The Doctor Will Review You Now...
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. So says an old proverb. Well, local amateur publication The Gazette have certainly been fooled at least twice by charlatans that we at Cleveleys News immediately recognised and exposed. So shame on them.
There was Barry Carr from Rossall Gate, Fleetwood, a member of the BNP dubbed “neighbour from hell” after he repeatedly harangued, harassed and fat-shamed the lady next-door. It made national news when Carr was given a ten week jail term suspended for a year and ordered to pay his victims £200 each in compensation. Gazette were also all over the story, but what they didn’t mention in their coverage was that they had been publishing Carr’s intolerant rants on their letters page for years.
Then there was “Lord” Perry Harber, who fooled the Gazette with his cockamamie story about being attacked in Blackpool whilst on business and his claims of being a hereditary peer of the realm. The Gazette ran his story without question, including a selection of Harber’s favourite yarns about owning superyachts and holidaying regularly in exotic locations. In fact, Harber had been on our radar at Cleveleys News for some time after the known conman had begun using a house in Holmefield, Cleveleys as a business address. We immediately published our findings that he was a fake “lord” who had run and abandoned countless limited companies, pocketing cash along the way and leaving victims owed. Several of Harber’s decent and law-abiding family members even contacted Cleveleys News to thank us for exposing him after their communications with Gazette had fallen on deaf ears. To this date, Gazette’s article full of Perry’s lies still exists online. By contrast, when we told The Ledbury Reporter about him they removed their article promoting his fake charity immediately.
But once a fool, always a fool, and the Gazette continue to be duped into giving a voice to imposters with an underlying narrative. If you read their letters page you may well recognise the name “Dr Barry Clayton” as a regular contributor. He repeatedly writes to the paper with right-wing opinions of varying degrees but always with a level of dogmatism guaranteed to spark debate and elicit a response. You can understand why they publish him - they want letters to publish and fill their pages. And it works, many a letter in the Gazette is an angry response to Dr Barry Clayton.
They could well argue that they are only giving him the same freedom of speech as anybody else in this town. They have after all published letters by UKIP's Paul Nuttall, and of course they have published letters in direct criticism of Dr Barry Clayton, so surely they are just sharing the many and varied voices of Blackpool. And the less varied voices of UKIP. But last week they didn’t just publish one of Barry’s letters - they featured it as a main article, even bestowing upon him the title of “digital reporter”.
“We have to wake up to dangers of new technology” read the headline, followed by Barry’s concerns that social media and mobile devices are replacing human contact and conversation. We wouldn’t normally disagree with such concerns, except when they come from Dr Barry Clayton, whom we have been suspicious of for some time. Why are Gazette making a feature of this man? Aside from the fact that a fear of screens and technology might well fit Gazette’s narrative of convincing people to buy their “trusted” newspaper in print instead of getting better news for free online, we can only assume they still haven’t learned to check who they are giving a voice to.
For clarity, “Dr” Barry Clayton does not appear to be a medical doctor. At best he may hold a doctorate degree; at worst he’s as much a doctor as Pepper and Seuss.
He claims to be ex-military, yet his opinions on army matters are laughable according to responses from a number of veterans stumbling upon his opinions.
You see, all you need to do is Google Dr Barry Clayton and you quickly discover that he is a very prolific writer indeed. As constant a barrage of unsustainable reactionary right-wing opinions as his letters to Gazette may be, they seem like a mere sideline compared to how much he writes for Amazon.
Barry “reviews” books on Amazon pretty much on a daily basis, commenting on works about an eclectic array of subjects including ancient myths and legends, gypsies, the suffragette movement, diets, the monarchy… in fact, just about every subject ever written about. To date, Dr Barry Clayton has reviewed over 1700 books on Amazon and is currently ranked #183 in the top 500 Amazon reviewers list.
Just take that in for a moment. One thousand seven hundred books. He reviewed no less than 41 books during the month of May 2018 alone, many of which have publication dates in the last couple of months. So these aren’t books he has read over the course of his long and possibly imaginary army career but only just got around to reviewing on Amazon, no no no! These are brand new books that Dr Barry Clayton has allegedly just read. In fact in his Amazon bio, just after his claim to hold a degree in Economics and Maths a PGCE and an MA in War Studies as well as a PhD in American/Soviet nuclear strategy, the good doctor quips that he “would like to think reviewers have actually read what they are reviewing”. So if we are to assume the best of him, namely that he reads everything he reviews, Dr Barry Clayton must be reading and reviewing more than one major publication every single day. How does he even find the time to write to The Gazette?
This single fact alone has led many people on Amazon to the conclusion that Barry Clayton is a liar, or delusional, or both. One fellow reviewer caught him out, noticing that a huge section of one of Barry’s reviews was copied and pasted from another source.
And Barry’s position as 183rd most trusted reviewer on Amazon is also something of a joke when you consider that the number 1 most highly ranked reviewer of all time has only himself reviewed 594 products. They got their ranking through quality, not quantity, pulling in less than one-eighth of the “helpful votes” Barry has received, yet still ranking more helpful percentage-wise. Barry’s strategy is clearly that if you throw enough bad writing out there, some of it will be read and believed by idiots.
