Whiny zombies

Thin skinned 38 Degrees activists have taken offence at being called zombies by Tory MP Simon Burns earlier this week. Another word would be humourless. Their professional activist (get a life) executive director, David Babbs, was grumbling in the Huffington Post this week. Huff being the operative word.

I have another word for them: whiny. 85,000 38 Degrees zombies have written this whiny e-mail to Burns:

Dear Simon Burns,

We’re citizens, not zombies.

We have a right to be treated with respect by our MPs and to expect a reply when we get in touch.

Every British citizen has a right to be heard in our democracy. Thousands of us write to our MPs, because we care. Because we value democracy. Because the decisions you take affect us.

It’s your job to listen.

They also have the right to be ignored. I don’t suppose that many of these are Tory voters so I don’t suppose that Burns will be unduly worried. Hopefully his staff have the technology to send an automated reply so that not too much taxpayers’ money is wasted on this nonsense.

38 Degrees blind to BBC hegemony

38 Degrees’ anti-democratic twitter zombies are trying to influence Ofcom’s consideration of what criteria should be used to measure media plurality. Ofcom's consultation closes on November 18th so they are going a little crazy.

38 Degrees is so befuddled by its hatred of Rupert Murdoch it has totally lost any objectivity. 38 Degrees has set up a page to allow it zombie army to bombard Ofcom’s consultation with pre-prepared answers. 38 Degrees’ suggested wording is:

Dear Ofcom,

Re- consultation on measuring media plurality

I am calling for:

-no single person or corporation to be able to own more than 20% of the UK's newspapers, radio and TV stations

-details of any meetings between media corporations, government bodies and politicians to be made public

Please note that the BBC is a public institution and should not be treated in the same way as commercial broadcasters.

Hilariously 38 Degrees suggests a 20% rule but wants the BBC to be treated as a special case.

The BBC’s mullti-channel domination of news is truly awesome. Just so you know the numbers look at this Ofcom paper. TV has a 73% share of where people get their news from and the BBC owns a 70% share of that.





In addition to the 70% share of TV, the BBC has a 54% share of radio news and 40% share of page views of the top 50 news websites. Sky only has a 6% share of TV news. NI is big in papers, about 35%, but radio and online are almost as big as the newspaper segment. The BBC has a bigger share of radio and online than NI has of newspapers and the BBC’s share of TV news is double NI share of newspapers and a 12 times bigger share than Sky of the TV segment. The real news media plurality story in this country is the vast preponderance of the BBC.

If you want to make a real contribution to the consultation follow this link.

I told Ofcom:

The BBC as a corporate body should be treated identically to any other corporate body.