- Best of enemies part three - 20th August 2025
- Going crooked - 19th August 2025
- People power - 18th August 2025
During a 42 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry identifying the GOOD men or women (whistleblowers) was as important as spotting the bad apples, but now comes news of how this may be changing.
We are sustained by whistleblowers.
I salute them because they bravely turn to media outlets like The Eye, rather than their immediate superior (who might be knobbled) to tell the truth about an organisation, and this could be dangerous for their career, but they know that the press office rarely gives the facts to a troublemaking journalist like me!
Now a different kind of hero is being lauded in the press – and they are not the same kind at all.
Technology superstars and others.
One for example in Silicon Valley, is Lucas Beyer, who has said online that he was dedicated to “living, working, loving and playing”.
He is a former researcher at OpenAI, and Mr Beyer announced last month that he was leaving his Artificial-Intelligence (AI) lab to join Meta, a social-media giant with big AI ambitions of its own.
With rumours swirling that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s boss, was offering packages worth $100 million to poach AI whizzes, Mr Beyer clarified that he had not secured a nine-figure deal, but the fact that he needed to say so at all reflects the extent of the frenzy.
This may become worse too with technological innovations being announced almost every day.
For example, earlier this month ChatGPT-maker OpenAI unveiled the latest version of its AI chatbot, GPT-5, saying it can provide PhD-level expertise.
Billed as “smarter, faster, and more useful”, OpenAI co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sam Altman lauded the company’s new model as ushering in a new era of ChatGPT.
Apart from this whole world being highly suspect. the race for a handful of superstar software engineers masks a slump for everyone else.
As ChatGPT-like generative AI changes how code is written, companies are rethinking how many programmers they need.
In America job postings for software developers have dropped by more than two-thirds since the beginning of 2022, according to data from Indeed, a recruitment site.
In January Marc Benioff, the boss of Salesforce, a maker of business software, said his firm will not add any more software engineers this year, owing to productivity gains from AI tools.
In May Microsoft, a tech colossus, cut around 6,000 jobs, many of them in engineering.
Mr Beyer, however, is far from being the only one.
In many other walks of life, too, ‘heroes’ are celebrated in the media, but, I would suggest, they have done virtually NOTHING, or even worse what they HAVE done has been positively harmful.
They are certainly not in the league of the brave individuals who give me the inside track on what is really happening in an organisation.
Vacuous and unknown ‘celebs’ dominate the news, while sports superstars earn millions (they were always well paid, but now their salaries are stratospheric).
‘Journalists’ like Stacey Dooley gain a huge amount of attention, but their past is questionable, and my craft is sullied.
She made an awful mistake in a BBC Panorama programme she fronted which claimed to portray the truth about Islamic State’s (IS) treatment of women, and she has been accused of being “lazy”.
One angry viwer said a complaint about Ms Dooley had been made to the broadcast regulator OFCOM.
BBC journalist Anisa Subedar posted: “Raising the finger is NOT an IS salute. Does #StaceyDooley know us Muslims raise it everytime we pray (that’s 5 times a day) to remind us of the oneness of God?”
The television ‘Loose Women’ star Janet Street Porter also condemned the programme, and the BBC News Press Team said the criticism was “disappointing”.
After a deluge of complaints the BBC backtracked, and announced that the episode was to be re-edited before its broadcast.
The News at Ten bulletin, which showed the trailer, was also removed from iPlayer.
Previously Ms Dooley’s programmes have been accused of being “poverty porn”, and in one UK newspaper they were called “patronising and condescending to the people they’re trying to help”.
A subject in ‘Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over’, Adele Allen, said: “In the whole 72 hours she was here I did three early morning dog walks at 6am with the baby and she didn’t manage to make it out to one. She couldn’t get up with me – so there’s the lazy one”.
Ms Allen’s partner Matt claimed that Ms Dooley didn’t join in enough with their family life in Brighton on the show.
Matt said: “She’s lovely but there’s not a lot of depth to her. There’s a fantastic moment (in the programme) where she is with me in the allotment and I say: ‘Come on then Stacey, what herb is this?’ and I tell her it begins with the letter O and she says: ‘Olive oil’”.
But unlike Ms Dooley, and other ‘celebs’ (like those in Silicon Valley) others should become famous.
Such as the whistleblowers who help us…
Phil’s memories of his astonishing lengthy award-winning career in another kind of journalism as he was gripped by the incurable disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order the book now!
Tomorrow – how belief is growing among seasoned politicians and experts that the right wing party Reform UK may win its first seat in the Welsh Parliament/Senedd Cymru (WP/SC) next year, as the award-winning screenwriter Russell T Davies blames the group for declining gay rights.
