- The once brilliant Private Eye magazine is now "a safe pair of hands." Archived Message
Posted by Morrissey
on March 19, 2023, 9:57 am
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Has Private Eye gone Establishment? and is the Grauniad now a mouthpiece for spooks? Rolf Norfolk June 24, 2022 https://rolfnorfolk.substack.com/p/has-private-eye-gone-establishment It seems curiously difficult to find out what exactly Ian Hislop did in the five years between leaving Oxford and becoming editor of Private Eye in 1986; I don’t think he survived solely on his PE contributions. I thought I’d read somewhere that he’d done a stint in teaching, like fellow PE satirist John Wells; if so, I guess he’s grateful to have washed off the smell of pencils. For hasn’t he done well since! And despite PE’s having seriously upset powerful people in its time, his reputation for being ‘the most sued man in Britain’ is overblown: Sutcliffe was the turnaround, it meant the court of appeal could cap libel damages, the judge was allowed to direct the jury as to amount, everything that had been mad about it started to be changed […] I think at the moment [2011] we’re all worried about injunctions and privacy. I’m not alone in thinking PE has lost its contrarian edge. This (sweary, and Brexiteer) blogger says: Private Eye is now Establishment. Supporting the mainly London, liberal elite – the civil servants. lawyers, politicians and all the rest of the gravy train troughers who serve no purpose to the majority of Brits. All within the M25 natch. Recently it looks to have gone further than that, taking a starkly Russophobic line. Four issues back, several of PE’s cartoons, if you translate the images into words, alleged that Putin was deliberately and gleefully targeting civilians in Ukraine; and nothing in print suggested otherwise. The advantage of graphic humour is that it evades having to defend its case; though since the Ukrainian forces have a tactic of using the local population as human shields while firing on the Russians, the latter may have a war-law counter-argument in terms of ‘proportionality.’ PE might almost be a brother in arms of the Daily Mail’s Ian ‘Putin is a snarling rat backed into a corner’ Birrell. At a time when the Prime Minister breaks appointments to fly out to Ukraine and urge President Zelenskyy to keep fighting, a non-aligned PE would be most welcome. Issue 1571 was not a one-off in its partisanship. The current issue (#1575, p.11) contains a sharp (would ‘goaded’ be a better word?) riposte to a website called The Grayzone, which ran stories (June 7 and June 13) about links between journalist Paul Mason and British intelligence. PE’s piece, titled ‘Grayzone Layer’, reports Mason’s announcement that his email account had been hacked, and repeats his assertion (untested in that article) that this will have been carried out by ‘a Russian state or state-backed unit.’ The anonymous PE writer terms The Grayzone ‘the leading pro-Kremlin site in the English-speaking world’ now that the West has blocked our access to RT and Sputnik. The tone could be read to imply approval of this censorship, but bearing in mind that we are not technically at war with Russia, it must be a matter of regret that we Brits are having alternative sources kept from us. Ironically, at the foot of the same page PE deplores the action of Turkey’s President Erdoğan in shutting down ‘168 critical media outlets.’ Concerning the hacking of Mason’s emails, what they reveal may justify the intrusion in a way that does not apply to the News International phone-hacking scandal; unlike the latter’s appeal to prurient curiosity, there is a public interest angle. Besides, if we recall Hislop’s 2011 concern over ‘privacy’ (above), even PE should be less worried about the method than about the results. Mason has held important positions with BBC2’s Newsnight and Channel 4 News, and writes for a number of left-leaning newspapers and magazines; yet his private communications reveal proposals for collusion with an ‘intelligence contractor’ called Amil Khan, and one Andy Pryce of the UK Foreign Office Counter Disinformation and Media Development unit, in setting up ‘an information warfare outfit funded ‘through cut-outs.’’ Despite have once been a left-winger Mason, said The Grayzone, planned to wage all-out war on anti-imperialist and left-wing academics, activists, campaign groups, independent journalists and media sites – and particularly this outlet. After briefly alluding to the plot against The Grayzone (but omitting mention of Mason’s other targets), Private Eye’s article goes on to dig into the writers of the two TG pieces, Max Blumenthal and Kit Klarenberg. The author uses ironic quotation marks around the phrase ‘factual reporting’ to throw doubt on Blumenthal’s allegation that the Ukrainians attacked civilians in Mariupol as a false-flag operation designed to provoke NATO intervention; yet there is evidence (e.g. a number of videos here) to suggest that false-flag plan or no, Ukrainians have been targeting civilian areas and individuals, including with the use of snipers. Next in PE’s firing-line is Klarenberg, citing the latter’s connections with RT and Sputnik, and his spats with a couple of people who had accused Russia of ‘disinformation.’ As we become submerged in all this who-shot-John argy-bargy we are encouraged to forget what we now know Mason was up to, something hardly touched on by PE here, far less denied. The would-be-killer last paragraph notes that Klarenberg used to praise fund manager Neil Woodford, whose Equity Income Fund collapsed. This again omits relevant information about how Woodford had previously earned a stellar reputation at Invesco Perpetual, having stayed out of the ‘irrational exuberance’ of the dot-com bubble and the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. Sadly, ‘Casey struck out’ this time, but that was hardly Klarenberg’s fault. Besides, as Woody Allen said, ‘A stockbroker is someone who invests other people's money until it is all gone’; and if you think cash is safer these days… What we have in this PE article is an attempt to ignore a disturbing revelation about Mason and his spooky friends; and an ad hominem counterattack designed to distract us and mislead us with negative atmospherics. Not many points out of ten, I’d say; and raising fears that Private Eye may have become a ‘safe pair of hands’ for the characters involved in what I recall Stephen Fry, responding on TV news to video-linked ex-MI5 operative David Shayler, called a ‘greasy trade.’ And then there is the Guardian newspaper, who despite their lament over Home Secretary Priti Patel’s go-ahead for Julian Assange’s extradition to the US on spying charges, were to some extent the cause of his woes, having pushed Wikileaks hard for faster revelations of information supplied by Chelsea Manning, for the sake of a ‘scoop,’ as Craig Murray says in his recent interview with George Galloway. A 2011 book by two of the Guardian’s writers published the secret password that then allowed public access to the unredacted files, whereas Wikileaks had been working hard to scrub names so that individuals would not be imperilled. It seems that the Guardian has become more than merely irresponsible, now smearing true revelations as disinformation. (It’s worth remembering that not long ago, the US also tried to set up a counter-disinformation board like the FO’s unit, but it fell over quickly when its head Nina Jankowicz resigned over allegations of bias.) As Jimmy Dore says, video-fisking a Guardian article attempting to discredit ‘conspiracy theorists’ re Syria’s White Helmets, the accusatory language is coming to sound like confirmation, instead. Whom can we trust, when supposedly independent investigative outfits have begun to sing from the Establishment hymnsheet? As the Nazarene said: ‘You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.’ |