Woeful Journalism

Culture
101

EU/IMF have agreed to jobs fund from sell-off - Howlin

Thursday April 21 2011

The Government has persuaded the EU and IMF that the proceeds of the sale of some state assets could be used to aid job creation rather than paying off Ireland’s debts, the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Brendan Howlin said today.

The argument about the expenditure on jobs was made successfully at the recent quarterly review of the EU/IMF rescue package, he said.

Each of the 55 recommendations made in the report, chaired by economist Colm McCarthy, will now be put to the relevant government departments.

No decision would be made yet in relation to the sale of the government’s 25pc stake in Aer Lingus, but he would be careful to ensure that competition remained in the aviation sector, the Minister said on Morning Ireland.

Defending the Labour party’s agreement to the sale of state assets, Mr Howlin said that the issue was not an ideological one. “We are a party and now a government of job creation,” he said.

The Coalition was presented with a range of options for privatising semi-state companies yesterday in a report by economist Colm McCarthy.

Mr McCarthy identified a potential €5bn worth of sales, including selling off the power generation sections of ESB and Bord Gais and privatising Aer Lingus in full.

The report also proposes privatisation of parts of the business side of Coillte and Bord na Mona, along with the National Stud and greyhound tracks.
[b]
But the Coalition admitted that it would have to negotiate with the EU and IMF on using any proceeds for jobs stimulus purposes – rather than just paying off the country’s debts.

Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin said the Government would have to negotiate “on a case-by-case basis”.[/b]

The Government insisted there wouldn’t be a fire sale of semi-states and that valuable energy, transport and industry interests would only be sold off on the market when the time was right.

Mr Howlin said no decision on sales had been made.

“I think there will be things that will not be acceptable to the Government, but I’ll let the Government debate that and we will be presenting our comprehensive response in due course,” he said.

The McCarthy review of state assets – the economist’s second investigation into trimming public costs and raising finance – looked at companies that have a total book value of €8bn.

Mr Howlin said if all the sales recommended in the review went through it could realise up to €5bn. But he again pointed to the €2bn target set out in the Programme for Government.

Mr McCarthy actually warned against jumping into a so-called “fire sale”, claiming it was a matter of timing to secure the right market conditions.

“It’s not practical to think about disposing of many of these companies in a big hurry,” he said.

“There’s also the question of what the market is like for commercial assets right now. There are always issues of timing.”

Mr McCarthy said the report of the Review Group on State Assets and Liabilities should be seen as an advisory document.

“It is a matter for the Government and the Oireachtas to decide what should and shouldn’t be done,” he said.

Pressure

“The Government isn’t under any immediate financial pressure, in the sense that the IMF/EU programme is in place, which means that the Government should be funded for the duration of that programme.”

The dramatic money-making plan affects 16 semi-states across several sectors, including the ESB, which would stay semi-state even though all its foreign interests would be sold – including Northern Ireland Electricity.

The transmission grid, including the high-voltage system in the North, should be transferred to EirGrid and kept in public ownership along with all hydro-electric units.

The Bord Gais gas and electricity generation and supply business should be sold. The high-pressure gas transmission network and interconnectors should be retained by the state, the report states.

Bord na Mona should be sold off, including peat extraction rights, but not ownership of the peat lands and likewise Coillte should dispose of forests and associated assets but not the land they grow on.

Irish Independent

The headline and the contents of the story are miles apart.
I heard Howlin on the radio this morning and he stated that the IMF were still very much of the opinion that any “windfall” money would have to be used to pay off the countries debts, but that the Government would be trying to make a case for some of it to be used to stimulate growth. A far cry from:
“EU/IMF have agreed to jobs fund from sell-off - Howlin”

102

Its a little long, but even to just read the first page should suffice. Unbelievable to think this actually got published.

GQ Writer wets herself interviewing Chris Evans (Captain America)

103

Christ MBB, what shit do you be reading?

104

It was pointed out in a movie magazine I was reading Fran as the worst movie star interview of all time. Hard to argue with that assessment.

105

“Mens” magazines. :lol:

106

Interesting plagiarism row.

From The Telegraph:

Johann Hari: left-wing commentator in plagiarism row
Johann Harin was exposed after a reader noticed that a quote in one of his stories had been cut and pasted from a book.

By Richard Alleyne

Johann Hari, a multiple award winning political journalist who writes for newspapers around the world, was exposed after a reader noticed that a quote in one of his stories had been cut and pasted from a book.

Such was the controversy that he was forced to respond in a personal blog, but his defence only further fuelled the intensity of the attacks against him.
Within 24 hours the discovery had sparked a massive backlash as other examples of his alleged plagiarism were uncovered.

