Interesting News Snippets

Ah understood. I have a tendancy not to bother with the Times as I can’t do the crossword. Half the time I don’t even understand the clues let alone know the answers.

Mike, the Times is a murdoch paper, they would no more support the Labour party than the greens since Ed took a stand against Rupert a couple of years ago. The Times did come out in support of labour in 2001 & 2005. He apparently came over to the UK to put some ‘backbone’ into News Corp’s coverage a couple of months ago.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/election-2015-murdoch-tells-sun-future-company-depends-stopping-miliband-becoming-pm-1497507

Along with the Star, Mirror and Sport. More intelligent comment in the Beano or Dandy.

You have spectacularly omitted the Sun, which is the only paper to have actually declared party political support. Tory south of the Border and SNP North. But perhaps you have dismissed it as a newspaper!!;)

The Mail and the Telegraph are but parrots to the Tory Party Machine.

If that’s your opinion I would like you to suggest an impartial newspaper. Mail, Telegraph and Express – Tory. Guardian and Times – Labour. Independent – LibDem/Labour because it’s not sure of it’s political orientation. It’s the paper of the undecideds.
Sorry Trekbuster. Looking back through the previous posts I notice we are revisiting old ground.

I wonder if there are any ideas on naming the Sprog ?

Chardonnay and Kylie seem to have fallen from favour. What do you think of Prosecco ? The diminutive might not be acceptable.

I’m jolly glad that you put that last sentence in. You have an admirable way of protecting your backside !

Suppression ? I almost launched into Red Ed and his Party conference amnesia.

It was the supression of the report as much as the nature of the findings that I was intending to highlight. Not that the tories have an exclusive history of supressing bad news.

Not necessarily so. That’s just one group – many business leaders are anti EU protectionism and the DG of the British Chambers of Commerce as reported in the Grauniad in February wants an early referendum to clarify the uncertainty.

Business reflects the spectrum of opinion across the country from Europhile to Eurosceotic and all stations between.

Of course big business are in favour of EU membership. Free access to markets, unlimited supplies of cheap labour to keep overheads down etc.

However, the decision on our membership of the EU should not be decided by exploitative big businesses, it is the people who should decide.

Right wing press in news bias shocker

It seems the tories tried to bury a very positive report about how business leaders supported EU membership and all the benefits that it provides the UK economy because it didn’t, as they had hoped, show that there was any evidence Brussels had any excessive power or reach.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/18/tories-covered-up-eu-evidence-conservatives

In another blow to Dave and Nige, the new Tesco boss has stated that the proposed referendum on the EU is in itself a bad thing for business

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/generalelection/general-election-2015-tesco-chairman-john-allan-slams-tory-plan-for-eu-referendum-10187367.html

Not surprisingly, neither pieces of news are reported in the Mail or the Telegraph.

Perhaps equally unsurprising is that neither the Grauniad nor the Indy reported Nige’s pathetic attempts to continue the ‘row’ over the audience in last weeks debate in his piece in the Daily Fail

My point exactly Mike. ( I don’t actually really mean the Parrot bit, the Telegraph is quite critical of some aspects of the Cons election campaign, it was a tongue in cheek comment paraphrasing an earlier post)

However I think to be accurate the Guardian leader actually supported the Lib Dems at the last election, not the Labour party and Rupert seems to have parted company with Labour as well. The Sun and Times supported the Conservatives in 2010

http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/may/04/general-election-newspaper-support

Hence the need to read around the publications to see their spin and try, if possible, to get to the truth without blindly sticking to one or two ‘trusted’ news sources.

[QUOTE=trekbuster;2216486]The Mail and the Telegraph are but parrots to the Tory Party Machine.
And The Guardian and Times aren’t the Labour equivalent. There’s no such thing as an unbiased Newspaper in this country. Even The Independent often prove that it obviously isn’t.

The Mail and the Telegraph are but parrots to the Tory Party Machine.

I have my personal experience and those of my politically neutral friends, upon which to draw. I have the collective reports on the subject from so many other media sources.

I’m more than sure that you are as aware as I am of this matter. Your declared political affiliations intervene.*

*Sorry John to paraphrase, couldn’t help myself. I’ll go and sit on the naughty step till I feel guilty.

We all have an opinion, they often differ, and we tend to read papers and agree with media outlets that support our own position. I am as guilty of that as the next person. However I do read as widely as I can, and this includes the Telegraph, the Times, the Sunday times, the Independent, the Guardian all regularly, very infrequently the FT and Observer, and, when I want to get a sense of moral outrage to set up my day, the Mail online. I am afraid I am too sensitive to be willing to go and buy a Mail in a shop. However, when I was living with an Aunt for a while a few years ago, I did read the paper copy of the Mail as she took it, and it doesn’t seem to have changed much.

