Undertaking the simple task of “redefining local media as we know it,” THE BRISTOL CABLE is the city’s latest local ‘alternative’ newspaper run out of (where else?) Stokes Croft, the city’s thriving cultural quarter especially for the wealthy interfering do-gooder who knows what’s best for everyone.
Allegedly run as a DEMOCRATIC COOPERATIVE “where people participate in strategic decisions”, the Cable is hugely popular with wishy-washy social liberals in West Bristol, while boring the pants off the rest of us.
However, their 1,400 fee-paying members appear to have had LITTLE SAY in the cooperative’s hasty attempt to join the IMPRESS press regulator. The organisation that has just been recognised by the government’s Press Regulation Panel as the country’s new newspaper regulator despite having no support whatsoever from the actual newspaper industry.
IMPRESS is funded to the tune of £3.8m by MAX MOSELEY, fascist Oswald Moseley’s son and the notorious user of, er, non-Nazi themed “Aryan” prostitutes with fake German accents. Moseley is a character so honest, classy and reliable, a High Court announced in 2008 he had NO REPUTATION to defend in a libel action!
Meanwhile a lot of supporters of IMPRESS and their Hacked Off! lobbyist arm appear to be wealthy male celebs whose main interest is keeping any unfortunate accidents regarding COCAINE and PROSTITUTES out of the press. Although the Cable have told their members, “IMPRESS was set up by a group of LIBERAL MEDIA FIGURES led by journalist Jonathan Heawood”. Neatly forgetting to mention Moseley’s involvement
Recognition of IMPRESS by the Press Regulation Panel opens the door to STATE REGULATION of newspapers in the UK. While any publication that doesn’t sign up to this shitty little celeb-led compromise, will have to pay the costs in any libel action whether they win or lose (and the costs tend to outweigh the damages at least ten fold).
In other words, TELLING THE TRUTH in newspapers could cost you millions unless you sign up to a series of rules agreed between the state and an organisation funded by an unwholesome right wing creep.
No newspaper or serious national publication has joined IMPRESS. They view it as a vehicle for GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE in the press that openly undermines free speech and is incompatible with British democratic values. While most of the media would also not touch Max Moseley with a barge pole-lengthed copy of the Bristol Cable.
Private Eye already has rejected joining IMPRESS outright. While not even the house journal of Tuscan social liberalism and wholesale state interference in our lives, The Guardian, is up for it either.
Is signing 1,400 badly briefed members up for state censorship of the newspapers really the kind of “reinvention” of the media we need?