On Twitter, the micro-blogging website, users posted a series of jokes in which famous sayings in history were re-created as if Mr Hari had been told them in intimate interviews, while blogs from rival journalists accusing him of so-called “churnalism”.

At one point his alleged plagiarism was the second most discussed topic on Twitter and even became the subject of a doctored clip from Downfall, a film about Adolf Hitler’s final hours.

Calls also grew for him to hand back his George Orwell prize, the most prestigious in political journalism, while the Independent, his main newspaper, received demands that he should be sacked.

His reversal of fortunes has been dramatic. Just a few days ago Mr Hari remained the darling of the left wing and was recently named as one of the most influential people on the left in Britain. He has reported from wars all over the world and been a regular art critic on television and a book reviewer.

As well as the Orwell Prize he has won awards from Amnesty International, the British Press Awards and Stonewall, the gay right activists. He has been a renowned critic of other organisations if he believed they strayed from the truth, especially those on the right, and has more than 60,000 followers on Twitter.

The backlash began when a left wing website analysed an interview Mr Hari conducted with Antonio Negri, an Italian Marxist, in 2004. The blog found that Mr Hari used a quote in the interview which appeared to have been taken from Negri on Negri, a book published a year earlier.

In Mr Hari’s article, he says that Mr Negri told him: “Who controls memory? Faced with the weight of memory, one must be unreasonable! Reason amounts to eternal Cartesianism. The most beautiful thing is to think ‘against’, to think ‘new’. Memory prevents revolt, rejection, invention, revolution.”

The blog goes on reveal that a passage from pages 100 and 101 of the book is almost identical.

Brian Whelan, another blogger, subsequently found a further example in a 2010 interview by Mr Hari with the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. He found a passage that appeared to be composed of sentences that had appeared in a column written by Levy the previous March.

The revelations forced Hari to respond in a personal blog entitled Interview Etiquette.

He claimed that he had only used the quotes to make his interviewee appear more articulate, and said he had not received a complaint in a 10 years.

He wrote: “So occasionally, at the point in the interview where the subject has expressed an idea, I’ve quoted the idea as they expressed it in writing, rather than how they expressed it in speech.” However the response failed to dampen the backlash against him.

Last night the Media Standards Trust, which funds the Orwell prize, demanded an investigation to see whether he should be stripped of the award.

It said that the issue had “the potential to damage its reputation”.

The organisers of the award said they were following a “process” normally carried out in “situation such as this”.

But Simon Kelner, the editor of the Independent, appeared to stand by him.

“Johann Hari has worked for The Independent for more than ten years, winning a number of international journalism awards,” he said.

"He explained his position in a personal blog yesterday, which he threw open to debate.

“He has listened and reflected on the range of views expressed and will be writing about it in tomorrow’s Independent.”

Private Eye had a go at him way back when:

Hari’s Game

by Hackwatch

23 March - 3 April 2003

Johann Hari, The Independent’s new columnist, has been bemoaning the “corrosive acid of distrust” in public life. “We in the press are least trusted of all British institutions,” observes the 24-year-old pundit, who was shortlisted as young journalist of the year in this week’s British Press Awards. “The number of my friends who assume that we just make up stories – even at reputable paper such as The Independent is startling.”

Not that startling, surely, especially if they are regular readers of Johann Hari. He began his career as the voice of yoof in July 2001, just after finishing his university finals, by boasting about his drug habit to the readers of the New Statesman. “Another Cambridge May Week has rolled around,” he wrote, “and I, like half of Cambridge, celebrated with a few tabs of Ecstasy and the odd line of coke.”

Fleet Street editors were thrilled: the Sindie reprinted his piece, and a few months later the London Evening Standard invited him to do an encore. Hari obliged by defending “the Ecstasy I know and love” against the tut-tutting of the Home Secretary. “Clearly, David Blunket needs to be informed of the basic facts about one of Britain’s most popular drugs,” he raved. “If he fancies tying one, I’ll be happy to take him to a decent club. But in the meantime, I’ll try to explain why so many of use the drug weekly.” He duly went on to describe the sensation of being “loved up” and “at one.”

In fact, however, the young rascal had never taken Ecstasy: before writing his lyrical account he had to phone a friend and ask what it felt like! And now, less than two years later, he has already forgotten his brief incarnation as an e-fiend. “Ecstasy defined the generation of my older siblings, not mine,” he wrote in the Indie two weeks ago. “Ecstasy is out.”

