unless you are from the E.C.O. machine or say what they want then forget there is no free press

E.C.O. machine = Eton Cambridge oxbridge 

Unless you are from the E.C.O. machine or say what they want then forget there is no free press, this is the world they have made for you.

Lets change it all you writers of freedom let all focus on showing the E.C.O. machine for what it is and how they destroy our country, our democracy  

ps ''Our ‘impartial’ broadcasters have become mouthpieces of the elite'' it has always been this way

Our ‘impartial’ broadcasters have become mouthpieces of the elite

George Monbiot

If you think the news is balanced, think again. Journalists who should challenge power are doing its dirty work

 'Every weekday morning the BBC's Today programme grovels to business leaders.' Photograph: Graeme Robertson

 

@GeorgeMonbiot

Tuesday 20 January 2015 20.07 GMTLast modified on Wednesday 21 January 201500.04 GMT

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When people say they have no politics, it means that their politics aligns with the status quo. None of us are unbiased, none removed from the question of power. We are social creatures who absorb the outlook and opinions of those with whom we associate, and unconciously echo them. Objectivity is impossible.

The illusion of neutrality is one of the reasons for the rotten state of journalism, as those who might have been expected to hold power to account drift thoughtlessly into its arms. But until I came across the scandal currently erupting in Canada, I hadn’t understood just how quickly standards are falling.

In 2013 reporters at CBC, Canada’s equivalent of the BBC, broke a major story. They discovered that RBC – Royal Bank of Canada – had done something cruel and unusual even by banking standards. It was obliging junior staff to train a group of temporary foreign workers, who would then be given the staff’s jobs. Just after the first report was aired, according to the website Canadaland, something odd happened: journalists preparing to expand on the investigation were summoned to a conference call with Amanda Lang, CBC’s senior business correspondent and a star presenter. The reporters she spoke to say she repeatedly attempted to scuttle the story, dismissing it as trivial and dull.

They were astonished. But not half as astonished as when they discovered the following, unpublished facts. First, that Lang had spoken at a series of events run or sponsored by RBC – for which she appears, on one occasion, to have been paid around 15,000 Canadian dollars. Second, that she was booked to speak at an event sponsored by the outsourcing company the bank had hired to implement the cruel practice exposed by her colleagues. Third, that her partner is a board member at RBC.

Lang then interviewed the bank’s chief executive on her own show. When he dismissed the story as unfair and misleading, she did not challenge him. That evening she uncritically repeated his talking points on CBC’s main current affairs programme. Her interests, again, were not revealed. Then she wrote a comment article for the Globe and Mail newspaper suggesting that her colleagues’ story arose from an outdated suspicion of business, was dangerous to Canada’s interests, and was nothing but “a sideshow”. Here’s what she said about the bank’s employment practices: “It’s called capitalism, and it isn’t a dirty word.”

Canadaland, which exposed Lang’s conflicts last week, found that other journalists at the broadcaster were furious, but too frightened to speak on the record. But after CBC tried to dismiss the scandal as “half-truths based on anonymous sources”, Kathy Tomlinson, the reporter who had broken the story about the bank, bravely spoke publicly to the website. The following morning, staff in her office arrived to find this message spelt out in magnets on their fridge: “Jesse Brown snitches get stitches”. Jesse Brown is Canadaland’s founder.

CBC refused to answer my questions, and I have not had a response from Lang. It amazes me that she remains employed by CBC, which has so far done nothing but bluster and berate its critics.

This is grotesque. But it’s symptomatic of a much wider problem in journalism: those who are supposed to scrutinise the financial and political elite are embedded within it. Many belong to a service-sector aristocracy, wedded metaphorically (sometimes literally) to finance. Often unwittingly, they amplify the voices of the elite, while muffling those raised against it.

A study by academics at the Cardiff School of Journalism examined the BBC Today programme’s reporting of the bank bailouts in 2008. It discovered that the contributors it chose were “almost completely dominated by stockbrokers, investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other City voices. Civil society voices or commentators who questioned the benefits of having such a large finance sector were almost completely absent from coverage.” The financiers who had caused the crisis were asked to interpret it.

The same goes for discussions about the deficit and the perceived need for austerity. The debate has been dominated by political and economic elites, while alternative voices – arguing that the crisis has been exaggerated, or that instead of cuts, the government should respond with Keynesian spending programmes or taxes on financial transactions, wealth or land – have scarcely been heard. Those priorities have changed your life: the BBC helped to shape the political consensus under which so many are now suffering.

