(not satire – it’s the UK press)
Contrary to popular belief, I’m much more of a cock-up and cover-up man than a conspiracy theorist.
However, I have noticed that I get trolled a lot – well a lot more than usual anyway – after I write something critical about the UK media.
Over the years, I’ve had more than a few threats of libel (idle ones to try to shut me up mostly) but I’ve noticed the threats very often come from journalists, not from politicians or others.
In fact, in my experience, national newspaper hacks have the thinnest skins imaginable and are the most likely to jump up and down threatening to sue at the drop of a hat.
Which is ironic considering how they think nothing of dishing it out day after day, often to the people least able to fight back.
The latest insults and the usual threats to “track me down” came after I wrote a blog post criticising the UK media for ignoring the March Against Austerity in London yesterday:
BBC and press ignore massive demonstration against austerity in London
If you look in the comments of my Facebook status which links to the blog post, you’ll see a typical example of the kind of trolling I get.
But even stranger is that the threats often come from media people – or their supporters – who are supposed to be anti-establishment.
I get attacked by people such as the Daily Express journalist Sonia Poulton, her partner Lee Ryan and now I’m apparently being “tracked down” by supposed anti-establishment film maker Bill Maloney who claims to be uncovering establishment paedophiles.
Why on earth are so-called anti-establishment campaigners and their circle of friends wasting their time threatening – to the point of obsession – an anti-establishment blogger like me?
Why are they not targeting the real villains – the corrupt politicians, the hidden interests of the money men and the powerful mainstream press?
Nothing to do with their close professional connections to the UK media I suppose?
.
.
But no.
Like I say, I’m not all that much of a conspiracy theorist.
I think the real reason I’m being targeted is because journalists and the media in the UK are so arrogant that they just can’t stand anyone who dares to criticise them:
This is what you get when you dare to question a tabloid journalist in the UK
Beware online activists asking for money
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No conspiracies here. I’m being targeted because of good old-fashioned arrogance, bullying and greed.
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Related articles by Tom Pride:
BBC and press ignore massive demonstration against austerity in London
Disgusting abuse of kids by The Sun and Mail shows press self-regulation is toothless
Why we need press regulation – primary school teacher bullied by Daily Mail columnist is found dead
Murdoch attacks BBC when his own press abused a dead schoolgirl and her whole family?
Just 4 billionaire tax exiles – friends of Cameron – will benefit from weak press regulation
This is what you get when you dare to question a tabloid journalist in the UK
Daily Mail hack boasts about being able to ‘trace’ personal phone numbers of Twitter users
On-line trolling is being tamed – but the Tabloid Trolls are still rampant
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Please feel free to comment.
Pride's Purge 
To some extent this is positive – you are doing the job journalists should be doing – but the grip that the establishment has on most of them prevents them from doing so.
Journalists are keen to use ‘social media’ as it has been labelled ( they have to label it to understand and categorize it!) and use it abusively but react strongly to it when they are ‘abused’
There’s a cricket journalist in the Guardian called Mike Selvey who is very happy to call Shane Warne’s comments about Cook as peurile – he even goes below the line in comments sections to admonish contributors – but won’t accept any criticism of himself.
The British media in general are scum. They are arrogant, unintelligent, sycophantic and worthless. you challenge them and the only reaction they know is to patronise and abuse.
Keep up the good work
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sorry
the point about Selvey is he’s the journalist, Warne is only a cricketer!
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Those journos don’t come across as being very bright saying that sort of stuff. Waste of an education I reckon.
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I suppose it`s because social media are a threat to the mainstream which more people are turning over from because they recognise it cannot be trusted. So you must be doing something right.
Just be sure you know people are who they say they are.
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The bulk of advertising revenue that pays for the media comes from government. The newspapers are political. You cannot write for the media, but from a political standpoint.
The Daily Mail is far right.
The Daily Express is UKIP.
The Daily Telegraph Tory / UKIP leaning.
The Independent – Labour – New Labour
Is The Sun, Labour after that photo shoot of Miliband? Don’t know?
But at least I have finally learned what trolling means on the internet. It is, in effect, harassment if there was such a law online. ‘Tracking you down’ is a threat of violence and low-level terrorisation.
But abuse on either side, with aggressive stance achieves nothing.
It is not words but actions that feed the starving.
TUSC needs to engage and bring under its umbrella all the little socialist parties and get the trade unions to donate to TUSC (Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition is its name after all) sothat they can ‘buy’ into the Independent, the only newspaper the says the truth that welfare reform is the cause of starvation, to the extent published in the medical journal The Lancet in May 2014 by doctors that the hospital admissions for starvation have doubled in last 5 years. It takes over a month without food for an adult to medically starve to threaten life. Less for a plumper adult or kids. Children are suffering the hunger symptom of Rickets more and more.
Once a party has a newspaper, it has arrived.
Only those over 45 and even more over 60 read newspapers, but the grey vote are the last of those voting.
