Media - Stealing Material

Richard North has a piece on EU Referendum entitled 'Media: The Story Stealers', which is about the way that Christopher Booker's story about an Italian woman who was forced to have her baby by caesarean so that it could be taken from her and be put up for adoption. It's a horrific story, and it's easy to see why it has been picked up right across the media. The only thing is that Booker, who's been writing about the reign of terror that social workers and the family courts have imposed on many families, hardly gets credited with brining the story to public attention in the first place.

I've had a little taste of it here too, with the Balakrishnan and the Lambeth Slaves story. It started when I guessed the likely identity of the group involved before it had been revealed in the press. Once it was confirmed that it was Balakrishnan and his group I wrote a few pieces about my contacts with them years ago in Brixton. Not only did that lead to a massive spike in traffic, it also lead to numerous contacts from the mass media.

To date I have spoken or had email contact with the Independent, the Sunday Times, the BBC, the Huffington Post, the Sunday Telegraph, Sky News and more. I gave them information about the group, what it was like in Brixton at the time, the ins and outs of the different far Left groups active at the time and more.

And the result? Only one person has given any credit to this blog and that's Cahal Milmo of the Independent. Many of the rest have quoted verbatim from text I've given, used extracts from conversations I've had with them or else picked up facts that I supplied and have given no credit or attribution. I shouldn't be surprised, but when I've had long and detailed conversations with journalists and they've promised to give the blog a mention it's galling for them to use my material and not credit me with it.

Not only that, I see the same idiocies and errors of fact repeated again and again. Even when given correct information some newspapers seem unable to get it right. For example, the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Communist Party of England (Marxist Leninist) and the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist Leninist) are not the same, and Balakrishnan was only ever involved with one of them. And the stories about Balakrishnan proclaiming himself Jesus are as idiotic as the garbage about Carlos the Jackal staying with Balakrishnan in Brixton.