Peston on antigenic shift and antigenic drift

The sewer press must move on. Murdoch has done his globalist best to throw shit at Boris, after it became clear that having already left the EU we would not extend the transition period. Only the dawning of 1st January 2021 will convince the globalists and remainers that we've really left. The remainer dags on BBC, ITV and C4 - Peston, Kuenssberg, Bolton, Beth Rigby, Newman, Burley and the rest - must now crawl into even more latrine pits to find material with which to attack the government. I predict Peston, having demonstrated before millions that he doesn't know the difference between an antigen and an antibody, will instantly now become an expert on the difference between antigenic shift and antigenic drift as talk moves on to vaccine development.

Meanwhile there will always be those who look to the make the best of a crisis. Amongst them are those seeking to drive a wedge between China and the states of Africa. Africans, it appears, have had first hand experience of their Chinese overseers already and it has not been positive. Now it's emerging that the Wuhan virus is racist, killing people of colour to a disproportionate extent, the wedge-drivers are using social media to squeeze out videos of black people being abused and victimised by the Chinese and even one alleging to show a mob of Nigerians torching a Chinese factory. Whether these come from the CIA, FSB or just opportunistic sources, the effect is the same - they help to undo the billions spent by China in Africa as part of the belt and road drive. 

And finally of course Boris's illness also seems to have provoked hope in the hearts of ambitious Tories. As Boris came close to death, our MPs asked desperately who could possibly replace him, and for at least one Tory MP the answer it seems was 'Me!'

So here's your quiz question for the week. Which Tory MP whom you've probably hardly noticed in the past has been all over social media and the less-demanding broadcast media this week? Also with an article in the Sundays. A couple of clues. He's an obedient soft remainer and is possibly the most tedious and soporific writer and speaker in the parliamentary party. The man is living Ritalin. He could put an entire remedial class of ADD delinquents to peaceful sleep.

The media have failed - and the public know it

There are three malign motives driving many of the mainstream media in the UK. First is Brexit - which many London journalists have great difficulty in understanding has happened. "Do you think this is a good time to be leaving the European Union?" asked one gigantic numpty of Rishi Sunak at the daily Number 10 press conference; "We have left" replied Mr Sunak. Bitterness over having failed to reverse democracy pervades the newsrooms of the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky and has coloured their coverage of the Wuhan virus.

Second is their left-wing bias. Hence the suggestion that no one has ever made outside the febrile minds of journalists that Mr Johnson should share power with assorted failures and has-beens, mostly of the left but including a Remainer or two to frustrate our EU trade negotiations. Yeah sure. We have a majority of 81. Good reason to let Tony Blair and John Major join the cabinet.

Thirdly is their hatred and envy of Boris himself. Emily Maitlis made her own dislike of the PM very clear in June of last year, when she chaired (appallingly) that ridiculous TV debate with Sajid Javid, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove and a jejune attention-seeking Rory Stewart, all perched on uncomfortable bar stools while Emily launched dig after dig at Boris.

Fortunately, they're stupid enough to imagine that using their privileged airtime to slag-off the PM, our government and the nation's response will rouse public anger against the government. Well, cretins, it's had exactly the opposite effect. Our little media heroes have been stunned at the ferocious reaction against them on social media. Peston, Kuenssberg, Maitlis, Boulton, Newman, Burley, Morgan and the Snows hardly dare venture onto Twitter these days - they're immediately destroyed by an enraged public. And this at a time when newspapers are facing severe challenges from loss of physical sales and online advertising, as is Channel 4, and the BBC is facing an imminent decriminalisation of the TV tax. Yep morons. You're facing nemesis.

The final straw is their failure to ask serious questions of China of the sort that Niall Ferguson asks in the Boston Globe - serious and searching questions on the origin of the Wuhan virus, the cover ups, the conspiracy and the disguising of the truth. Peston's stupidity, Kuenssberg's malice, Matlis's meretriciousness and all the rest trying to find gaps through which to shove needles at Boris whilst giving the PRC a free pass have not been missed by the public.

All of which is reflected in the latest popularity poll from JL polling for Times Red Box (9/4); China may be down -45%, but the media is close behind at -29%.

Update
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The Boston Globe comes up fine for me, but for anyone missing the linked piece, Ferguson's questions are

First, what exactly was going on in Wuhan that led to the initial emergence of SARS-CoV-2? If, as first claimed but now seems unlikely, the virus originated from a bat at one of the disgusting “wet” markets (for wildlife intended for human consumption), which your regime inexplicably has not shut down, that would have been bad enough. But if it originated because of sloppy practices at the Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, that is worse. It is insanity for research on potentially lethal zoonoses such as coronaviruses to be going on in the heart of a vast metropolis like Wuhan.
Second, how big a role did the central government play in the cover-up after it became clear in Wuhan that there was human-to-human transmission?
Third, after it became clear that there was a full-blown epidemic spreading from Wuhan to the rest of Hubei province, why did you cut off travel from Hubei to the rest of China — on Jan. 23 — but not from Hubei to the rest of the world?
Fourth, what possessed your Foreign Ministry spokesman to start peddling an obviously false conspiracy theory on social media and why has he not been fired?
Fifth, where exactly are Ren Zhiqiang and Ai Fen, to name just two of the Chinese citizens who seem to have vanished since they expressed criticism of your government’s handling of COVID-19?
Finally, how many of your people has this disease really killed?

