Private Eye’s bizarre dishonesty
Look, there’s more important things going on — like the world degenerating into a massive burning skip — and if I responded to every absurd attack fired my way, I wouldn’t have time to eat. But Private Eye (a magazine I respect and all that) are being so ridiculous, I’m going to have to put the record straight.
A few weeks ago my Facebook page was being spammed by a disgruntled former writer at Tribune magazine. He left around 30 messages (and was clearly going to keep on going indefinitely) as replies to anyone who commented on the page (including, in one case, someone sharing her story of having her benefits cut). Every message was the exact same copy and paste job, alleging that the new owners of Tribune — a magazine on its way to being completely defunct until it was recently taken over by US magazine Jacobin — owed wages to former staff.
Now, I don’t work for Tribune (I wrote an article for the first edition as a freelancer), but having looked into it, it turned out the claim was false. Indeed at least one media outlet has already been forced to apologise for this false (and it turns out, potentially libellous) claim:
So I had someone relentlessly spamming other users with the exact same false, potentially libellous claim. My Facebook page is a very vibrant place full of heated and passionate discussion; I don’t have time to properly moderate it, but like any reasonable page owner, I don’t tolerate spam or abuse when I see it. If I did, the page would quickly collapse as a viable space for discussion. Someone relentlessly spamming a page is not interested in reasonable discussion in any case. So I removed the user from the page to stop the spam.
You’d think this wasn’t exactly the basis for a riveting story, but Private Eye decided otherwise. They ran a story falsely claiming that Tribune owed wages to their former staff, and claiming a former staff member had “posted a polite reply to Owen Jones’ tweet, asking if his cheerleading for a newspaper proprietor who had ripped off three socialist hacks and trade unionists wasn’t a bit hypocritical bearing in mind his frequent calls for left-wing solidarity. Jones’ response to the ex-Tribune comrades? He has deleted their comment and blocked them from commenting on his posts ever again.”
The point of this “story” was to suggest that I’m a raging hypocrite who preaches solidarity with workers but sought to silence a victim of an unscrupulous boss. It was therefore gleefully shared by multiple right-wing twitter accounts. So I got in touch with Private Eye to point out their story was, actually false. I hadn’t blocked him on Twitter (and how would you delete someone else’s tweet anyway?); neither had they sent me “a” (singular) polite reply, but rather they’d spammed dozens of other users with a false, potentially libellous claim, and that because they were intent on spamming, I’d removed them from my page.
Private Eye did post a correction; well, not actually a correction, more what could be described as “a total piss take”. Their correction reads:
I see what you did there, lol, roflcopter, lmao, etc. That’s not accurate, they know that’s not accurate, and although — again — this is hardly up there with Watergate, it does raise the question of how much other stuff published in Private Eye is genuine, or just a wilful distortion of the truth. Forget me here, they’ve published false claims about Tribune, too. The individual who wrote this “story” is not, to put it mildly, my biggest fan, but that surely shouldn’t mean the magazine should act with a total lack of basic integrity.