The BBC’s business reporting breaks its editorial guidelines every day by failing to provide alternative viewpoints. Every weekday morning, the Today programme grovels to business leaders for 10 minutes. It might occasionally challenge them on the value or viability of their companies, but hardly ever on their ethics. Corporate critics are shut out of its business coverage – and almost all the rest.

On BBC News at Six, the Cardiff researchers found, business representativesoutnumbered trade union representatives by 19 to one. “The BBC tends to reproduce a Conservative, Eurosceptic, pro-business version of the world,” the study said. This, remember, is where people turn when they don’t trust the corporate press.

While the way in which the media handle the stories that are covered is bad enough, the absence of coverage is even worse. If an issue does not divide the main political parties, it vanishes from view, though the parties now disagree on hardly anything. Another study reveals a near total collapse of environmental coverage on ITV and BBC news: it declined from 2.5% (ITV) and 1.6% (BBC) of total airtime in 2007 to, respectively, 0.2% and 0.3% in 2014. There were as many news stories on these outlets about Madeleine McCann in 2014 – seven years after her disappearance – as there were about all environmental issues put together.

Those entrusted to challenge power are the loyalists of power. They rage against social media and people such as Russell Brand, without seeing that the popularity of alternatives is a response to their own failures: their failure to expose the claims of the haut monde, their failure to enlist a diversity of opinion, their failure to permit the audience to see that another world is possible. If even the public sector broadcasters parrot the talking points of the elite, what hope is there for informed democratic choice?

• Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com

Journalism is democracy, how to get a job as Journalist !?...& a simple solution of E.C.O. system

Forget the Future: What’s Happening in Journalism Now?

I recently went to a talk entitled “Forget the Future: What’s Happening in Joure nalism Now?” at the Frontline Club in London. You can watch a video of the talk here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_K1GDk52xY).  The following is my analysis – if you like it then please share, and never  stop until we live in our world[s1] . If you hate it, or have any other comments or feedback, please tell me (bloggerok1234@gmail.com).[s2]

I’ll tell you what happening now - fuck all. It’s business as usual for the elite schools who so totally dominate this industry of so called and self-declared impartial journalism. This, of course, includes the owners of this media who collectively report the news to 99.9% of people they never could or even would represent.

I have truly never been to a more embarrassing talk in all my life, everyone looked embarrassed, from the host and guest speakers to the audience. the poor bloke with the mic who was treated like a dog by George Brock who just keep barking orders at him (i talk about George Brock at the very end, ((changed my mind)) [s3] if he wants to make dogs of people that his fetish &they like been made dogs of ...cool)[s4]

The title of this talk should of been “Accidentally Telling Everyone Why You're Fucked If You Want To Be A Journalist and Don't Come from Eton, Oxford or Cambridge.” The exception is Stephen Bush or Assistant Comment Editor, The Telegraph[s5] , who did genuinely did have great concerns about our media’s elitist closed door system.

The night was meant to be a forum where these self-declared impartial journalists would impart their wisdom to a room of the next great upcoming media talent. However, it soon became clear the only advice is that if you don’t come from Eton, Oxford or Cambridge, then you’re fucked.

Why? Well, just look at the night itself which was organised by the Eton, Oxford or Cambridge school elite, hosted by the Eton, Oxford or Cambridge school elite and panelled by the Eton, Oxford or Cambridge school elite. This shall henceforth be referred to by me as the ECO system.

it is very clear that 99.9% of those in the E.C.O. cant see it, if you spent your whole life in a forest, there is no forest )[s6]

We might as well have been at the Mad Hatter’s tea party for all the good in the world this night was going to do - where time never changes, and unless you’re already seated at the table you are not going to get a chair. The characters from Alice in Wonderland declared “no room, no room” when they saw any stranger approaching the tea party. Last night this was echoed by the panellists, and will be every time you go for a job (I, like Alice, thought “There's PLENTY of room!”)

The first speaker, Alex Hearn, brings to mind a gazelle being taken down by a lion. He opened by stating that since he left the ECO system he has failed at everything he has ever done. It seemed that he was trying to say “don’t worry, keep trying and you will capture  your dream”. However, what came across was “don’t worry if you fail at everything, we ECO boys and girls stick together and we will always find room at the table for you.

i think all alex comments during this talk are simple bordering on the insane and it was at this moment that mad hatters tea party leaped to my mind[s7] . (if you or know someone who apply for the job alex Hern  has at Tech Reporter of The Guardian could you introduce yourself to me thank you, you could help me add to depth of this blog)[s8]

in absolute no connection to Alex Hern or anyone on the panel i think mad hatters tea party, should be retitled to mad hatters cocain party seems more of a interesting title, not sure what makes me think that tho[s9] .

