PRESS GANG

PRESS GANG has been quiet for the past six months.

There’s a reason.

Editor Paddy French has been working on a major project with media commentator Roy Greenslade.

It’s a forensic account of the sordid career of Rupert Murdoch’s “Fake Sheik” — Mazher Mahmood.

He was gaoled in 2016 for conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

It will be published next month — more details shortly.

See https://paddyfrench.substack.com/p/the-house-of-farage?r=o41j8

This kicks off the Press Gang autumn season. Among the articles on the stocks are:

The House of Farage

PRESS GANG takes a trip to the seaside …

… to have a closer look at the Reform leader’s new “home” in Clacton.

The James Murdoch Mystery

RUPERT MURDOCH’S youngest son dramatically called out his father’s right wing editorial policies and left the board of the family business in 2020.

And yet he remains a director of Elon Musk’s Tesla.

Saint Andrew Norfolk

LAST MONTH saw the formal canonisation of the late Times reporter with a high profile memorial at St Brides, the journalists’ church on Fleet Street.

This, and a series of obituaries, have engaged in “narrative cleansing” — removing all traces of Norfolk’s highly damaging attacks on Britain’s Muslim community.

White Grooming Gangs

KEIR STARMER and the media establishment are not telling the truth about grooming gangs.

To frame the issue as an Asian problem, they’ve had to purge white grooming gangs from the debate.

Israel and the Gaza Genocide

THE “ZEALOTS for Zionism” are working overtime.

In the vanguard, Jake Wallis Simons — the former Telegraph and Daily Mail hack forced to resign his Jewish Chronicle editorship earlier this year over Netanyahu-inspired fake stories about Gaza.

Wallis Simons has just published another tract — Never Again: How The West Betrayed The Jews And Itself — which advances the novel theory that the West is in decline and one of the reasons is its hatred of the Jews.

Most sane observers believe the opposite is true.

The West’s support for Netanyahu’s genocide is a boost to the far right and a threat to democracy.

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Today the Observer was taken over by the loss-making Tortoise Media company headed by one-time Rupert Murdoch protégé, James Harding.

Tortoise’s editorial team is dominated by former journalists from the Times and Sunday Times.

Does this mean that the Observer’s stance on the conflict in besieged Gaza and the occupied West Bank will change to a more pro-Israel position? 

https://paddyfrench.substack.com/p/the-end-of-the-observer?r=o41j8

The “independent” press watchdog Ipso is still refusing to order a Standards Investigation into the Jewish Chronicle.

Here are the latest, tortuous attempts to bring the wayward paper to heel …

The scarcely believable story of how Prince Charles, with the help of the News of the World, stitched up his own son when he was a schoolboy at Eton.

https://open.substack.com/pub/paddyfrench/p/prince-harry-the-blackadder-conspiracy?

News of the World reporter Mazher Mahmood was spared a serious humiliation in Harry’s case against the Murdoch paper.

One of his witnesses in his cocaine sting on John Alford has admitted she lied on oath in the case.

https://open.substack.com/pub/paddyfrench/p/fake-sheik-off-the-hook-in-prince?

THE LATEST instalment of the Press Gang campaign to overturn some of Mahmood’s miscarriages of justice has just been published. 

It examines claims that the News of the World hired “heavies” to intimidate witnesses in the trial of the ITV “London’s Burning” actor John Alford.

ELON MUSK’s dramatic interventions have added rocket fuel to the “Asian grooming gangs” issue.

Last Thursday he tweeted:

Free Tommy Robinson!

Robinson is currently serving a gaol sentence for contempt of court over the issue.

A few hours later Musk attacked Keir Starmer over his handling of grooming cases while Director of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS):

Who was the head of the CPS when rape gangs were allowed to exploit young girls without facing justice?

Musk — already known as America’s “Shadow President” for his massive financial backing of Donald Trump — is also threatening to intervene directly in British politics.

He’s reported to be considering a $100m donation to the Reform Party — led and partly-owned by Nigel Farage.

The “Asian grooming gangs” narrative is a key component of the rising tide of anti-Muslim media coverage in Britain …

… and Musk is not the only one to jump on the bandwagon.

The issue was first made respectable by the Times.

The paper published a sensational series of articles back in 2011 which claimed to have discovered the new crime of “on-street” sexual grooming of young girls by British Muslims.

Far right groups claimed these articles proved they “had been right all along about Muslim paedophile gangs”.

Ever since, the Times and its reporter Andrew Norfolk have become key cheerleaders in the surge of anti-Muslim reporting in mainstream newspapers.

But their original investigation was seriously flawed.

Today Press Gang republishes two articles which exposed the questionable methods used to create the “Asian grooming gangs” narrative.

The first — “Grooming …” — found that Norfolk and the Times left out a series of vicious grooming gangs who were white.

The second — “Early Warnings” — shows that even before publication there was powerful evidence that their thesis was wrong…

CONTINUES HERE
https://paddyfrench.substack.com/p/elon-musk-weaponising-grooming-gangs?r=o41j8

BREAKING

Evidence that Jewish Chronicle and Melanie Phillips are parroting falsehoods about Gaza …

… this new scandal could have been prevented if press watchdog Ipso had taken action against the paper at its December board meeting.

https://open.substack.com/pub/paddyfrench/p/jewish-chronicle-parroting-falsehoods