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Wednesday 20 December 2017

Press Bullies Threaten Labour Activist

Along with all the recent left-of-centre entrants to the new media world, the likes of Skwawkbox, The Canary, Novara Media and Evolve Politics, have come online campaigners whose memes and Retweets are increasingly popular. And one of the best known in the latter category is the woman who Tweets as Rachael Swindon. She has become so well known that the Press Establishment has decided to rough her up.
Who f***ing says I can't send my hacks to monster f***ing leftists, c***?!?

Not, you understand, that this involves any kind of physical assault: rather, our free and fearless press does its work in a far more insidious way, using the megaphone of the print media to whip up the mob. In this case, those doing the roughing up are the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre and his obedient hackery at the Daily Mail, on whose behalf hack Neil Sears turned up at Rachael Swindon’s house yesterday.

How Sears found the address is mildly eyebrow-raising: it isn’t in the phone book and she, along with her husband, have only very recently moved in. Not, of course, that there is any suggestion that the Mail, or anyone on its behalf, has been indulging in any kind of illegal information gathering, you understand. Sears, like the people in The Prisoner, wanted information. And in the same style, he wasn’t going to get it.

But it matters little what she and her husband tell the Mail: the resultant hatchet job will be so laden with nudges and winks as to tell the readers what to think. There may also be liberal use of quote marks to disguise invented quotes, or even downright lies. After all, it will already have been decided by the inmates of the Northcliffe House bunker that she cannot afford to sue the SOBs. The Mail has serious past form for this.
Rachael Swindon's Twitter avatar

Just how good the paper is at making things up can be seen from Sears’ latest article, “Hooded gang storms celebrity party near Grenfell Tower chanting 'Tory scum' and forces guests to observe minute's silence for the victims”. This is a support piece for the deeply unpleasant Ben Goldsmith, who claimed that an alleged incident at the Maxilla club last week was the work of “Labour activists” and “Corbyn supporters”.

Goldsmith was talking out of the back of his neck - hence the deployment of quote marks throughout the Mail’s article. Sears is, let us not drive this one around the houses for too long, another of the Mail’s shock troops. His appearance unannounced yesterday, followed by his persistent doorstepping, merely underscores this.

If Rachael Swindon, along with her family, friends and supporters, is still in any doubt as to the ability of the Mail to talk well, but lie badly, and then defend their abusive behaviour for years afterwards, they might usefully look at what happened to Juliet Shaw, about whom the paper concocted a flagrantly libellous article and then tried to bully and bluster their way out of it. She has since become a supporter of campaigning group Hacked Off.

There are many other examples of the Mail’s sheer spitefulness - one new media example is their pursuit of the Wikipedia editor who suggested the paper was no longer a reliable source for citations (which it is not). That included doorstepping the editor’s mother.

The Daily Mail has effectively declared war on the freedom of speech enjoyed by Rachael Swindon and those like her. This desperation to silence dissent would have found favour behind the Iron Curtain. As would the bullying and rank hypocrisy. No change there, then.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

As I said to sqwakbox before, we should all help protect our own. A crowd-funded legal team might be a start.
Although I have to admit I am useless at organising this sort of thing but would be more than willing to contribute a few quid to the free speech defence fund.

Anonymous said...

Nobody's attacking "Rachael's" free speech at all. It's a reporter doing what reporters do.

Would you be saying the same if it was a Tory-loving account who'd been doorstepped by the Daily Mirror? Or death threats to Tory MPs?

Give your head a good shake. Clowns.

p.c. said...

A reporter doing what reporters do. That's all right then.

Just the normal harassment, stalking, bullying - all in a day's work.

Let's remember why Chukka Ummana pulled out of the Labour leadership race.

Because 'reporters' were harassing his partners grandmother, and he put family first.

Sad reflection on the society we have become, and obviously 98% are cowards hiding behind anonymity, but yes - death threats to Tory MPS are not to be tolerated.

But until May stands at the despatch box and tells Dacre and Co to back right off, we're stuck with it.

Malcolm Redfellow said...

I hadn't been following @Rachael_Swindon, but I am now.

A small. even pathetic gesture, but the best instantly available.

Meanwhile, immense kudos and gratitude deserved to those who push back at the journalistic thuggery that has ben the Daily Mail tradition since George Ward Price was Rothermere's suck to all-things Hitlerite:
"The famous special correspondent of the London Daily Mail, Ward Price, was welcomed to interviews in the Reich Chancellery in a more privileged way than all other foreign journalists, particularly when foreign countries had once more been brusqued by a decision of German foreign policy. His paper supported Hitler more strongly and more constantly than any other newspaper outside Germany." [Hans-Adolf Jacobsen]

By the way, there was a Norah Dacre Fox (née Doherty), a.k.a. Norah Elam. A member of the BUF (and even keeper of their funds), of the notorious "Right Club", detained under Defence Regulation 18B with the Mosleys in Holloway. That "Dacre Fox" has got to to be no more than a coincidence, yes?

Anonymous said...

"...reporter doing what reporters do"?

In the Daily Heil? Like it and the Scum did with hacking phones?

Christ on a bike, some people need to give their head a wobble......never mind a shake......

Even Hitler couldn't silence dissent. That'll be the Hitler supported by the Daily Mail.

Paul Byrne said...

Mine was the first post on this subject.
Thanks people for replying to anonymous AKA COCO on my behalf.
You have said all I might have said in reply and more.
I had posted as anonymous which was just an error in box ticking.
I am more than happy to use my own name and not hide behind an alias.
In solidarity,

Paul Byrne

Gulliver Foyle said...

Reading that Juliet Shaw article kind of puts into perspective the comment by anonymous @ 11:28: -

"It's a reporter doing what reporters do"

In the world most of us live and work, if we'd lied through our teeth on the job we'd no longer have a job. It would seem that "Journalists" like these specimens are effectively paid to lie.

I'm guessing anonymous @ 11:28 is one of these specimens.

Anonymous said...

And this is one of the reasons I don't buy newspapers or read them or watch any TV news they are all one-sided to their own agendas "lies sells the truth tell the lie enough times it becomes the truth " and don't tell the truth although they claim it's the true news