Here's the moment @BBCLauraK found out that Sajid Javid was resigning as Chancellor.
— BBC Sounds (@BBCSounds) February 13, 2020
Listen to #Newscast on BBC Sounds 🎧 https://t.co/v9MN2AzHuT pic.twitter.com/Wf4fNkKvv2
Very restrained in comparison to most in the Westminster Bubble…
Even after being explicitly told to be polite by Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Labour Party audience could not stop themselves from jeering at Laura Kuenssberg. Rebecca Long-Bailey promised a ‘gold star’ for a ‘well-behaved audience’ at Labour’s manifesto launch if they listened quietly. They booed her…
The BBC’s flagship BrexitElectioncast podcast turned its attention to online media strategy last night, bringing the term ‘shitposting’ into British households. As ever, they’re well behind Guido on this…
Referring to CCHQ’s deliberately poor Twitter graphics, Laura K explained
“There’s also this thing called [shit]-posting, where… political parties or campaign groups make an advert that looks really rubbish and then people share it online saying ‘Oh, I can’t believe how s*** this is’ and then it gets shared and shared and shared and shared and they go ‘ha ha ha, job done'”
Twitter’s more youthful hacks leapt on Laura claiming she’d butchered the definition. Most failed to clarify anything, choosing only to sneer…
The mistake of Laura’s was the Tories’ digital strategy is an example of shitposting, but shitposting is far from limited to political strategy – indeed political parties are only just testing out the well-loved internet joke format. Definitively, shitposting is most often a deliberately low-quality, jokey post or comment that derails – or devalues the quality of – the conversation.
The intent of the poster is important. For example, the Tories’ garish yellow and pink Brexit graphic was posted to get attention, but it wasn’t until they saw the mass negative reaction and put out their black and white comic sans version that it could be classified as shitposting.
Laura and the Brexitcast team gave a good example but a poor definition. Most ironically of all, the Brexitcast video ended up itself being memed for shitposting purposes – perhaps this was Laura’s intention all along…
Yesterday, Peter Oborne published a characteristic scream of pain at the over-use of “Downing Street sources” by Lobby hacks. Oborne argued that the quoting of unnamed sources facilitates lying and makes hacks the hands free delivery mechanism for fake news. It is noticeable that, of late, tweeting Lobby hacks repeat anonymous threats from Downing Street sources which habitually do not eventually materialise. He pointed the finger at almost everyone from Laura Kuenssberg to Robert Peston. For hours after his piece was published, the customary tweeted insider nuggets of information were no longer dipped in the Downing Street source…
Nobody seemingly dared report anything “according to a Downing Street source”. ITV’s Paul Brand was the first to break the self-imposed embargo at teatime. His attribution was greeted by a barrage of abuse on Twitter. Twittering Lobby hacks went silent again on what Downing Street was saying…
At 10:00 pm Peston cracked, tweeting
“So here is No.10 confirming that if EU gives the requested three-month Brexit delay, Boris Johnson will ask for an immediate general election. Loads of you have poured buckets of manure on me for telling you what Downing St is thinking and saying. So you are totally at liberty to ignore this statement or disbelieve it. But it would be wholly wrong of me to withhold this from you, on the patronising assumption you cannot analyse and contextualise it.”
His tweet thread included a Whatsapp text from his undisclosed Downing Street source. He was combative (given he has made his career from repeating things he has been told by sources that is hardly surprising).
Perhaps emboldened by Pesto, at 10:05 pm Laura Kuenssberg risked tweeting “No 10 confirms tonight after the vote they’ll try to push for election if EU offers delay.*” She was greeted with tweets saying she was a Downing Street mouthpiece…
Oborne is right to say that hacks whose main journalistic asset appears to be phone numbers for spokesman really need to be less reliant on, and more careful about, re-broadcasting a line that the source would be too embarrassed to say in public. The reality is that it isn’t in the interests of hacks to open up the Lobby system or insist more often that quotes are on the record. Transparency will devalue their role because information scarcity makes their possession of a spokesman’s phone number more valuable. A start to improving and opening up the system would be to put Lobby briefings in the open and televised…
*Boris had in any case already said this publicly earlier in the day in the Commons.
Boris has managed to give his exclusive “first interview since resigning” to both the BBC’s Laura K and Sky’s Beth Rigby at the same time. Watch his BBC interview here…
UPDATE: It turns out Boris gave not two but three interviews in the same room which have all gone out at the same time today – ITV’s Robert Peston has got in on the act too.
State-backed press regulator Impress is currently investigating The Canary for spreading fake news about the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg. Given they are endorsed by the government, surely we can trust Impress to carry out a fair and proper probe, right? Or not. It turns out two members of Impress‘ board have shared tweets from loony Corbynista accounts trolling Laura K. Press Gazette has found Impress board member Maire Davies sharing crackpot tweets calling Kuenssberg the BBC’s “chief propagandist”:
While fellow Impress board member Emma Jones tweeted out a far-left Counterfire article ranting about Laura’s supposed bias, and another cartoon with her wearing a “Vote Tory” sign.
Impress is the state-endorsed regulator backed by the government. Time and time again it has been revealed as a sham organisation made up of press-hating, party political cranks and oddballs. Total joke that the Tories haven’t done anything about this.