No matter: it served its purpose, and Hari was on a roll. A couple of weeks after his original ecstasy article he went to Genoa for the G8 summit and sent a vivid dispatch to the New Statesman about the death of anti-globalisation protester Carlo Giuliani. “On Friday, before the real business of the summit began, the police shot him twice in the head and then ran him over,” he reported. “They killed him, even though he carried no weapon other than a fire extinguisher. When I saw the scene, I couldn’t believe so much blood had poured from just one body.” Yet, as several witnesses can attest, Hari wasn’t there, having hailed a taxi to escape the scene some time before Giuliani was killed.

Now that he’s a full-fledged pundit, Hari has been pontificating in the Indie and on Newsnight about his support for a war against Saddam Hussein. The Iraqis want to be bombed, he says, even if more than 100,000 of them die: he knows, because he’s been there and talked to them. “Last October, I spent a month as a journalist seeing the reality of life under Saddam Hussein,” he wrote on 10 January. “Most of the Iraqi people I encountered…. Would hug me and offer coded support.”

Actually, Hari spent two weeks in Iraq as a holidaymaker, on a package tour visiting ancient archaeological sites. He wrote about the trip in the Guardian on 3 December last year. In that article, however, he complained that it was “very difficult to get Iraqis to express their feelings… I blundered about asking fairly direct political questions, which caused people to recoil in horror… Many people asked quite genuinely ‘why your government hates the Arab world’.” He also met many “dignified, stoical Iraqis” and “doe-eyed children” who complained about western sanctions.

The only person who eventually offered “coded support” was an old man in a souk who had visited London in the 1970s. “After much oblique prodding, he said warmly, ‘I admire British democracy and freedom.’ He held my gaze. ’I very much admire them.’ He added, ’We do not know what is coming. The news we receive here is… unclear.’”

And, er, that’s it. Yet in an Indie column on 15 February, Hari claimed that people in Iraq asked him: “When will you come to free us? When will we be able to live again?” Since these pleas from Iraqis yearning for the bombers to arrive must surely have struck him as newsworthy, why didn’t he mention them in his original Guardian feature?

Answer comes there none. The only question troubling this journalistic wunderkind at the moment is why on earth British newspaper readers suspect that hacks “just make up stories.”

107
  • the bit I’ve bolded above is the most tremendous use of a verb I think I can ever remember.
108

this nugget from macs beloved Irish indo
“you know you have cracked the big time when teenagers start copying your haircut .And yesterday it was Rorys Mcilroys mop of curls that was the haircut du jour”

vincent browne the ex FG member & failed nominee to be a FG TD came out with this
“Rory Mcilroys inclusive approach to success recalls US thinker John Rawls on the quest for justice & fairness”

109

Fuck me, they’re priceless :smiley:

Why the fuck would anyone buy the indo?

110

I quie enjoy Frank Firzgibbon of the SunTimes musing re the other Sun papers on a Sat night on Twitter.

Took a cut at Indo for their ‘some bird in dress’ cover story…

“The “lovely” Sarah Griffin on front of Sindo wearing a John Rocha dress from Havana in Donnybrook. Don’t they mean Havana laugh?”

But he had a right cut off the Sunday World,
“Sun World: Ireland’s most dangerous rapist was “stalking” female concert goers at Neil Diamond. Paper blames it on garda cutbacks…”

SunWorld says the Aviva chap is a"snarling pervert and volatile sex pests who WILL strike again". Stay away from those Neil Diamond concerts"

111

Laughable editorial in the London Times yesterday explaining that Britain will never be world beaters in sport because they have only 7 million males between 18 and 36 and a lot of those play rugby and cricket as well. Told the Brits to keep the chin up because they were world class at very many sports including- I’m not making this up- archery and dressage.

112

Stand strong with Norway

Carnage in a city centre. A massacre at an island youth rally.

Terrorism, the scourge of the West, brought slaughter yesterday to the friendly and civilised streets of one of Europe’s most peaceful nations.

The Sun and its readers grieve today with the people of Norway, stunned by the assault on their capital Oslo and the island of Utoya.

How well we remember, from London’s 7/7, the shock and misery when an ordinary summer’s day turns into a nightmare of smoke, flames and bodies in the street.

Just as on 9/11 in New York and in Madrid in 2004, horror came when everyone least expected it.

Why Norway? The answer is simple.

Because it is brave. It is a loyal member of NATO and plays its part in Afghanistan and Libya.

It has courageously stood up to Muslim fanatics trying to stir up hatred in Norway, where Islam is the second largest religion.