Alex then went on to say that he was the only intern ever to get paid at Left Foot Forward and, with great joy, he announced “I scored the only ever paid internship there and after i left it, i burned down all the bridges there insuring none could follow” [s10] (you can hear this comment at 4:10 on the podcast, and the groans of all the aspiring journalists in the audience who are desperate for such an opportunity).

Left Foot Forward is, unsurprisingly, an ECO elite school programme. The only people who call this “impartial journalism” are those sat at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.

Following Alex’s statement, Archie Bland (who was brilliant all night and handled himself with distinction)  embarrassedly put the question to the “I’m afraid to say, this is an Eton, Cambridge and Oxford filled panel which will confirm lots of people accurate suspicious  about what journalism is like and what a rarefied sort of environment it is”.

Emma Hogan answered first, her view on the ECO journalist mafia (as referred to by Zing Tsjeng) is that not all is lost and things are looking up for anyone hoping to get into journalism. However, she shot herself in her own testimony by suffixing her statement with “I think”, and then “I hope anyway”.

no one goes as far as  Emma Hogan has done, on hoping your facts are right, a professional would alway say “i dam well make sure my facts are right.”  but having the E.C.O. school journalist mafia start such  serious journalistic project  upon themself,  is never going to happen.

that will be the job of everyone else which i hope one day someone  will take up as a challenge too.(hopefully someone who is not dyslexic, oh the irony, but on reflection this might prove its ok to be dyslexic  )

it should be noted that there are people from the E.C.O. schools journalism mafa that are sick of this sublime hypocrisy at the hart of journalism.

why because its is their job which is  such a beautiful noble pursuit and actually does do some great things have to have at its hart such an all consuming cancer that eats upon truth and justice with such sweet delight.[s11]

lest we all forget we all have harts and a good journalist hart, pumps the blood of  passion and truth to every organ in there bodys. when/if the opportunity presents ! (yes even at the daily mail, tho my optimism may have way exceeded it self there, who knows.!)[s12]

The point I should have raised, but failed to, was that we supposedly live in a democracy. Yet the fundamentality of any democracy is that all citizens are meant to participate equally in their society, and this night strikes at the very heart of this, and the ramifications are profound. The ECO system closes the doors to all but the ECO, meaning the people have no access to corner stones of democracy, such as journalism, nor positions of power and influence.

On the 9th September, Alan Rusbridger did a talk at the British Library called “Reflections on Press Freedom”, which was one of the best talks I have been to at the British Library (insert link). At this talk, I asked him if, “with hand on heart can the people of this country say they live in a democracy, given everything you have said tonight”. He did not answer my question in front of the audience for whatever reason.

So afterwards, one on one I asked him again and this time he said “we live in a flawed democracy”.  This was mind blowing - and my response to his statement was “which of course, is no democracy at all”.

Three days later, Alan Rusbridger’s contemporaries claim at the Frontline Club that journalism is totally controlled by the ECO system. This is why we live in what Alan Rusbridger called a “flawed democracy” and what I called “no democracy at all.”[s13]

We are undoubtedly looking at a Mad Hatter’s tea party – but who has set the places? A very small group of people who collectively control the shape of our so called democratic government.  It is these people we need to look at, not just the journalists. I am certain, judging on the comments made that night, that there may be more ECO journalists who would like to help with a solution.

So what is the solution? Firstly, and this will be a slow process, until you know with hand on heart that you or your child have just as much  chance as being a journalist, or the Prime Minister, or in any other position of power as anyone in the ECO – do not call what we live in a democracy. Until every child, family person or community anywhere in the world knows that democracy was truly given to them, do not call this a democracy, not even a “flawed democracy”. Until then – always question anyone who claims that we live in a democracy

solution number 2

stop saying ‘’we’’ are destroying the world it is them and only them. i heard this for years and nothing breaks my hart more each time i hear it.

for we have no access to the any of the  jobs that make the shape of a country.[s14]

Could you please email me if you are someone who is trying to become a journalist, or already are a journalist and like to give your story (anonymity guaranteed).

bloggerok1234@gmail.com

i keep adding to this