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    More gilets jaunes smearing/pearl clutching Archived Message

    Posted by Raskolnikov on March 24, 2019, 5:46 am

    When they do decide to cover this ongoing mini-revolution it's only to smear the participants but this is too (unintentionally) funny to hit the mark. Right from the opening line you can tell it's special:

    In 47 years of journalism, few things have shocked me as deeply as the sight of burning newspaper kiosks on the Champs-Élysées.

    Wow. You must have been in some real hotspots. Forget famine, genocide, the result of using 21st century weapons on a civilian population no a burning newspaper stand is what gives me the nightmares.

    The destruction was largely the work of the black bloc urban guerrillas – slender, self-satisfied young men from well-off families, not suffering protesters from a forgotten or peripheral France. These self-appointed representatives of “the people” attacked the livelihoods of men and women who scarcely earn the French minimum wage.

    This could hold the record for most assumptions/lies packed into one paragraph but given the competition over there, it's hard to keep track.

    Having got his smear in the rest of the article is a series of tales about "kiosquiers" he has known and his little crowdfunding adventure and nothing about the issues behind the protests.

    A couple of the kiosks on the Champs-Élysées have already been rebuilt; others will be in the next week or so.

    Oh. So rather than an economic apocalypse, it's a week or so out of action. While not underestimating how important every week's income is, this is hardly the end of civilisation he made it out to be.

    Finally he goes for the big finish:

    I will leave the last word to Éric Fottorino, a former editor of Le Monde: “The printed press is a creature of the street,” he said. “Each kiosquier defends a little corner of democracy.”

    Ignorance is Strength.

    Of course they can always pass this particular smear session off as an opinion/human interest piece but that's just a fig leaf and Chomsky's "If you didn't believe what you believe" line to Marr applies here.

    As the Brexit shitstorm/hellscape draws ever nearer the PTTB must be casting nervous glances at all of this but they never seem to realise that people see through both their propaganda when they do bother to cover the protests and their studied omission from their "journalism" of one of the biggest stories in Europe right now.

    https://www.dumptheguardian.com/world/2019/mar/23/paris-news-kiosks-burnt-protests-crowdfunder

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