Whilst the Mail may be a cut above the other tabloids, such as the Sun, The Express etc. which I am afraid I don’t read, it’s standards of reporting and, lets face it, basic use of English, often fall below all the other publications mentioned

The often written comment that many on this forum are less than keen on the Mail qualifies it in my opinion as second only to the D.Tel. which apart from Mary Riddell is the best.

What makes a newspaper more or less great?

Accurate reporting would be a big prerequisite. Bothering to check facts out, rather than pinching other’s copy and rehashing it.

Rather scuppers the Mail in both respects. Just ask JK Rowling about that, she won an aplogy and substantial damages over their failure to check basic facts out.

A great newspaper would probably be one that won a Pulitzer prize

Actually, to give them their due, I respect the Mail for their courageous coverage and pressure on the authorities regarding the Stephen Lawrence Killers. But that was some while ago now

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2570722/Daily-Mail-page-turning-point-says-mother-Stephen-Lawrence.html

However, this did not sit well with some of their readers, just check out the comments after the article linked to above.

These apprenticeship schemes do smack of wheel reinvention. From what I gather, they were all the rage up until the Blair regime anyway. From personal experience it would appear that a lot of apprenticeship and graduate schemes exist as a means of underpaying staff for the level of responsibility they are landed with. When I was job hunting after my MSc I found a lot of graduate schemes that were looking for newly qualified graduates with ‘two years of experience in the field, knowledge of Javascript, Python, SQL, C++, CAD, ideally six months + experience on site’, for a job that pays ~£20k is happens to be in London (they all are). Quite how you are meant to have gained those precious two years of experience is beyond me, because the true purpose of a graduate scheme should be to give the employee said experience in the first place. If you are already vastly qualified for such a role then you wouldn’t be applying! That job would be either a six month fixed term appointment or a sleazy rolling contract that means you don’t get any of the perks of being a real employee; you can be fired at any time, you don’t contribute towards a pension, you get limited annual leave and sick pay. Costa and Morrisons are probably rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of hiring and firing numpties on minimal wage positions at will without costly tribunals etc… It seems a lot of corporations allowed themselves to get very top heavy during the financial downturn, by firing the serfs first, then crow endlessly about their philanthropic work; re-employing a token number of youngsters on reduced wages with fixed term contracts.

Perhaps I’ve got it wrong. What makes a newspaper more or less great?

The worlds second greatest newspaper the Daily Mail reports that a Coalition initiative appears to be delivering a positive result. Costa Coffee and the supermarket chain Morrisons have announced their participation in the Coalition’s much trumpeted apprenticeship scheme.

Some commentators have taken a rather superficial attitude to these worthy proposals. They ask whether training young people to make coffee and tastefully decorate supermarket shelves is really what Britain needs in its quest to re-establish itself once more as the workshop of the world.

This move seems to me to be a step in the right direction. Let the Chinese and the Koreans concentrate on heavy engineering – they do it much more cheaply. If we do what we do best – quantitative easing, we can quietly print money to buy the goods the Americans tell us we need like the F35. We might have been able to con the French into building the two aircraft carriers but, then their printing presses are also very busy.

I’m quite touched by frequent media reports of the current concern shown by many American military commentators when airing their views about British defence spending. I recall that after WW2, successive American governments were apparently keen to weaken Britain’s standing in the world thus enabling the Americans to arrive on the stage as the worlds only superpower policeman.

But, all became well because someone invented the ‘special relationship’. This was taken to indicate that Britain and the U.S. were, underneath a certain rivalry, just really good buddies standing shoulder to shoulder against whatever was the threat flavour of the month. One aspect that was never much discussed was that the ‘special relationship’ was more in the minds of British politicians than the’ man in the street’ whether here or in America.

All the more ironic, given the history of Anglo American relations over the past 60/70 years, that our now best friends should be so concerned about our level of defence spending – a concern which I certainly share.

I wonder if their concern would have more emphasis if it were coupled to a new form of Lend Lease that resulted in a few choice bits of weaponry crossing the Atlantic at knockdown prices.

I have my personal experience and those of my politically neutral colleagues in teaching, upon which to draw. I have the collective reports on the subject from so many media sources that comprises an almost non stop flow of information.

I’m more than sure that you are as aware as I am of this matter. Your declared political affiliations intervene.

You seem to imply that I am “aware” of indoctrination. You are effectively suggesting that I am lying.

So, to make my position very clear.

I have genuinely never seen any indoctrination, ever, indeed all the teachers I know are scrupulous in keeping their own politics out of the job. None of my students knew who I voted for, and indeed asked me on occasion but I would not say as I thought it inappropriate.

I could say that you have been blinkered by your own prejudices, but since I don’t know what your experiences and media sources are, I would be falling into your own trap, so I won’t say that.

By the way, I have not declared any political affiliation. Oh, another thing, I am not a member of the NUT either, as you seem to have alluded to in post#267

I have said who I won’t vote for, but if you recall I have also stated I have yet to decide who to vote for this time. If even I don’t know how I will vote……..