Trial by media circus

[Maatandosiris]

The first thing to say is anyone who has committed rape absolutely needs to be brought to justice. The criminal
justice system needs to become more effective in protecting all victims of crime.

However, AIBU unreasonable to think that this weekends story about RB has been sinister for many other reasons, none of which are to do with RB.

Firstly the SM posts whipping people into a frenzy of some big reveal like some secret album release. Clues planted through various carefully placed posts, giving just enough detail to let people work things out (plus making people suggest other names) . It was an absolute circus, in the case of rape it turned accusations of serious crime into entertainment, no thought how anyone would be affected, whether ultimately guilty or innocent (maybe c4/The Times were trying to get new stories). Extremely bad taste at one end of the spectrum, devastating for innocent people at the other.

The ultimate agenda of both The Sunday Times and C4 is to make money. That’s it, neither is set up as the states arm of justice. There’s no inbuilt checks and balances. Yet somehow they are allowed to name an individual, accuse them of crimes (and effectively say they are guilty) without any of the safeguards and checks and balances of the criminal justice system applying.

People have lost all sense of justice. We have a man accused of something, an hour and a half of heavily hyped TV which holds some accusations but mainly a character assassination, The Sunday Times probably selling many more copies/getting many more subscribers with more of the sane one sided accusations.

Even on Mumsnet we have people already calling him a Rapist, people feeding into the frenzy of “he’s a creep”, “he’s a sex pest” etc etc. in other words, convicting him in their minds before this has gone anywhere near a court or jury.

How will this ever now be a fair trial? How will they find a jury who can 100% not have their views affected by this whole circus? If he is guilty will there ever be a safe conviction, how can we be confident that real justice has been done? What’s the risk of any conviction being overturned? This is not in the interests of either the alleged victim or the alleged perpetrator.

Questions are circulating all over SM as to the agendas at play. It’s fairly clear that the Sunday Times has been searching out victims. What were they saying to these people? What promises have been made?

if a crime has been committed this should be with the criminal justice system not Saturday night prime time TV with an associated heavy advertising campaign.

Im not sure whether RB is guilty or innocent, but that’s not what this post is about. AIBU to think that the way this witch hunt (which is what it is regardless of whether RB sinks or floats) is abhorrent and flies in the face of justice and that this has far wider and scarier implications for society than just this case. Who or what is next?

Yet here we are being told journalists are whiter than white and the best upholders of justice. I think mentioning Martin Nashir is very relevant

No one has said that or anything like that. Why use ridiculous hyperbole?

And you have yet to acknowledge that the content of Martin Bashir's interview with Diana has not been questioned. It was the way in which he secured the interview that was deceitful!

This is the trouble. Behaving inappropriately and illegally are two separate matters.

One should have been dealt with by his employer and I think it’s right to ask why it wasn’t esp where that employer was public ally funded - this needs to be investigated by the appropriate watch dog

secondly an accusation of illegal activity needs to be investigated through the justice system.

whether either of these mechanisms are fit and effective is another matter.

Any credibility of the journalism and their agendas was destroyed in the 24hours before in the whipping up of a frenzy via carefully placed social media pieces. This was not the tactics of empathetic and balanced reporting.

And the way in which he secured the interview no doubt influenced its content and Diana attitude towards him. It’s sad you cannot see the connection. So, I’m not going to acknowledge something that isn’t true.

Brand can shift the trial by media circus into an actual trial in court if he wants. He has previously threatened legal action. The Times and Despatches are giving him the chance to put his money where his mouth is.

They've done him a favour really.

'Yet here we are being told journalists are whiter than white and the best upholders of justice.' Nobody said that. Stop spoofing and exaggerating.

There are checks and balances.

The check on the failure of the legal system is the media.
The legal system is the check on the media.

It is a better system than having only one. It's imperfect. But the purpose of checks and balances is precisely this understanding of imperfection.

Social media has upset something of these existing balances.

But this doesn't mean that social media is either 'telling the truth to power' more than mass media nor does it mean that the mass media is always fully accountable. However we do know that there is less quality checking of content of social media and less regulation of social media which means it is more vulnerable to crackpots and grifters.

The point is vigilance must be constant.

Ah so you admit that sometimes journalists aren’t correct, that they sometimes manipulate and exaggerate. That sometimes we cannot rely on what they are saying, that sometimes their “journalism” is tainted with an agenda?

And sometimes police are criminal and corrupt and sometimes there are abhorrent miscarriages of justice.

