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Tuesday 19 April 2016

Guido Fawked - Jukes Whoppers Busted

As the attempts continue to paint Byline Media as being a purveyor of conspiracy theories, and to claim it is in league with campaigning group Hacked Off, on to the scene, by complete coincidence you understand, has come the press establishment’s very own poodle, in the shape of the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog, who have decided to target Byline co-curator Peter Jukes.
Whose website is calling "drunk" on others?

The Fawkes folks have tried to rubbish Jukes, right down to Photoshopping a tin hat on his head, but there was a teensy problem with their effort: it was a pack of lies from start to finish. While this will surprise no-one who is familiar with the machinations of Staines and his pals, just for a little divertissement, Zelo Street has picked out the most pungent items from the heap of steaming bullpucky so readers can marvel at the scale of dishonesty.

It goes wrong at the very beginning, as the title tells “Peter Jukes’ Late Night Meltdown”. Sadly, the deceit is all too obvious: the Tweet shown was actually posted at 0932 yesterday, not 0132. It’s easy to do this - just log out and Twitter posts will revert to Pacific Time, which is eight hours behind the UK. And then it gets worse.
See the time on that Tweet?

Peter Jukes, the man behind conspiracy site Byline” they claim. But he isn’t. And for The Great Guido to call “conspiracy” on anyone else really is taking the piss. And yet worse: “Last night, an emotional Jukes”. Er, hello? The blog founded by Paul Staines, who has four alcohol related convictions, including two for drinking and driving, and who memorably got chucked out of the IoD for drunkenness, calling drunk on someone else?

Have another go: “alleged the Telegraph and LinkedIn are using ‘bots’”. He didn’t allege LinkedIn were using bots. Would Sir care to dig himself in a little deeper? You bet: “Jukes nonetheless is convinced he is the victim of a conspiracy”. Wrong. He claimed, rightly, that he had been targeted. Try again. “Indeed he believes ‘dark arts’ are at play”. As there has been a confirmed email phishing attack behind the scenes, he is right to so believe.
Here's the same Tweet with the actual sending time

Moreover, there were indeed spam bots boosting traffic for the Telegraph hatchet job on Byline yesterday morning. But, by another miraculous coincidence, the Fawkes rabble had a pal of theirs who had some tech knowledge at hand! “Could he be correct? Alas, as Phil Hendren explains, the LinkedIn emails are simply an algorithm used by the social media network”. Hendren, aka Dizzy Thinks, hasn’t blogged on politics and media regularly for ages. Yet up he pops, right on cue, to have a go at Jukes and provide a soundbite.

n any case, his reasoning is dubious, and what Jukes describes looks more like a mass emailing. There is also the matter of several Byline contributors being threatened that they will lose work if they continue to be associated with the site. But the best The Great Guido can manage in conclusion is “this is the man claiming the existence of a vast media conspiracy to cover up Whittingdale’s private life”. No it isn’t.

But good to see that the press establishment is so sore that it’s sending in the always deniable Fawkes rabble to tell a few porkies. Another fine mess, once again.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's an error in the above, Mr Staines has been convicted of drink-driving on three occasions, not two. Such errors make him appear a better person than he is, and must therefore be corrected!

Anonymous said...

If ever someone had an apt surname it's Staines.

Fortunately for what's left of our democracy there are people like Tim Fenton around to set the record straight.

"Straight" being a concept well beyond the ken of a neocon liar like Staines and co.

Anonymous said...

Your obsession with Guido is hilarious.

rob said...

@ Tim

Your headline could be read two ways - falling into a tabloid trap?

They don't appear to get that Byline is crowd sourced by whoever wants to fund a suggested project and totally disassociated with the funders of Byline itself.

Unlike Guido and his rabble rousers who are probably paid offshore by a family owned business with an agenda to sell.

Actually I believe they do know it but like to lie, just to try and fool some of the people some of the time. If they have to rely on pieces like this from Wickers they may not have much time left to do so.


Alex W said...

That was only the times they caught him !!!

Anonymous said...

I always like to refer to him as P(ee) Staines.

http://www.thesocialshuttle.com/ said...

Look at the positives: the nasty nutters like Staines are doing a terrific jib of publicizing ByLine. I only discovered it via this controversy & I'm now a regular reader.
The Dead Tree Press of the News Corp variety is increasingly staffed by bitter hacks who know the end will come eventually & there are just so many bitter has-beens that will find a perch at the MailOnline on poverty contributor payments. When Murdoch Snr goes to God to explain his Wicked Ways the sons will dispense with the newspaper publishing interests and all hell will break loose.

dizzy said...

I like the way you skipped over the fact Jukes made a false statement about me claiming I'm an "old friend" of Andy Coulson, a man I've never met or spoken too.

Also it's not a sound bite it's a statement of fact from LinkedIn. They have a shitty algorithm that trawls the web and blog and further trawls back linking which is why Tim Worstall's blog got spotted by it. Given Tim writes for the Times and FT plus his back linking to the Telegraph it's hardly a surprise that the algorithm picked it up.

We may disagree on things but in this case there is no dubious reasoning as many other tech hacks pointed out to Peter, who, subsequently, changed his LinkedIn settings to turn the feature off.