Those 50-66 years are suffering just the same as all ages from welfare reform (aka abolition of the welfare state), plus the moral theft of state pension when the ring fenced NI Fund has been full for decades, not needing a top up from tax and remains full because it is not a tax and so government cannot empty the fund, believed wrongly even by the Pensioners Convention, who also cannot comprehend that the state pension is a contribution based pension at 12 per cent per year compulsory contributions by the employee, plus boss’s contribution.
See the banned TUSC video on my personal website:
http://www.theswansnewparty.org.uk
I am not a member of any political party, because no party as yet offers me the life-saving rightful payout of state pension at 60 from this year (lost from 2013 so far to 530,000 women).
If the government wanted to raise the retirement age, they should have done it to those turning 18 in 2013, not any other age.
But as the raised retirement age has not saved one penny in tax and it is discrimination, because all women MPs kept the pension payout at 60 from 2012 and all MPs are getting exactly the same money as an 11 per cent pay rise in 2015.
The loss of pension payout and even worse to come from 2016 that leaves men and women with nil state pension for life, hzs lost youth jobs on the high street, as it is the over 50s and elderly who shop in town centres.
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Journos don’t like being exposed for what most of them really are – a load of yellow bellied bullies, who’ll do as they’re told to stay in a job…and they’ll go after anyone who dares to mention it, COWARDS!!
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Let me get this straight, Tom.
You’re receiving abuse from two non-entities on your facebook page, and this amounts – somehow – the the media closing ranks to fight off your awesome assault.
[Katabasis –
1) As far as I can tell, it seems to be about around 10 people using different identities, most of them probably connected with Express hack Sonia Poulton, but not exclusively.
2) The abuse is by email, on Facebook, on Twitter and on my blog. The above are just some of the latest examples.
3) It’s been going on since May 2013. That’s a long time.
4) The trolling includes death threats, threats of violence, threats to my family and threats to trace my identity and home address and visit “karma’ on me.
5) If you had bothered to read the blogpost before commenting you would have noticed I specifically say it ISN’T a conspiracy but just petty bullying by people with connections with the media.
6) Nice try.] – TOM
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you must be in the media – are you a journalist or a troll?
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I love it!
This confirmation bias is an absolute hoot.
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Reblogged this on sdbast.
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I suppose it’s a compliment in reverse – they say bad publicity is better than none!
Keep on annoying Tom 🙂 xx
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im not sure Sonia poulton is really a mainstream journalist i haven’t seen anything by her in a mainstream paper for a fair while.
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I hope you have handed these stupid remarks by even more stupid people to the police Tom?
Elaine Payne
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Before she got a bee in her bonnet about you, Tom, I saw Sonia Poulton run up against another Twitter user who is a cancer sufferer (and very talented cartoonist/artist/humorist) for a really innocuous remark he made about one of her posts. She made comments that were spiteful and quite unnecessary, and yes, she spewed out legal threats on that occasion, too. It prompted a third user who is a prominent disability activist/blogger to reprimand her. All in all it was an ugly incident, and caused me to unfollow Poulton, promptly.
I began to wonder if she is really the champion of disabled people she advertises herself to be, or a cynical queen-bee careerist trying to carve out a personal media niche as a campaigner? She’s certainly very precious about her vaunted status as a “professional” journalist. All it means in this day and age is that she has taken Paul Dacre’s dirty shilling, which is hardly a recommendation. It’s as if she and her followers believe nobody else is capable of asking pointed questions, or indeed, should be permitted to do so.
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“1) As far as I can tell, it seems to be about around 10 people using different identities, most of them probably connected with Express hack Sonia Poulton, but not exclusively.”
– How have you established this?
“2) The abuse is by email, on Facebook, on Twitter and on my blog. The above are just some of the latest examples.”
– That gives you two out of four venues you can complain directly to and three that will at least yield IP and/or location data. You’ve given that to the police too, right?
“3) It’s been going on since May 2013. That’s a long time.”
– I’ve been getting abuse online since about May 1999 along with almost everyone else I know with an expressed opinion. How long is that if 1 year and 1 month is a “long time”?
“4) The trolling includes death threats, threats of violence, threats to my family and threats to trace my identity and home address and visit “karma’ on me.”
– You’ve contacted the police then, yes?
“5) If you had bothered to read the blogpost before commenting you would have noticed I specifically say it ISN’T a conspiracy but just petty bullying by people with connections with the media”
– Perhaps it’s not me with the reading difficulties, as I didn’t say “conspiracy”.
“6) Nice try.”
– I’ve no idea what you’re alluding to here.
[Katabasis: “the media closing ranks to fight off your awesome assault” would be one hell of a conspiracy by the media against me. Either stand by your original accusations or disown them and apologise. I can’t be bothered to argue with a slippery moving target.] – TOM
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I’ve been nosing around the People’s Assembly site. As far as I can tell no Press Releases were issued prior to the anti-austerity march. Can someone correct me if I’m wrong?