Rocks and hard places - digital regulation

I don't know what the collective term is for Youtube channels, infomercials, newstainment, multi-channel infotainment, e-pinion and the like - 'digital' is too encompassing, 'media' too finely drawn. 'Content' seems to be a useful portmanteau sort of word. There used to be certain checks and standards for those who created and disseminated Content. Newspaper and magazine ownership and distribution, broadcasting bandwidth governance and licencing, professional journalists, barriers to entry including technical complexity, equipment cost and limited capacity. Making a video use to be a matter of  a camera, lighting and sound crew, an offline editor, an online editor and a facility with half a million quids worth of Beta SP machines, editing suites, reference monitors and so on. Then came processing power, software and easy GUIs that meant a video recorded and edited on an Apple laptop could rival in look and feel one costing £2k a broadcast minute to make.  

Regulation has yet to catch up with what has happened. If I want to broadcast a three minute speech, I need a government licence for a digital broadcast radio channel, a transmitter, and a roomful of compliance and diligence stuff and every breath I broadcast is subject to the most minute scrutiny. If I put the same speech on the web as a podcast, there are no restrictions, no standards and no regulation whatsoever bar the criminal law. One can argue that broadcast bandwidth, for the 'push' media, is a limited and valuable resource that must be centrally controlled and rationed, whilst internet bandwidth, for the 'pull' media, is effectively unlimited and use is determined by market forces, i.e. popularity. 

Why should these differences be a problem? Can't we live with the way things are? well, perhaps today we can - but technology and economics mean the boundaries between the transmission mechanisms of exactly the same Content are being increasingly blurred. Established broadcasters want to regulate the Wild West of the internet to replicate the analogue regimes under which they toil. Authoritarians strive to impose their own bigotry. And all the while champions of free speech, Libertarians and democrats are resisting State control, censorship and the economic cudgels of the global corporates all seeking to 'own' the internet. 

Personally, I don't buy the guff that the internet is 'harming millions'. The few sensitive souls getting the vapours because someone was rude to them on Facebook seem the same sort of folks who used to swoon at the sight of a nipple on 'Play for Today'. Yet I also want to take-down ISIS videos of lads from East Ham hacking-off people's heads, sick paedo filth or grainy footage of dogs tearing eachother to pieces. These views are not inconsistent; the latter repulsive Content types are all contrary to existing law. We don't need new laws - we just need a mechanism for we, internet users, to apply the existing law. We don't need need nine-hundred police officers crouched over glowing screens - we need ways in which we, Peel's citizen police, can act ourselves to exclude the already-illegal stuff whilst leaving the hurty words intact.

The dangers of the media echo chamber

We have moved into an age in which the traditional news media no longer merely report the news but seek to shape it. Newspapers and broadcast media have become political actors, campaigns and even parties. As a consequence, the trust that the public used to invest in establishment entities such as the BBC, or the 'broadsheet' press, has disappeared. They are all guilty of disseminating 'Fake News', and public trust of journalists and journalism is now in the gutter. Alongside that of politicians. 

The consequence of this is that most of us now communicate only in echo chambers, with those who share our views and beliefs, using sources that confirm such opinions. The more pronounced this becomes, the more polarised our nation and society, the greater the mistrust and the more egregious the Fake News. From both sides.  

I have written before that I respect greatly the journalistic integrity of Der Spiegel, an openly left-liberal publication but one that fights the loss of journalistic professionalism in a way that the Guardian would simply not understand. It takes a certain courage for Spiegel to ask 'Is there truth to refugee rape reports?' and then to answer the question in a conditional affirmative. Something I suspect strongly that the Guardian would never do. 

Germans are particularly sensitive to notions of mass rape. Antony Beevor helped lift the lid on the extent of Soviet rape in Berlin - the Downfall, bringing to a popular audience hidden records that both German and Russian authorities would rather have remained hidden. Rape and conquest, rape and invasion, are linked in German historic memory, so sex crimes attributed to migrants are big news. In the German echo chamber, no mainstream news outlet references the website Rapefugees.net - but Spiegel sought to challenge what it displayed.  

They found that though many of the rape reports were either false or referred to sexual assaults that fall short of rape under German law, many others were based in fact. Now after finding this unwelcome result, a dishonest media outlet would have shelved the result. All credit to Spiegel for publishing. They write;

The classical media find themselves in a quandary here. If we don't write about the issue and about the rumours circulating on the internet, skeptics see that as proof that something is being hidden. Yet if we do write about specific websites like the one covered in this story, we run the risk of enhancing the profile of pages meant to incite hatred online.

So yes, the pandemic of sex assaults carried out by migrants is based on reality. Police statistics back this up. But the real benefit of honest reporting across the echo chambers is to challenge prejudice and preconceptions; migrants commit sex assaults not because they are Muslims or brown, it is suggested, but because they are "more frequently young and male and are more likely to live in a large city, lack education, be unemployed and have no income".

Well, to a point, Lord Copper. I think why they commit such a high level of sex assaults is still open to judgement. But acknowledging that there is a problem is a good start for both polarised sides. And perhaps our UK media, including the BBC, can even learn a lesson that will allow them to raise their own gaze from the gutter.