Recently it refused a grant to an Islamic leader demanding that those who did not observe Ramadan should be decapitated.

By daring to oppose terrorism, Norway has become a victim of it.

Attack

The gentle nation best known for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize suffered its most violent attack since World War Two.

We do not know if yesterday was the work of al-Qaeda, which has threatened Norway before, or Libyan madman Gaddafi, who has vowed revenge on NATO. Last night one extremist Islamic group had already claimed responsibility.

The lesson for us are clear.

Osama Bin Laden may be dead. But the tentacles of al-Qaeda, and groups linked to it, spread deep into the heart of Western nations.

That is why our security cannot be relaxed, especially with the London Olympics only a year away.

The Government must keep its promise to change the law so our judges can no longer free terror suspects on human rights grounds.

Muslim hate preachers must be arrested, as the law allows. We need the decent Muslim majority to help stop their impressionable young men being recruited as bombers.

We must find every penny our security services need.

We must ask ourselves whether – like Norway – we offer too cushy a life to bogus asylum seekers.

And we must recognise that quitting Afghanistan with the job only half-finished will put Britain in peril.

Today, sympathies lie with Norway, our loyal friend and trading partner across the North Sea for centuries.

We share their pain. We salute their courage.

113

Holy fuck.

I also write on a political forum and the sense of acute disappointment, devastation even amongst the racist right wing nutters who populate it was clear when it became apparent it was a racist right wing nutter and not a Muslim who was behind the attacks. I imagine it was the same at Sun Towers.

114

In fairness to the Sun, while they weren’t exactly moderate in their statements, they weren’t alone on this one.

The NY Times said:

“Terrorism specialists said that even if the authorities ultimately ruled out terrorism as the cause of Friday’s assaults, other kinds of groups or individuals were mimicking al-Qaida’s signature brutality and multiple attacks.
If it does turn out to be someone with more political motivations, it shows these groups are learning from what they see from al-Qaida,” said Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism researcher at the New America Foundation in Washington."

There’s a good article on Salon about this topic. Why is it no longer “terrorism” because it wasn’t Al Quaida? It’s a good example of how the media (with the assistance of the US and UK primarily) have taken over the terror word and used it to solely describe international enemies of state.

115

116

“Democracy” = the installation of a US puppet
“Freedom” = neo-liberalism, yummy money for Uncle Sam’s private contractor cronies
“Reform” = the abolition of state social protection
“Flexibility” = the right of employers to treat their employees like shit
“Surgical strikes” = bombing the shit out of civilians
“Sharpshooters” = snipers if their on “our side”, murdering terrorists if they’re not on “our side”

117

The granny gets Alive! newspaper delivered every month. It’s unreal stuff. There’s a piece in it this month describing Cameron Diaz to the parcel in a game of pass the parcel because she’s broken up with another boyfriend and she doesn’t see much value or hope in marriage and family etc.
I fucking hate religious people.

118

From sportsnewsireland.ie .A decent site to follow a game, but the crap and sometimes biased and blinkered reports and previews are awful. This one doesn’t seem to realise Kevin Walsh is from Galway.

Alan Mulholland and Kevin Walsh have emerged as the early favourites to become the next Galway football manager after Tomás Ó Flatharta was sacked on Friday night after only a year in charge of the county.
Ó Flatharta was originally appointed on a three-year term but after a very poor season, the writing was on the wall for the Kerry native. Clubs in Galway will now be asked to nominate their preference for the next boss and the process is likely to take a few weeks.
Mulholland trained the county minors to an All Ireland success in 2007 and followed up this year with the Under 21 national title. He is currently regarded as the clear favourite to take the reins. Kevin Walsh was expected to replace Joe Kernan last year but decided to stay with Sligo at the time. Whether that decision counts against him this time round, only time will tell.
After the disappointing campaigns under O’Flatharta and Kernan, the Tribesmen may be slow to appoint a third consecutive outside boss. For that very reason, Mulholland has to be the obvious choice. If however, the clubs decide to be openminded and look outside the county, Mick O’Dwyer must be their number one port of call. The Kerry man has always expressed an interest in managing Galway and with the clock counting down on his managerial career he may fancy one last shot at an All Ireland crown.

119

absolutely dire article in the magazine with saturday’s indo about the annabels murder which they were purporting to reinvestigate.

turns out all they did was a mac and looked at the killers fb pages and then name dropped their celeb friends. shockingly woeful stuff

120

I started to read that and had to stop. It was embarrassing shit.

Stuff like:

A close friend informed us “John is still very popular amongst ex-classmates, he has over 200 friends on Facebook”