got it? Under no circumstance mention The War, Midnight Rallies or Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms.
The left: “and we don’t like Musk, so there!”
My favourite nickname for Senator Elizabeth Warren is walking Eagle,because she’s too full of poo to fly.
If you were the suspicious kind you would wonder if scheduling the trial, abbreviated by a handy guilty plea, alongside another newsworthy event was not merely a coincidence but a stage managed ‘nothing to see here’ trial.
But then you would have to ask yourself ‘What is being covered up?’. Several other mysterious news non-events make me wonder if people are being leaned upon to prevent (no pun intended) embarrassing disclosures. Perhaps Prevent are merely scapegoats in this particular case?
Cover-up Keir motto: All the news that ordinary people are allowed to know.
The trials of the Labour councillor (now on bail) who is alleged to have incited murder,and the alleged attempted murderer of an Army Colonel in Rochester were scheduled for the same day,but unaccountably delayed.
2TK team working hard.
‘Ang on a minute, first you say this ‘igson geezer’s a comedy writer, and the next you mention the “fast show” – can you plse make your mind up?
Reportedly there was some link between the murderer’s father and 2TK.
Perhaps he bought him a dress or something.
The Uniparties have to keep the B word out of the media at all costs. So they are blaming Amazon for selling the knife and EM for everything else.
The B word involves the videos that Axel followed and would upset every decent person in the Country.
If you think the accusations are absurd now, just wait till they start loading those planes with illegal gimmiegrants.
“illegal gimmiegrants” nice!
Mea culpa. I am showing extremist traits as outlined above, all the way from Shakespeare, through Tolkien, The Great Escape et al. I even hide my identity behind a nom de plume. I am unrepentant.
What are these space cadets smoking? That’s what I’d like to know. How does one manage to go through a single day ignoring the many contradictory facts that surround them which cancel out their viewpoint easily, whilst doubling down on their completely fictional inner narrative that has no basis in truth? It’s like a form of self-hypnosis, surely? Is it not just similar to being radicalized or belonging to a cult?
”James O’Brien blames Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos for the Southport stabbing.
The mental gymnastics is astonishing. Crazy to think that people take this man seriously.”
https://x.com/jessgill03/status/1882051266697941338
This is funny though…
https://x.com/throughist/status/1882157660763771083/photo/1
Pathetic Leftards desperately scraping the barrel and demonstrating just how lobotomized and idiotic they really are. The only way they can get any of their poisonous rhetoric to make sense is by denying reality. Facts are like kryptonite because basic data can easily contradict their bilge in one fell swoop, ergo highlighting their relentless bullshittery, so truth must be ignored at all costs. Who wants inconvenient truths when you’ve an agenda to push? Sadiq The Khant is a master of this art, but the examples are all over the shop.
From Germany, just another traitor in complete denial, but I think there’s a factory somewhere churning out these treacherous, delusional imbeciles. I suspect it’s in Brussels;
”German Green MP Katrin Göring-Eckardt often celebrates changing demographics in Germany, despite years of terror and soaring crime.
“We are talking about what our country will look like in 20 or 30 years’ time. It will become younger. How great is that? How long have we been talking about demographics? It will become more colorful. How wonderful that is?”
Germany has been hit with a wave of terror attacks in recent months featuring foreigners, including the most recent one in Aschaffenburg, which saw a 2-year-old child and a man stabbed to death by an Afghan national who should have been deported.”
https://x.com/RMXnews/status/1882152553829355690
Et tu, Charlie Higson? FFS.
“The Great Escape, did Prevent think they were automatically on the side of the guards?”
That got me thinking of a Top Gear episode in Germany when Clarkson asked…”When you watch a War film, what side are you on” LOL.
How Come Elon Musk is Automatically a Nazi, But Axel Rudakubana Definitely Isn’t a Terrorist?
Elon Musk – has a skin colour of the people the madleft consider to be “world poisoners”.
Axel Rudakubana – is a person of sacred skin colour
The simple fact that the left feel the need to put this forward as a serious piece of discussion shows that they are beaten. Its an enormous ‘mopping up’ exercise, but they are done.
A commentator on Fox News who says that the Left and MSM know it’s all over, it’s all they’ve got, like a fat man on death row, what’s the point of dieting.