‘The business of funding digging journalists is important to encourage’, Andrew Marr informed the Independent in 2008. ‘It cannot be replaced by bloggers who don’t have access to politicians, who don’t have easy access to official documents, who aren’t able to buttonhole people in power.’ At the Cheltenham Literary Festival two years later, he was dismissing these online upstarts as ‘socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother’s basements and ranting. They are very angry people.’ And there’s more: ‘So-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.’
But the media world is changing. In the US, major networks are looking to online media for a lead as ratings for legacy media decline. CBS has enlisted Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, a few short years after she was bullied out of the New York Times before she slowly built up a multi-million dollar online empire with the Free Press.
Some BBC stalwarts have, like Marr, perhaps seen where things are heading, and jumped ship to be free to express their old ideas on new media. Emily Maitlis and John Sopel created the News Agents podcast for this purpose. Oxbridge-educated Maitlis now doubles down on the smug but deluded sense of class-based superiority that has become her stock-in-trade. Never has she seemed more out of place as when she deigned to take her podcast to Clacton on the eve of the General Election last year. Nigel Farage is now Clacton’s MP.
– Michael Collins with an absolutely stonking article on Spiked
It’s going to get worse before it gets better but they can feel their power slipping away. We need to be merciless in 2029, implacable, grinding them down the way they’ve done to so many.
Apart from in the Jeremy Clarkson version of Top Gear, I wonder if the word “stonking” has ever been uttered on the BBC ? It seems like a very Toxic Male sort of word.
“Stonk” is derived from a technical military term used to describe a certain type of artillery barrage: a “Standard Regimental Concentration” 😉
“Pimples, slightly seedy and bald”.
The fact that Marr, who looks like a Tenniel illustration, can still criticise the appearance of others confirms his stratospheric level of self-delusion.
It is indeed a stonking article, skewering some of the most poisonously useless people to infest British public life in the past couple of decades or so. Marr, Aaronovitch, O’Brian, Maitliss etc etc. All promoting ruinous policies, which they will never suffer from, thanks to their wealth and status.
This tendency is widespread amongst the idiot middle classes. I ventured on X today, to see some fool pontificating along the “refugees welcome” line. His bio mentions that he lives in Norfolk, that’s 94% White British Norfolk. Of course he does.
I remember reading something by Rod Liddle in which he recounted a conversation with one of his editors. “Why do you keep using the phrase ‘middle class bien pensants’, Rod?” the editor asked. “Because you won’t let me use ‘c**ts’,” Liddle replied.
I remember when mainstream journalists were bashing the bloggers and describing them as ugly losers ranting away in their mother’s basements. At the time it often used to amuse me when the MSM were breaking a news story that I had read about weeks ago on a blog. I also remember the Climategate story that the MSM sat on until they couldn’t really ignore it any longer. Around that time there was also the Ship Of Fools story that involved a ship full of journalists, including some from the BBC, going off to Antarctica to see the devastation being caused by Global Warming. Their ship got stuck in the ice. The story wasn’t reported in the MSM despite the ship being full of reporters, without bloggers I would never have heard about it.
It’s only been in the last week that the prideful Real Media – even the NYT – decided it was acceptable to report on how our Minnesota Somalis have stolen several BILLIONS of dollars from us – a story that the bloggers and locals have been pushing for months.
So, to listen to them bluster about the lack of credentials and results has bypassed being funny and is quite enraging.
@Marius
You’ve just made me snort tea from my nose. I had not heard that quote.
@Stonyground
Indeed. That’s why it’s called PJ Media – the ugly losers were supposed to still be dressed in their pyjamas while blogging.
Bobby,
Do you mean the recent case where a judge over-ruled the jury’s guilty verdict?
@Clovis Sangrail: I’ve always thought shortening its original name, “Pajamas Media”, in order to sound more “professional” was a mistake.
John:
You are so right. The idea of Andrew Marr criticizing the appearance of anyone else shows that he lives in his own fantasy bubble. But we knew that. Clearly there are no mirrors in his house.
Shouldn’t Michael Collins be in lunar orbit pondering the “Irish Question”?
‘access to politicians’ means being given information by politicians that they want to see in print. Sometimes that information might be accurate.