No system or profession is whiter than white and even the justice system fails to uphold justice

You are not making a cogent argument

Unfortunately you have hit the mail on the head. Yes the legal system should be the check on the media, but social media has upset this balance. It clearly moves far quicker than the legal system can do. the legal system will never override the narrative now ingrained in peoples minds, a narrative put forward by the media, entrenched by social media.

If this goes to court, and on the off chance a fair trial can now be heard (unlikely) and RB is found not guilty. RB sues channel 4 and the Sunday Times. What then? Do you think he will be seen as innocent? Do you think his mental health will be repaired (and his family’s). Or will people treat him like (?and call him) a rapist forever?

Again this is not about whether RB is guilty or not. It is whether this trial by media is morally and legally right.

Yes, I’m happy to admit that. It’s common in the shitrags like the Sun and Mail.

But in this specific case, there will be so much source and fact checking to verify the women’s stories that any rogue journo with an agenda will be found out long before publication.

But you will never believe it because you’re an RB fanboi. So crack on defending a pervert by trying to undermine the accusations.

I’m not sure which part you are failing to understand. Justice should be administered through the justice system not the media. If the justice system is broken it needs to be fixed. Any problems with the justice system are not solved by vigilantism.

Actually I don’t like RB at all, have never found him funny, so there goes yet another of your made up narratives.

You keep saying these journalists will have been fact checked )as opposed to the many others who haven’t been). I might believe it if there was evidence of exactly how they conducted themselves, how they checked stories etc. rather like you would expect in a court of law!

You’re so hung up on the rapist tag. Even if he never stands trial for rape, the revelations about his gross treatment of women are enough to make any sane person believe he’s revolting.

Even if he’s never proven to be a rapist, he’s definitely fucking rapey.

It’s been an open secret in the comedy and entertainment world for years. In plain sight.

And you don't understand that investigative journalism isn't vigilantism. Well you probably do but you just like making irrational arguments.

And this is the crux of it isn’t it. You have the attitude of, well if he’s not guilty of this crime, he’s guilty of something. I suggest you dig out a history book and look up witch hunts.

Good article by Fintan O'Toole on RB's gaslighting in The Irish Times today - behind a paywall but posted below as it might be instructive reading for some of the misguided posters on here

By playing the part of a predator, Russell Brand convinced us he couldn’t be oneIn his defence of himself against multiple allegations of sexual abuse, Brand would have us believe it’s not just his reputation but reality itself that is at stake

Last July, on his YouTube and Rumble shows Stay Free, Russell Brand interviewed the far-right governor of Florida Ron DeSantis. It is a crossover moment in which two kinds of gaslighting, the political and the sexual, flow perfectly into each other.
A fawning Brand gave DeSantis free rein. The would-be Republican nominee for next year’s US presidential election took the opportunity to explain that we did not see what we thought we saw on January 6th, 2021, when a mob invaded the US Capitol to try to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.
“These are people that were there to attend a rally and then they were there to protest,” DeSantis told Brand. “Now it devolved ... into a riot. But the idea that this was a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States is not true, and it’s something that the media had spun up just to try to basically get as much mileage out of it and use it for partisan and for political aims.”
You didn’t see what you saw. What happened didn’t happen. It’s all created by the media. There are no objective truths, only partisan and political constructs.
Fast forward to Friday last, and Brand is addressing his huge audience on the platforms where, as he says at the start of his speech, “we critique, attack, and undermine the news in all its corruption”. The line was the same as the one he had allowed DeSantis to spin in July: it is all a plot by the mainstream media.
Brand used a rhetorical trick that Trump is particularly fond of: saying something outlandish while attributing it as “some people say” or “some people think”. In Brand’s case, the attribution is to his own fans, who, he claims, have been warning him to “watch out Russell, they’re coming for you, you’re getting too close to the truth”.
Who are “they”? Not really the women who have come forward to recount to Channel 4 and the Sunday Times allegations of awful experiences with Brand – which he pre-emptively denied. They have no autonomous reality – they are mere puppets whose strings are being pulled by the dark conspirators who control the world, the same ones who try to fool us into believing in the Covid pandemic and climate chaos.
Gaslighting is the technique of reality distortion in which an abuser (typically male) manipulates a victim (typically female) into disbelieving her own experiences. One of the classic signs is “insisting that an event or behaviour you witnessed never happened and that you’re remembering it wrong”.
Rapists and domestic abusers have used this technique for a very long time. But it has seeped out into contemporary politics. That classic sign of gaslighting now flashes all over far-right political discourse.
The aim, as Brand openly boasts, is to “undermine the news”. Just as victims of personal and intimate assaults must be convinced that they are “remembering it wrong”, the same trick can now be pulled in relation to public events witnessed live by hundreds of millions of people.
The knack lies in the ability to turn everything upside down. Things that would previously have been hidden are displayed quite openly, while everything that can be seen openly is really an illusion created by the hidden “they”.
The first part of this trick is the chutzpah of hiding in plain sight. Brand shows that he could not possibly be a secret sexual predator by playing the part of one so flagrantly.
This ploy works because it draws on and exploits common sense. We assume that someone who is up to no good must want to pretend otherwise. Therefore, the logic goes, someone who seems so obviously nefarious (and remember that Brand actually played Dr Nefario in Despicable Me) must in fact be innocent. It takes both nerve and skill to pull this off, but Brand is a highly accomplished actor and performer who has plenty of both.
He is also immensely famous and, as Trump put it when boasting about his serial sexual predation, “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
The second part of the trick is where it enters the political world. In order to “undermine the news” and convince your followers that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, you are innocent of everything, you have to generate a world view: the global conspiracy.
Its shape comes from the old tropes of anti-Semitic paranoia, but the Elders of Zion can appear in many guises, among them “the mainstream media”. Exactly who “they” are and how they operate is always fuzzy. But that is less important than the insistence that, as Brand put it on Friday, their attacks are “concerted” and “co-ordinated”.
There is some place where “they” all get together and decide which enemy is getting too close to the truth and must be brought down. The plot is all the scarier because we cannot quite see what it is.
It’s this crossover that makes Brand’s case so much bigger than the individual allegations against him, dreadful as they are. Brand’s defence is more than the personal rebuttal to which he is entitled.
It is a counter-offensive against the values on which rational discourse depends: evidence, truth, objective reality. Brand is not just saying that he did not rape and abuse women. He is saying that there is no cognitive universe in which such allegations could be true because reality itself is manufactured by dark forces.
He knows he is pushing buttons that are already fully wired up. The irony of Brand’s claims that he is being victimised by the mainstream is that the conspiracy-theory gaslighting he depends on is now itself completely mainstream. It is the inside dope, the creed of multibillionaire media moguls such as Elon Musk and major political parties such as the Republicans in the US.
Seeing is disbelieving. Experience is fantasy. Memory is false. Evidence is fake. Testimony is performance. The accuser must be accused. The perpetrator is the victim.

