Hypocrisy is the state of promoting or administering virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not actually have or is guilty of violating. Hypocrisy often involves the deception of others and thus can be considered a kind of lie

Wikipedia

Just after I published this post about the upcoming Team Rex exhibition starting on Thursday, my blog was vandalised…

( very subtly.)

Team Robbo  was changed to…

Team Robbed

Team- definition

A group of players forming one side in a competitive game or sport.

Robbed- definition

to take something … illegally, as by force

Nasty eh? 

Absolutely chilling in fact, when aware of Robbo’s plight.

This is what is known as a cold joke,  but a new modern cyber-age version, done via hacking.

So what is a cold joke?

Among the strongest expressions of lack of respect is the cold joke.

During the occupation of Kuwait, some Iraqis who had killed a boy told his family they wanted money for the bullet. They could have simply forced Kuwaitis at random to give them money. The added cruel humour of this demand is what makes it a cold joke.

The language used by people carrying out atrocities is riddled with cold jokes…..The cold joke mocks the victims. It is an added cruelty as well as a display of power: we can put you through hell merely for our mild amusement. It adds emphasis to us and them: we the interrogators are a group that share a joke at the expense of you the victims. It is also a display of hardness: we are so little troubled by feelings of sympathy that we can laugh at your torment.

Jonathan Glover- A Moral History of the Twentieth Century

The Second Edition is published this month, August 2012; Get yourself  a copy here . It will help you understand the psychology of the cold joke when used by tyrants as a tool of oppression and the kind of people who enable them by protecting, shielding, promoting, assisting, legitimising, financing and supporting them…

 The Guardian call the book…

…a useful primer on our inhumanity.

…and continue…

In chapters on, among others, the first world war, My Lai, Hiroshima, Rwanda, Stalin, the Nazis, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot, Glover rubs our noses in our own ordure while at the same time proposing a model of how we should be governed. The leader we want, in short, should be intelligent, imaginative, capable of empathy and, while a swift decision-maker, not given to acting on impulse.

…and finish by assuring us that this is…

A tall order, but a necessary one..

Well thanks for that morality lesson, from The Guardian who should after all know that very well as they take a leadership role themselves, as a ‘Guardian’, and their leadership should surely therefore be subject to the same requirements that it quantifies for other agencies….

Therefore it’s a crying shame such a respected and esteemed publication would appear to be not quite as forthright, astute and conscientious or indeed…

…intelligent, imaginative, (and) capable of empathy….

regarding certain…

ordure

or·dure (ôrjr)

n.

1. Excrement; dung.

2. Something morally offensive; filth.

…on their own patch, 21st Century London; Media and the Arts… 

When the ‘Graffiti Wars’ documentary,  the first ever TV programme to reveal a whiff of the…

ordure

….that Banksy leaves in his wake, won an RTS award they didn’t even mention it in their write up.

Yes that’s right the Royal Television Society, far more famed for their hard-won intellect and vast reservoir of scholarly wisdom,  than any graffiti affiliations found the programme so utterly scintillating that they gave it a best arts documentary award.

The Guardian who are so renowned for their graffiti affiliations that their website returns 680 articles responding to the search query ‘Banksy’ wrote….

Channel 4 swept the board at the Royal Television Society programme awards winning 10 prizes including two for its university comedy drama Fresh Meat.

The broadcaster also won best drama serial for Top Boy, the popular factual and features prize for Hugh’s Big Fish Fight with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and the daytime award for a live edition of Deal Or No Deal, which is currently being investigated by the Gambling Commission.

Omitting to even mention ‘Graffiti Wars’- I am deadly serious, the article is here

So it would seem that the Guardian whose motto is….

Get The Whole Picture

…would rather keep the sniff of Banksy’s

ordure

… away from the tender noses of their readers, and buried halfway down the compulsory results list that ran after the article.

Shome mishtake surely?

• Not deemed relevant information for their massive readership of ardent Banksy fans?
• Self censorship?
• Leaned on by JB? 
• Worse? ((Shudder))

The…

“I was only obeying orders” or

“I didn’t think it was my place to speak out”

….defence was memorably thrown out under the Geneva Convention at Nuremberg in 1945

I’m truly disappointed to have to post this as The Guardian are very often a truly great newspaper and have contributed enormously to British culture, and the evolution of journalism, and continue the great tradition of newspapers as moral campaigners. To get squeamish, pull rank and censor as a matter of editorial policy just doesn’t sound right to me, and is certainly not the job of any ‘Guardian’ I would want protecting me, so I do hope there is an explanation….

In 2007 the newspaper was ranked first in a study on transparency that analysed 25 mainstream English-language media vehicles, which was conducted by the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda of the University of Maryland.^[137] It scored 3.8 out of a possible 4.0.

Wikipedia

But now that at least one Guardian arts journalist is actually in the active employment of ‘Bristol Gift Shop Industries PLC’  would their score be so high?

I would venture to refer the Editorial team on this occasion, to the wisdom of their esteemed moral arbiter, Mister Jonathan Glover himself…

We take so much on trust. We rely on the authority of experts, trusting that textbooks of chemistry or physics get things broadly right, that historians give a correct picture of at least the central chronology of the French Revolution, or that economists have at least a bit more understanding than we do of the causes of a recession. Many people take on trust much of what their parents or their society believe about morality, politics or religion. These items and others like them make up the worldview of a particular society at a given time.

…so if the press, in general, not just the Guardian, are to maintain their moral high ground, they may, in certain circumstances, need to decide whether to be

• the Guardians of the totalitarian terror of the commercial ‘street’ art cartel, operating with impunity under a false flag in London, thus protecting their readers from the truth; or
• the Guardians of freedom of expression, the truth and the people

…because the two are so intrinsically and  fundamentally at odds, that there can only be one winner, the outcome of which could potentially devalue the major personal risk, gruelling dedication and burning passion for justice that it has taken so many newspapermen to reach the heights of outstanding journalism and transparency.

However despite any errors of judgement, it certainly seems like the Guardian are leading the charge, with their Open Journalism campaign, which began in February…

Here’s their advert espousing Open Journalism; getting …

The Whole Picture

….from the readers involvements, wisdom, comments and opinions in the breaking of a story, using the story of the Big Bad Wolf, with a modern twist….

…we are informed that it’s not just news, but also….

Culture coverage at the Guardian is no longer just one-way, from critics to readers. Catherine Shoard, head of the Guardian’s film coverage, discusses the importance of building a relationship between readers and editors, and how much potential there can be in tapping into specialist knowledge beyond the media bubble.

However on this article discussing the Robbo issue, an article that allows Banksy a voice to criticize Channel 4,  comments have been disabled!

So despite us being told that…

Culture coverage at the Guardian is no longer just one-way, from critics to readers.

…on certain issues that challenge the supposed champion of free speech himself it still is one way, if it even gets published at all.

If the Guardian or broader  news media would like to draw on the knowledge of someone with a unique insiders understanding of British art and grassroots underground culture and help them achieve….

The Whole Picture

…. I would gladly put my writing to this service.

I did try to embed Mister Rusbridger’s  video on Open Journalism ,

“Journalists are not the only experts in the world”

here, but the embed option is very sadly not available for that film, so you’ll have to follow this link

[WP-CUMULUS]

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