The BBC person shows the normal, tragically normal, mixture of arrogance, personal abuse (his rant against citizen journalists – totally ad hominem “playing the man – not the ball”) and ignorance. In 2008, 2010, or now.
Perhaps the most depressing line was his commitment to “politicians and official documents” – the Gentleman appears to be totally unaware that the function of a journalist is to check to see whether what “official documents” (on Covid, on “Global Warming”, or on anything else) are true – if the “official documents” are just going to be assumed to be true, then journalists might as well not exist at all –
the public should just be directed to government websites.
The role of a journalist is not to repeat what officials and official documents say – the role of a journalist is to find out whether those official statements and official documents are true, or whether they are false.
And such work can be highly dangerous.
@Sam Duncan
I wholeheartedly agree.
(Slightly) interestingly, when I wrote pajamas, autocorrect changed it to pyjamas. Not the spelling I was brought up with, but apparently the one favoured in British English.
Yes the article by Mr Michael Collins is good – if depressing.
It describes a group of wealthy and “well educated” people whose minds have never been troubled by doubt – they ASSUME what they have been taught is correct, and never doubt these Collectivist doctrines, they claim to care about ordinary people – but show their “care” by wishing for absolute and total control over them.
At places like Cambridge Karl Marx replaced Plato – but the contempt for ordinary people, and the desire to rule them, indeed to crush them, remained.
The socialist philosopher Bertrand Russell (descendant of the interventionist Prime Minister Lord Russell – FALSELY described in the history books as a supporter of the laissez faire), presented himself as as “rebel” as a school boy by, instead of reading out the speech of John Bright against the Crimean War (as he had been asked to do), read out one of John Bright’s speeches against the Factory Acts instead.
It should be stressed that school boy Bertrand did not AGREE with John Bright – on the contrary he could not imagine anyone opposing the Factory Acts, to oppose them meant that someone was stupid and lacked basic compassion – because state intervention is good it is “Social Reform”, young Bertrand knew all this – because his school told-him-so, some “rebel”.
A “philosopher” who always followed fashionable doctrines and never allowed himself to really think – in the sense of challenging these doctrines, these assumptions.
A perfect member of the Apostles Club at Cambridge.
O/T
A triumph of Labour’s integrated travel and environmental policies
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/01/zipcar-worlds-biggest-car-sharing-company-to-close-uk-operation
That was merely one defendant’s trial in the midst of the close-to-100 defendant trials set so far. About $7 million worth. The liberal judges are doing their best to protect the Democrat-led state offices that enabled the huge theft. Should be interesting to watch.
This idea is being touted as more sustainable because it supposedly reduces the number of cars that need to be manufactured compared with having a car for every household. The glaringly obvious flaw in the argument is that the shared car is going to rack up its mileage in a fraction of the time and need to be replaced on a much shorter timescale.
@bobby b
how our Minnesota Somalis have stolen several BILLIONS of dollars from us
Would that they had stolen it from us, but in fact they stole the money designated to feed the poor and their children, the homeless and people who are trying to recover from drug addiction. I’m kind of surprised they didn’t also steal it from nuns healing the lepers and people saving kittens from being drowned in the river.
These people deserve a special place in hell.
And as to their leader, Ms Omar, a woman who was literally rescued from starving to death in a refugee camp in the seventh circle of hell, brought here and given freedom and unthinkable opportunity to even be a representative in our Federal Congress — to turn around and heap hatred and vile invective on the nation who rescued her from death or worse out of no motive but compassion? There are no words that can fully express my utter contempt and revulsion of this woman, and the shame that she brings on the good, decent salt of the earth Scandinavian folks who populated Minnesota. That is, until their suicidal compassion destroyed them.
Fraser Orr.
As you know these populations (for example the family of Mayor Elect Mamdani in New York) have never tried to hide their hatred of the West and their desire to destroy the West – the fault is with the people who let them in, and screamed “RACIST!” at anyone who suggested they not be allowed in.
Think about how President Trump is sneered at for saying that only people who love the United States should come to the United States and become citizens of the United States – how absurd say the establishment, for in their mental universe people who love the United States should be kept OUT (as such people are “reactionaries”), and people who HATE the United States (and wish to burn it to the ground) should be encouraged, actively encouraged, to come in.
It is the same in other Western nations.
The establishment is both evil – and insane.