Again you come out with ridiculous exaggeration. Investigative journalism is not vigilantism.

'Justice' isnt being meted out by journalists. They are putting information into the public domain.
Information that can be challenged by RB.

Given you don’t understand the difference between hearsay and testimony, I’m not sure you would gain much for seeing their working.

You also said there were no checks & balances in your OP. Realised you’re wrong now?

Rest assured that the Times / Ch4 legal teams do understand the difference and know the threshold they need to pass for broadcast / publication.

And where did I say journos aren’t fact checked? Of course stories are fact checked before they are published. Genuinely, do you know how the media works?

The dictionary definition of vigilante

“a member of a group of people who try to prevent crime or punish criminals in their community, especially because they think the police are not doing this” - sounds exactly like what is happing here to me

It is whether this trial by media is morally and legally right.

I think it is right this time. He is rich, quite powerful and has said he's fine suing those who "defame" him. His victims would not have received justice in the criminal courts. They may get some from this. In that way it is morally right. And as RB can take the broadcasters to court, it is legally right.

The post you’re replying to doesn’t really warrant an ‘ah’(ha) - emphasis mine - moment

I never said I didn’t think he was guilty of this crime. I’m simply expanding the discussion of the doc / articles to include the predatory and problematic behaviour that doesn’t fall into the illegal category. Because that also needs looking at - and the court of law isn’t the setting for that, is it?

I’m very aware of the witch-hunts - they have an interesting interlinked history with the early incarnation of the mass media, actually - with Malleus Maleficarum being widely disseminated thanks to the recent invention of the printing press.

Interesting you bring them up, given they were largely about removing power from women and not taking their word as truth.

Not quite the gotcha you hoped for, perhaps.

I believe them.

However I think there are a million more stories that impact many many more people that would warrant three year's investigation.

But the journalists involved in RB’s report haven’t prevented a crime - they’ve reported it. They haven’t punished or encouraged anyone else to dish out punishments either.

what your actually objecting to is people holding information and making ethical judgements using that information. People, all people, have the right to do that. Or do you disagree with that too?

Well when journalists are calling out for the removal
of RBS income sources as happened this morning on the BBC I would say that fits the description.

if your husband pissed off his female boss, she accused him of rape the newspaper ran a story with her saying he was a rapist, it was then all over social media saying he was a rapist? He got sacked, your kids were taunted with shouts, your father is a rapist. Would you be ok with that?

Are you happy with it because you don’t like RB?