Here is the news according to glorious leader Jeremy Corbyn
Good evening, these are the headlines.
(Bong)
Comrade Corbyn has sent a letter of congratulations to the President of Venezuela hailing the nation’s innovative new currency, the El Crapo, sadly not trading after the banning of all foreign exchange trading.
(Bong)
Three unauthorised journalists with illicit public school backgrounds are to face a show trial chaired by Justice Seumas Milne (Winchester). Guilty verdicts have been announced. The trial opens tomorrow.
(Silence. No bong. Man operating bong button has gone on strike.)
The North Korean infrastructure minister has welcomed a new friendship deal agreed with Comrade McDonnell which will see our brothers and sisters from North Korea building a series of “holiday camps” in Wales and Northern Scotland, for the joyful purpose of re-education.
(Silence. No bong. Striking man supposed to be operating bong button has been found and shot.)
Comrade Abbott has announced that she will…
(Electricity goes off nationwide. Bulletin cuts out.)
It is easy to mock the notion of a Corbynite news service, in light of the Labour leader’s dire speech at the Edinburgh TV Festival this week. He wants to set up a nationalised digital service which my friend Alex Massie has already dubbed JezSpace. Under the Corbyn terror, news organisations will be forced to have elected editors, to give the media an early Russian revolution vibe. The BBC will also have to account for the poshness of its staff, and explain where they went to school. That’s a laugh considering how public school Marxists dominate Corbyn’s inner circle. Corbyn himself was for a time privately educated. Is a refund available?
Inevitably, Owen “Squealer” Jones, the Corbynite equivalent of the propagandist in Animal Farm, crawling his way back with Milne and Corbyn after denouncing the Glorious Leader before the 2017 general election, declared that this is a marvellous initiative that will #changethemedia.
Journalism is dying, Jones said, which will be news to the Guardian group working hard to turn the business around after Alan Rusbridger’s calamitous tenure, or at The Times (the paper I write for) that is doing so well that it has hit 500,000 subscriptions, or at the FT, or the Daily Mail, or at magazines such as the Spectator and the New Statesman, or at the Washington Post, or the WSJ, or at highly successful and profitable US networks, or at the BBC where for all its problems there is still much good journalism.
Journalism is under pressure and it is changing, because of the impact of digital, and the tech giants need to be treated as the publishers they are responsible for everything they publish, but the idea that the media needs help and guidance from a bunch of Marxists takes the biscuit.
I wondered on Twitter how long the many good journalists on the Guardian would put up with this bloke Owen Jones rubbishing journalism, when it is their hard work and long hours that pays the wages of the entitled Jones. He’s a talented boy, but I suspect he has worked more on the fluent gobshite side of the business, and not in a newsroom or in commercial.
Dawn Foster (sorry, hitherto unaware of her work) also from the Guardian did not like this criticism of the sainted Jones. Oh well.
Still, we have Milne, McDonnell and Corbyn in charge of media policy to look forward to. Oh, and if they get in they’ll have their hands on GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 too. Brilliant. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?