Big Sticks and Small Carrots

Insomnia - Day 4

I’ve not felt like writing much in the last couple of days as I haven’t been sleeping well. A combination of reasons are to blame but I won’t bore you with the details. I’ve been trying to take my mind off things with some blog experimenting. More details on this in my next post. Anyway, since I don’t feel in the frame of mind to write much, here are links to some posts which I thought were good. I’ve got no connection to these proper bloggers other than the fact that I read them.

Chicken Yoghurt provides lots of very good reasons why you should support the people of Backing Blair.
Perfect.co.uk has reaction to the nomination of Wolfowitz as the new head of the World Bank.
Guido lays into all three main parties.
MediaMediaWatch isn’t very complimentary to the religious groups who are harrassing the BBC over the Jerry Springer saga. Lots more info on this available on this site. I chose this post because of the last line.
Edit - Oops, that should be MediaWatchWatch. Silly me.

Finally, Bloggerheads has a screen grab which might amuse.
(I’ve been on a nameless blog this evening which mentioned this effect but with an update saying that it no longer works. At least the evidence is forever preserved.)

Comments and/or trackbacks may be forthcoming. I never know whether this is good manners or leeching on the good work of others. Advice welcome.

Anne Begg, Labour MP for Aberdeen South, is, as the title of this post suggests, my MP. She has her own website here. If you’ve read some of my other posts, you’ll know what I think of Tony Blair, and you’ll know that I don’t want him to be Prime Minister after the election. To this end, I started to look up information about my Labour MP. I am a fan of Bloggerheads and had half a mind to set up a proxy weblog on behalf of my MP, even if only for the length of the general election campaign.

Now that I have researched the performance of my MP, I’ve realised that it wouldn’t be fair. I looked up Anne Begg on They Work For You.com. It is a user friendly resource which gives history and performance data for all MP’s. It’s definitely worth a look if you want to find out about your own MP quickly and easily. I discovered that, although Anne is normally a loyal Labour voter in the House, she did vote against the invasion of Iraq and for an ammendment stating that the case for military action was unproven. With this in mind, I feel that I cannot set up a proxy weblog on behalf on Anne Begg.

I do think that MP’s should keep their own weblogs, so I’ve emailed Anne and suggested that she might want to do just that. I also explained my own position and gave the address of this blog in case she wants to know more about me. I will continue to do as much as I can to reduce the Labour majority in the next parliament. Strategic Voter suggests that the Liberal Democrats are expected to win Aberdeen South at the election. For the sake of the country, I hope they are right. Anne Begg, perhaps undeservedly, may have to pay the price for belonging to a party led by a war happy Prime Minister.

I’ve been continuing my experiments in the wonderful world of blog. I’ve still got some tidying up to do but it’s all going rather well. More details to follow.

I feel it would be remiss of me if I didn’t say hurray for blogger.
(That’s assuming this post ever gets published)

Under Deconstruction

Normal service will be resumed asap (that’s assuming it doesn’t all go horribly wrong of course).

I have to be honest here and admit that I’ve never really taken this accusation seriously. I’ve always thought that people who speak about a left wing media conspiracy are just doing it to annoy people from the left. Now that I’ve started using the interweb to get more of my information, I’ve made a startling discovery (startling for me anyway). I’ve started to realise that there are a lot of people who actually believe in this conspiracy theory. I am astonished. I cannot see how a rational person could possibly think this way. As I’ve been busy today and haven’t caught up on the news, and as I’ve been thinking about doing a post on this issue for a little while, here it is:

I wrote I Believe in the BBC a while back. To me, it seems to stand well enough on its own, even if I would like to edit it slightly. As I understand it, this would defeat the whole point of blogging and so it stands as I wrote it. To emphasis the point I was trying to make, I’ve found this from one of my all time favourite authors:
“Television companies are not in the business of delivering television programmes to their audience, they’re in the business of delivering audiences to their advertisers. (This is why the BBC has such a schizophrenic time - it’s actually in a different business from all its competitors.)“
Taken from The Salmon of Doubt, What have we got to lose? p116, Douglas Adams.

