Digital tools can be used by journalists and citizens alike.

A few weeks I posted A miraculous world that is nearly magical, discussing the seeming rise of citizen journalists to counterbalance and correct misreporting and errors from the mainstream media. I mentioned there

Techno fog is an ordinary citizen sharing local insight to place a national reporter's statements into context. In the space of a decade, we have created a technological infrastructure where we can have a near real time fact-based conversation in which everyone can participate.

Technofog uses recording of the journalist's original broadcast and interweaves google maps and other digital media in order to upend the mainstream journalists original argument. It isn't that Technofog is contradicting the MSM journalist - he is using virtually the same digital tools to demonstrate in a checkable, transparent fashion why the MSM is wrong.

Sweeney Agonistes: Tommy Robinson Turns the Tables on the BBC by Bruce Bawer is another example of the same phenomenon.

It is hard to convey the role the BBC plays in British media and British cultural memory. They are NPR, ABC, NBC, CBS and MSNBC all wrapped up into one. With the important wrinkle that you have to buy their product regardless of whether you want to watch them or not. They still speak to and for a portion of the population, much like MSNBC does here. Just not necessarily the population as a whole. Indeed, their academic hot house ideological obsessions have some longstanding notoriety.

Which brings us to citizen Robinson, someone who might be considered center right on the American spectrum. His claim to fame is his avid rejection of multiculturalism and his outspoke opposition to the accommodation by the British government of immigrant Islamists at the expense of the native born Brits. He is also working class and so, as with much in Britain, there is an overlay of class rancor as the college educated BBC sniffs at the unenlightened working class bully - as they view him.

Setting all that aside, the similarity is in Robinson's use, as an average citizen, of the same tools and techniques used by mainstream media journalists in order to expose their duplicity. One of the BBC's journalists has a planned hit-piece on Robinson. Robinson hears about it and takes action.

The key to Tommy’s plan was Lucy Brown, a former employee whose job with him had ended in a shouting match. After their split, she was offered £5,000 by HNH to badmouth Tommy for a cover story, and had to contact a lawyer to prevent a major daily from falsely claiming she’d accused Tommy of sexual allegations. When Panorama reporter John Sweeney asked her to talk to him for what he promised would be a “definitive documentary” uncovering Tommy in all his “horribleness,” Brown got in touch with Tommy and agreed to wear a hidden camera when she met with Sweeney to discuss his plans.

The undercover footage of Brown’s meeting with Sweeney forms the heart of Tommy’s hour-long exposé, Panodrama, which he premiered last Saturday on a huge screen to a huge crowd in front of the BBC’s Manchester headquarters. In that footage, we see Brown meet Sweeney at a pub where, presumably in hopes of loosening her tongue, he plies her with various kinds of liquor, including champagne, gin, red wine, and brandy, for a total bar bill of £220, which he put on his BBC expense account.

Sweeney, who had promised a “definitive” takedown of Tommy, instead provided Tommy with a definitive portrait of the sleazy journalistic hack at work.

What helps make Brown’s undercover footage so riveting is the way in which Panodrama presents it. After Brown has given Tommy the video, Tommy, whom Sweeney has been nagging for weeks to do an on-camera interview, agrees to sit down with him at a site of Tommy’s choosing -- a room furnished, as it happens, with a big screen. Before Sweeney can start asking questions, Tommy, who has brought his own cameraman along, sets about interrogating Sweeney. For instance, he asks Sweeney whether he’d ever tell any interviewee what to say about Tommy. No, Sweeney assures him. Tommy then directs Sweeney’s attention to the big screen, where Sweeney can be seen in Brown’s undercover video spelling out to her in some detail the three points about Tommy that he’d like her to make during their on-camera interview. If she covers those three points, Sweeney tells her, he guarantees they’ll be included in the final cut. Indeed, he pretty much writes her a script. Sweeney also asks Brown if there’s anything she doesn’t want him to ask her on-camera, and adds: “I’m not supposed to ask this.”


So it goes again and again: Tommy poses a question; Sweeney answers it with a firm no; Tommy then shows him an undercover clip that proves him a liar. Tommy pulls all this off with the skill of a master prosecutor. Watching him do so is a delicious experience. So is watching Sweeney watching Sweeney. In the undercover footage, Sweeney comes out with all kinds of things that you know he’d never say on TV. He informs Brown that the way “to piss off a Greek” is to “start speaking Turkish.” He says that since he has his dog with him, he can’t take a taxi home because “Asian cab drivers don’t like taking dogs.” (As Tommy points out to him: “You’re doing what your channel does, blaming an entire continent” when in fact it’s Islam that has a problem with dogs.) Sweeney confides that one of his heroes is former IRA terrorist Martin McGuinness. He jokes about shooting gay people and refers to someone as a “bloody woofter” -- cockney rhyming slang for “poofter.”

There’s also a good deal of nasty stuff about the lower classes. “I have more in common with Tommy than most reporters,” Sweeney says. “A scumbag Irish background.” He says that it’s so rare to encounter a working-class white male in the green room of BBC’s Newsnight that it’s like running across “a cannibal from the Amazonia.” And he observes that in today’s Labour Party, it’s more common than it used to be to hear “accents like yours and mine” -- i.e., middle-class establishment accents -- “rather than Tommy’s.”

Robinson uses all the tools of the digital trade to turn the tables on the monopolist state media which has been gunning for him and produces an apparently stunning reverse documentary demonstrating how deceitful, vile, and dishonest the agent of the state is being.

But before we get too excited about a new age of citizen autonomy and transparency, the coda is worth noting.

There’s one thing about Panodrama that remains unclear. It was supposed to be live-streamed on Facebook during the Manchester rally, but the stream stopped dead early on. A backup YouTube stream also halted shortly thereafter. The film was switched to a new Facebook page, that feed, too, terminated mysteriously. Not until Monday afternoon, Greenwich time, was the full documentary posted on Tommy’s Facebook page. It’s now gone. In fact, on Tuesday, Tommy was banned from Facebook and his page taken down. Presumably the documentary will resurface somewhere else online. Find it and watch it. By itself, it won’t sink the BBC, but it’s a brilliant job, handsomely photographed and snappily edited -- and it is, we can hope, just the opening salvo in a long-deferred, all-out war against the British government’s fake-news empire.

The long arm of the state and state corporatism still stands in the way of the unrealized dream of a citizenry sourced information sharing.