I am not going to close this petiton...

...but I think this petition – and the Laura Kuenssburg story – are losing momentum now, so – what to do? Conclusions? The petition on the government site calling for an end to politicians choosing BBC governors hasn’t really taken off. There are other petitions on the subject, but... I contacted the 38 degrees team on 22nd May and received a reply from ‘Katie and the team’ on 26th May. I may as well summarise: they are sorry we were frustrated. They sent us links to Babbs’ Guardian article and blog. I don’t like linking to the Guardian, so I’ll summarise the points he made: In the Guardian article Babbs says the petition was removed because “A small number of people signing the petition were using it as a launch pad for sexist hate speech towards her on other platforms such as Twitter” and points out that another petition on their site has 400 000 signatures standing up for the BBC and calling for “its independence and funding to be protected” – as if this is a point in Kuenssberg’s favour. He also claims that discovering some misogynistic comments on Twitter came as a shock to him, his team and the petition writer – I still can’t read that line with a straight face – the director of a major social media tool is telling us that he was not aware that everything on the open web occasionally gets smutty, gutter-level comments? Our answer to that, in our petition letter was, “If the comments are on your site, delete them. If they’re on someone else’s site, report them.” Of course, many people said that to Babbs but rather confusingly, his response on his blog was that they have both an automatic filter and a reporting system, both of which they used to remove troublesome comments from the offending petition. He goes on to say… “We looked at comments left on the petition, and checked twitter. We saw enough comments on both to feel that there was a genuine problem with the petition acting as a launchpad for sexist abuse.” This really doesn’t make sense – in effect, “we took the offending comments off then discovered the ones we’d left on offended us” Here’s a reminder of what Craig Murray had to say about that… https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/?s=laura+Kuenssberg I don’t watch BBC news but, judging by her Twitter account, Laura Kuenssberg is still BBC political editor and still a narrow tory. All I can say is, we all need to understand the media, and what news is and what isn’t. If you’re not familiar with the techniques the corporate media use to make, rather than report, the news, try a tour of Medialens… http://www.medialens.org/ Here’s a ‘The Web They Want’ on the off-guardian website. Do have a tour of that site if you haven’t seen it before. Might be an idea to post a link from that site as a comment when your Guardian-loving friends share articles… https://off-guardian.org/2016/05/26/the-web-they-want-how-a-twitter-wordsearch-justifies-internet-censorship/ … I’ll leave the petition here – if anyone else wants to keep plugging it, feel free. Give me a shout if it hits a significant figure and I’ll send the list in to 38degrees but the most important thing, in my opinion, is to spread an understanding of the problem we all face. The corporate media, the BBC and most of our politicians, appear to belong, first and foremost, to “powerful” people like billionaires Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre and the Barclay Brothers. The BBC now has ex-Murdoch people in positions of power. They are not going to produce unbiased news. If there is one good thing I can see coming out of this petition experiment, it is a chance to say to nearly 5000 people, please stop saying “the mainstream media”, start saying “the corporate media” and stop reading/watching it. Take every opportunity to show the producers of bias up for what they are. You wouldn’t get your news from “Hedge Fund Managers’ Times” would you? But that could be the title of any corporate owned/influenced publication/TV channel. If you haven’t already done so, please go and find alternative sources of news and promote them to your friends. The media are only as powerful as we make them. Let’s learn to ignore them. The Real Media might be a good place to start… http://realmedia.press/ On Facebook, the Canary gives political commentary daily, and often links to decent, non-corporate news sources. https://www.facebook.com/TheCanaryPosts/?fref=ts