Just to state what I hope is obvious, almost all media sources are funded by advertising and this is likely to have an impact on the programmes, articles, and news items which they create. You can imagine a situation where an editor, faced with a choice about whether to publish a negative news story concerning one of his or her largest revenue providers, would be unlikely to risk losing such revenue by publishing the story. It is just possible that this is why you can still buy a certain brand of filtered tap water in some countries, but you cannot buy it in the UK.

When the BBC says that it can do certain things because of the unique way it is funded, it isn’t just a slogan. It can publish news stories which other stations cannot. It is that simple. Next time you complain about paying the licence fee, think about how many bottles of filtered tap water you’ve been saved from buying. Do you really want all of your news sources to be funded by advertisers? Not for me, thank you.

Don’t write in and complain until you’ve read the small print. I like Channel 4 News. I watch it regularly and I often find that the coverage has better depth than BBC news. I’m not questioning the integrity of all privately funded news sources. The point is that without the BBC, the pressure on these sources would be much greater. Jon Snow can say to his editor “Yes, we should run this story. You know the BBC will run it and we must too!” The advertisers know this too, so they are less likely to try to cover up the story. They know they don’t have the power which they do in some other countries. It’s all because the BBC is independently funded.

I don’t know what time it is where you are but here in the UK it is after 5am. Insomnia sucks. Did I say that already? And to make matters worse I’ve just realised that I spelt insomnia wrong in a previous post. The Blogger spell checker is no use to me, it keeps telling me labour is spelt labor. That’s not right.

Maybe I just haven’t noticed the option to change from US to UK spelling. If there is one I haven’t noticed. I said that. I’ve had about 5 hours sleep in the last 2 days. Can you blame me if I keep repeating repeating myself?

I am still giggling about a very funny video I saw today so although I’m tired, I am still :o)
It’s video III from Backing Blair. If you like a laugh and you’re not easily offended, go there right now and stop reading this nonsense.

I am experimenting with the wonders of blog. Further information may be forthcoming depending on the results of these experiments. It is unlikely that I’ll post anything much here for a couple of days while I work it out.

With my apologies to The League of Gentlemen, I can’t help one more post on the Tory Idiots. (Last one, I promise.)

Tubbs: “Howard, Howard. Come quickly.”
Howard Flight: “What’s all this shouting? We’ll have no trouble here. This is a local party for local people.”
T: “Michael says you’ve got to leave the party.”
HF: “Michael? Is he local?”
T: “He’s not from our town Howard.”
HF: “Not local? Tell him this is a local party.”
T: “He says he’s in charge of the whole party and you have to go.”
HF: “What! An outsider! This is a local party for local people. There’s nothing for him here.”
T: “Shall we burn him Howard?
HF: “Yes Tubbs. We shall burn him. Every day from now till the election!”

I could go on but I’m not going to (unlike Mr Flight). I’ll be back to Blair bashing asap.

I have no connection to this other than the fact that I think it is Very Very Funny. Read the post and open the video. Now!
Backing Blair - Video III now live
Giggle, giggle, giggle, giggle…

I wrote this on the 27th March:
I’ve just been looking up information on the internet. I wanted to find out what Aljazeera had said about a particular story but I didn’t have the web address. I did what anyone else would do, entered Aljazeera (actually Al Jazeera, I’m an ignorant westerner) into a search engine. It’s not the first time I’ve done this but this time I noticed something odd; there seem to be two Aljazeera english websites. One is http://english.aljazeera.net and the other is http://www.aljazeera.com (I’m not sure I’d recommend this second one, read on first).

It’s not that unusual so I presumed that they were two sites from the Aljazeera TV company. Now that I’ve had a closer look, I’m not so sure. Neither site appears to refer to the other and they seem to be based in different countries. Aljazeera.net looked the more likely candidate but I’m no expert. In times of confusion, I tend to refer back to a trusted source so I looked up the BBC website and found a story with a link to http://english.aljazeera.net
Now I can confidently say that this is the official site of the Aljazeera TV company.

I still don’t know what the other site is. It could be a sister site to aljazeera.net or it could be something else. Now that I’ve thought about it I have a theory but I’ll keep it to myself for the moment. I had linked to this other site in an early post but have just added an edit to reflect this earlier confusion and direct my imaginary reader to aljazeera.net instead.

Edit - I didn’t publish it tomorrow, date changed, oops.