Plain English Villains award 2021
Nick Clegg
Clegg has for some time fought fires on behalf of Facebook, which has rightly drawn huge criticism for allowing dangerous misinformation to run unchecked on its pages. Now Facebook has been rebranded (‘Meta’), Clegg is busy steamrollering adverse publicity that has arisen. One example of which is his suggestion that “The vast majority of content on Facebook is babies, barbecues and bar mitzvahs”. Such comment, as the Washington Post suggested, is ‘highly curated’ – if it continues to host electioneering nonsense, Meta will be ever-reliant on Clegg’s own misinformation.
BrewDog
Earlier this year, BrewDog served up some crock-of-gold gubbins that the Advertising Standards Agency rightly deemed ‘misleading’. The Scottish brewer offered the opportunity for 10 lucky customers to find ‘solid gold’ cans worth £15,000 in their cases of beer. The cans in question were, in fact, made of ‘gold-plated brass’.
In its ruling, the watchdog adjudged: "Because the ads stated that the prize included a solid gold can when that was not the case, we concluded the ads were misleading."
GB News
Apart from making Andrew Neil look even more orange, GB News, a new ‘news’ TV station, was notable in 2021 for giving a platform to Fox News-style rabble-rousers. (See also: Foot in Mouth runner-up.) The station contains very little objective news and is best dismissed as shrilly diverting rubbish.
Doncaster Council (GELP 21 – Global Leaders Education Plan) “Strategic vision & a new paradigm”)
Teesside University
