Majorityrights Central > Category: Media

It passes the obvious to say that the internet offers a host of political and news commentary of a character the mainstream media disdain.  Over the last year or so there has been some considerable debate about the uneasy relationship between the two.  MSM journalists don’t like to be attacked from the fringes, and surely take much gratification from net journalism that descends into shoddiness and irresponsibility.  I bet, though, they would kill for the freedom of speech we take for granted.  It’s their rotten luck they don’t have it - and we do.  It must be intensely annoying to have us freely deride them as bought and paid-for hacks.

But lest you start to feel too sorry for them, just remember the sins of ommission which characterised MSM reporting at the outset of the Paris riots or the post-Katrina looting.  And just take a moment to read this piece from the Toronto Star.

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The BBC’s “interactive Power Play game, in which players were invited to choose a team of 11 to run the world from a list of around 100 of the most powerful leaders, thinkers and other high-profile people on the planet”, has declared for ... well, it’s bloody obvious really.

The runner-up was the man who never had sex with that woman.  Still more inexplicable, Noam Chomski came in at number 4 and Archbishop Desmond Tutu - a nifty dancer but not hitherto a man I would have judged fit for global governance - made it at number 8.

George Soros, the well-known

philanthropist just pipped that embodiment of open-handed diplomacy, Kofi Annan - who came in last of the eleven.

Pixie-Face grinned his way to number 12.  Michael Moore - wouldn’t you love to have that guy in charge? - was 15th.

The good news is that the game was intended for the BBC’s younger readers who are yet to develop much in the way of critical thinking - more than half of respondents voted for the godman of Africa.  The bad news is that modern educational methods may deprive these young and impressionable minds forever of that possibility.

Let it also be noted that the BBC picked the list of 100 possible candidates itself, which narrowed the field somewhat.  As a sop to Conservatives they included OBL.  He came 70th but has declared jihad on the top 69.  He has also declared jihad on everyone below him.  Well, just on everyone, actually.

Thanks to Johan for the link

“For personal reasons I would like to believe that men and women are equal, and broadly that’s true.  But over a period of time the evidence in favour of biological factors has become stronger and stronger.  I have been dragged in a direction that I don’t particularly like, but it would be sensible if the debate was based on what we pretty much know to be the case.”  -  Dr Paul Irwing, in The Times, giving liberals the shocking news in a cuddly, empathic way.

Dr Irwing and Professor Lynn (whose earlier, liberal-offending exploits are touched upon at the end of the article) are only saying what anybody capable of surfing internet politics can easily discover:-

Men are more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, making them better suited for “tasks of high complexity”, according to the authors of a paper due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology.

Genetic differences in intelligence between the sexes helped to explain why many more men than women won Nobel Prizes or became chess grandmasters, the study by Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn concluded.

They showed that men outnumbered women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rise. There were twice as many with IQ scores of 125, a level typical for people with first-class degrees.

When scores rose to 155, a level associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman.

Alright, not new information for us.  But it is interesting that the MSM is now prepared to touch the IQ story at last - one thinks of the Guardian’s recent admission that, yes, genes have a role in general intelligence.  It doesn’t matter whether these are coincidental swallows.  Enough of them will usher in summer, and all scientists for whom the left has proved a censorious foe should think on that.

Human difference, lest one forgets, simply does not lend itself as a foundation for marxian politics.  We are a very long way yet from seeing the hopeless expectations of Affirmative Action recipients or the egalitarian obsessions of the establishment or the selfish interests of state employees challenged.  But that is the goal.  The public acknowledgement - however gradual and haphazard - of a truth that has been (at times, viciously) suppressed for three decades is a necessary start.  We need much, much more of it.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment wanted us all to be part of the same broad humanity - but the brutal truth is that we are all a bit tribal.
Simon Schama, a latter-day Macaulay quoted in yesterday’s Guardian as saying something necessary and true - and, given his background, rather refreshing.

Schama, along with fellow-historian and liberal Tristram Hunt, was endeavouring to explain to TV producer and Guardian invitee Stephen Moss the unexpectedly high viewer figures for BBC2’s series, Coast.  Of these Moss writes:-

One recent episode of Coast, on BBC2, attracted 5 million viewers, the highest rating factual programme on the channel this year.  And it’s not only programmes about the British seaside that are currently winning audiences: series featuring Britain’s landscape (Alan Titchmarsh’s British Isles: a Natural History), history (Tony Robinson’s Time Team and their Big Dig), and our native wildlife (Bill Oddie’s Springwatch) have been some of television’s biggest recent hits.

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