Andrew Joseph

I'm pretty fed up with writing posts about Lucy Connolly, so I hope this is the last one. After hearing a ludicrous segment on @GMB this morning, about Trump getting involved [he isn't] with her case, I wondered where all the noise is coming from. If I gave you one guess, what would you think? If your answer was Allison Pearson and Toby Young … well done, award yourself a biscuit or treat of your own choice. On closer examination, using X Pro, the data show us some fascinating trends around the mentions of Connolly's name. I wrote a post last week, suggesting that there is a burgeoning cottage industry cropping up around this name. Well, Pearson seems to be the Creative Director of this new movement, with Young as her loyal, salivating deputy [sorry for that image]. Have a look at the chart below to see the actual stats, but I've used my usual media outlets to keep data as fair as possible. This time, I also added the personal accounts of some of the most vocal proponents of the New Connolly Movement®. Firstly, the media outlets. You can see that the main players [@SkyNews | @LBC | @itvnews | @BBCNews] have all mentioned her, at least, once except for The Times, who seem to have missed the stop for this bandwagon. Sky, LBC, ITV and BBC are all taking a measured approach with only a few mentions — max 3 from LBC. The slightly more hysterical noise comes from Talk TV, Allison Pearson's home, the Telegraph, and then we have good old GB News — behaving like a 14-year-old Swiftie waiting for news of her next tour. The chart run down for Lucy Connolly mentions is: 3rd place — @Telegraph with 17. 2nd place — @TalkTV with 42. And way out in front in 1st place — @GBNEWS with 74. This is the top line data, from July 2024 until today. I went that far back, just to be sure of catching everything possible. Next we have the more telling stats. I decided to run the search again but only from March of this year until today. This, I thought, would capture the current wave of noise more accurately and see if there has been a shift. The results are very similar from the main players, showing that they are reporting the news, rather than trying to create it. But, we can now see that the bandwagon rolled into town very recently from the other's data. Of GB News's mentions, only 9 were before March. 65 of their posts came since then. 88% of their posts about Lucy Connolly have been within the last two months. Same for the Telegraph — 88% and Talk TV — 90%. 🚂ALL ABOARD THE GRAVY TRAIN🚂 Now for the runners and riders [mixed analogies all over the shop]. We'll leave Pearson to last because, frankly, it's shocking. I picked some higher level accounts that seem to be talking about this case all the time: @toadmeister | @JuliaHB1 | @SpeechUnion | @EssexPR. Aside from Julia HB, the three other accounts are heavily posting about this case, in similar quantities to the outlets mentioned above. They all share the same bandwagon credentials — majority mentions since March. Except Adam Brooks, who has actually been talking about this almost since her sentence. He's definitely upped it since March, though. Now let us examine the posts of @AllisonPearson. Allison blocked me some time ago for pointing out that she was hitching her career to the Connolly wagon but, thanks to the new way this platform operates, I can still analyse her posts. Remember that a few paragraphs earlier we found out that GB News had become unhinged with 74 posts about this case? Well … if they are unhinged, Pearson has detached the door from the frame and walked it down the road to the local park and stuck it on a roundabout. ONE HUNDRED and EIGHTY FOUR posts about Lucy Connolly. 184. And guess how many of those posts have been since March of this year … 174. So tell me now, Allison, was I incorrect for pointing out your unhealthy obsession? Or … have you realised that you can make a fortune off the back of this woman's incarceration? Aside from her fees from the Telegraph to keep regurgitating the same article over and over again, Pearson is reverse-haemorrhaging cash from her monetised 𝕏 account. The more posts, the more views, the more money. As a result of this barrage of noise, we're now being forced to listen to the more mainstream broadcasters push out the 'free speech' line and the extremely thin, story that Trump is involved. This seems to have stemmed from a far-right US influencer called Charlie Kirk. He's recently been found in the UK, being humiliated in front of both the Oxford and Cambridge debating unions. He fled back to the US with the promise of 'raising this case with the president'. In reality, it seems as though this halted at a speculative text message to the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio last week. As far as I can find, no other mention of this has been forthcoming from the US administration. Another hyperinflated non-story making its way to our TV channels with no fact checking. That's it for now, I think. Suffice to say, the data doesn't lie and facts should be checked. And per capita is still used to misrepresent truth by the far-right. Have a great week.