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It was the site for the people that wanted to go. It was obvious from the outset that there were going to be a lot of people going. There were more than a few journalists aware. Lack of forewarning is not an excuse avaiable to the media in this case. An audience member event stated the date time and intention during the episode of Question Time that IDS was a panellist on, certainly the BBC and others were well aware.
Even on the day they could simply have looked out the window and realised there was a story there. There is no question but that it was an editorial decision rather than lack of knowledge of the event.
They are supposed to be jpurnalists after all!
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Tom – I support much of what you say and I think you blog comes from a place of morality and rationality. I think we ALL have to try to speak openly and ask or answer questions as best we can… so I say to you – Katabasis has asked some sensible questions. Will you answer them?
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P.S. Tom – If you have received a threat of death or violence (a ‘threat’ of karma doesn’t count!) then perhaps I should remind you that you are required BY LAW to report it to the UK police. Of course, if you don’t live in the UK (as you have claimed in the past) then you are subject to the laws of that other country.
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People tend to behave like that when they feel threatened. Given the shifting of power from print media to social media I, sadly, can’t say I’m surprised that you get these attacks from people who see you doing what they should be.
The more vicious the threats, the more the person behind them knows they are wrong and the less power they feel they have to communicate a message in comparison to yourself.
You are almost certainly correct about the reality of it being a very small number of individuals.
As regards SP, at first it seemed she may be doing something quite worthwile and I certainly wished the SPTV venture well. Since then, having watched both the sort of things she’s been covering and the way she acts and speaks – including her body language, I’ve come to the conclusion that she has a form of personality disorder. Please do not take that as a criticism of her, it’s just something that is what it is – people would sometimes say the same of me.
Unfortunately in her case, it does lead what could have been a challenging opportunity, to have become something of sideshow.
Well written blogs such as yours, with solid foundations and consistent standards will stand the test of time. Thank-you for doing what you do, and ignore the muppet brigade. 🙂
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P.P.S. To clarify – If you are receiving serious criminal threats then you MUST deal with that in private with the police, but if they’re not criminal then writing about them on here is worse than useless. Other than that, just keep on writing what you think to be true… and I hope that’s what you will continue to do…
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Tom – Are you going to reply? If you can’t think of any sensible answer then that’s OK, and you will be judged accordingly, but it would be simple politeness to apologise and say so. This blogpost is entirely about you, so you don’t have the excuse that “it isn’t about you” this time!
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Tom – Perhaps I can be more succinct (which I should have been before). If somebody has directly threatened a crime then tell the police. If not, stop whinging and get on with the job!
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I’ll be the first to criticise our worthless media class.
However, you really have to play their game if you want to get anywhere, and it matters not one jot what idealistic ideas you hold regarding what our glorious hacks should or should not be doing.
Our press institutions currently thrive on churn – primarily via press releases. If press attention was desired for this event then not even going through the motions of issuing a press release and distributing it aggressively was beyond stupid.
Especially if you’re then going to moan about lack of press interest.
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I see the “media blackout” narrative is getting short shrift over – at all places – the New Statesman:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/06/no-media-didn-t-ignore-your-anti-austerity-march-it-just-wasn-t-interesting
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On one of the online media blogs, forget which one it was, but it was during the time leading up to the European Elections, and the only thing the media seemed to be reporting was stupid boring scandal (so-called) involving Nigel Farage. I made the comment that I was fed up of reading such low-standard journalism and that it was about time they reported real news, for eg. the convicted paedophile cases involving the Labour Party – cased that have been tried in court and convicted. What had Miliband done about these people? Are they still members of the Labour Party? That was what I wrote, and my post got deleted.
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No Katabasis – it’s getting short shrift from Willard Foxton.
Google his name if you don’t know who he is.
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It’s interesting that those journalists who are most articulate and vehement in speaking up AGAINST Islamophobia tend to see it largely in politicians and public institutions, and rarely amongst their own. Which is a larf, really, because the media are among the worst offenders.
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Yeah, I saw that too, and rather than respond, I simply thought “true colours have been shown” and like you promptly unfollowed
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Exactly, Tom, I quit following Poulton.
Looks like I’m still here…
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believe me when I tell you that SP is involved with some seriously dodgy characters who’ve trolled me and others for nearly two years. Her and her sidekicks(teamoutlaw) have just about been contained. They stick to FB and so they should. They’re also informing us of the inevitable “blow up” that’s imminent and has been for decades. I know this because I was duped by them into becoming one of them. It lasted for a few months then it all went tits up for them because I realised my position and turned the tables. I’ve met one of the creatures and to be honest, in the real world they would be very much considered as vermin and put down. I’ve attacked Tom Pride on the basis that he was a troll, or so I was informed by my team. I’ve made amends and will continue to. Unlike the creatures I have a conscience and use it.
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