ungoodthink doubleplusungood.

So, the Right-wing-stacked board of the ABC has forced the creation of a new managerial position in the ABC: a director of editorial policies.

The function of this position is to monitor the ABC and everything it does for signs of bias — presumably for signs of bias against the government, since that is what the government and the apparatchiks it has stacked the board with have been complaining about.

So. There is now a senior ABC official whose job it is to monitor and correct the politics of the ABC, and ensure that the ABC's ideology is not offensive to the government.

Well, this position is not a new one, and as such it already has a well-established title:

Commissar.




Good luck looking for a Night Watch Commissar for the Commercial networks, monitoring and correcting their right-wing bias, to match the ABC's new Day Watch Commissar.

Have a nice day, Товарищ.

Night Watch ... a revelation

Well, I'm about halfway through The Night Watch.

The movie was made using the plot of that first half as a base, then adding scenes from other books (from other contexts).

( Spoiler )

But it was when I started the second half (and the second story) that I got a pleasant shock.

Anton Goredetsky is a BOFH.

Where in the first story he was just 'an analyst', drafted into field operations (and turning out to be almost disturbingly good at it), the second story opens with him entering the offices of the Night Watch. He is the sysad of the organisation. He has a PFY. He has a couple of programmers working under him who don't have much to do, and spend most of their time playing solitaire. He has an easy going relationship with the security guards, partially because of familiarity, partially because while they could make things inconvenient for him if they wanted, he could prevent them from having Tekken on their work PCs if he wanted.

Even better, his boss (Gesser) is not pointy haired in the slightest (although there are hints that his bosses might be.

Update: Although, after reading the second story, it seems clear that Geser is a bastard. But not pointy-haired.



I *heart* Night Watch.