So are Gazette’s trusted, qualified journos aware of Barry’s ability to churn out made-up and plagiarised rubbish at will, or are they blissfully ignorant? In either case, going to press with his words is equally shameful. We find just one point in Bazza’s article about technology that we can agree with, and that is that modern technology can turn people into mindless zombies. All he failed to mention is that The Gazette then employs them as fact-checkers.
There was Barry Carr from Rossall Gate, Fleetwood, a member of the BNP dubbed “neighbour from hell” after he repeatedly harangued, harassed and fat-shamed the lady next-door. It made national news when Carr was given a ten week jail term suspended for a year and ordered to pay his victims £200 each in compensation. Gazette were also all over the story, but what they didn’t mention in their coverage was that they had been publishing Carr’s intolerant rants on their letters page for years.
Former BNP candidate and @The_Gazette letters page mainstay Barry Carr has appeal bid rejected and his sentence increased. More pages for them to fill... pic.twitter.com/3aPtV9Ge6y— Cleveleys News (@cleveleysnews) February 6, 2018
Then there was “Lord” Perry Harber, who fooled the Gazette with his cockamamie story about being attacked in Blackpool whilst on business and his claims of being a hereditary peer of the realm. The Gazette ran his story without question, including a selection of Harber’s favourite yarns about owning superyachts and holidaying regularly in exotic locations. In fact, Harber had been on our radar at Cleveleys News for some time after the known conman had begun using a house in Holmefield, Cleveleys as a business address. We immediately published our findings that he was a fake “lord” who had run and abandoned countless limited companies, pocketing cash along the way and leaving victims owed. Several of Harber’s decent and law-abiding family members even contacted Cleveleys News to thank us for exposing him after their communications with Gazette had fallen on deaf ears. To this date, Gazette’s article full of Perry’s lies still exists online. By contrast, when we told The Ledbury Reporter about him they removed their article promoting his fake charity immediately.
But once a fool, always a fool, and the Gazette continue to be duped into giving a voice to imposters with an underlying narrative. If you read their letters page you may well recognise the name “Dr Barry Clayton” as a regular contributor. He repeatedly writes to the paper with right-wing opinions of varying degrees but always with a level of dogmatism guaranteed to spark debate and elicit a response. You can understand why they publish him - they want letters to publish and fill their pages. And it works, many a letter in the Gazette is an angry response to Dr Barry Clayton.
They could well argue that they are only giving him the same freedom of speech as anybody else in this town. They have after all published letters by UKIP's Paul Nuttall, and of course they have published letters in direct criticism of Dr Barry Clayton, so surely they are just sharing the many and varied voices of Blackpool. And the less varied voices of UKIP. But last week they didn’t just publish one of Barry’s letters - they featured it as a main article, even bestowing upon him the title of “digital reporter”.
“We have to wake up to dangers of new technology” read the headline, followed by Barry’s concerns that social media and mobile devices are replacing human contact and conversation. We wouldn’t normally disagree with such concerns, except when they come from Dr Barry Clayton, whom we have been suspicious of for some time. Why are Gazette making a feature of this man? Aside from the fact that a fear of screens and technology might well fit Gazette’s narrative of convincing people to buy their “trusted” newspaper in print instead of getting better news for free online, we can only assume they still haven’t learned to check who they are giving a voice to.
For clarity, “Dr” Barry Clayton does not appear to be a medical doctor. At best he may hold a doctorate degree; at worst he’s as much a doctor as Pepper and Seuss.
He claims to be ex-military, yet his opinions on army matters are laughable according to responses from a number of veterans stumbling upon his opinions.
You see, all you need to do is Google Dr Barry Clayton and you quickly discover that he is a very prolific writer indeed. As constant a barrage of unsustainable reactionary right-wing opinions as his letters to Gazette may be, they seem like a mere sideline compared to how much he writes for Amazon.
Barry “reviews” books on Amazon pretty much on a daily basis, commenting on works about an eclectic array of subjects including ancient myths and legends, gypsies, the suffragette movement, diets, the monarchy… in fact, just about every subject ever written about. To date, Dr Barry Clayton has reviewed over 1700 books on Amazon and is currently ranked #183 in the top 500 Amazon reviewers list.
Just take that in for a moment. One thousand seven hundred books. He reviewed no less than 41 books during the month of May 2018 alone, many of which have publication dates in the last couple of months. So these aren’t books he has read over the course of his long and possibly imaginary army career but only just got around to reviewing on Amazon, no no no! These are brand new books that Dr Barry Clayton has allegedly just read. In fact in his Amazon bio, just after his claim to hold a degree in Economics and Maths a PGCE and an MA in War Studies as well as a PhD in American/Soviet nuclear strategy, the good doctor quips that he “would like to think reviewers have actually read what they are reviewing”. So if we are to assume the best of him, namely that he reads everything he reviews, Dr Barry Clayton must be reading and reviewing more than one major publication every single day. How does he even find the time to write to The Gazette?
This single fact alone has led many people on Amazon to the conclusion that Barry Clayton is a liar, or delusional, or both. One fellow reviewer caught him out, noticing that a huge section of one of Barry’s reviews was copied and pasted from another source.
So are Gazette’s trusted, qualified journos aware of Barry’s ability to churn out made-up and plagiarised rubbish at will, or are they blissfully ignorant? In either case, going to press with his words is equally shameful. We find just one point in Bazza’s article about technology that we can agree with, and that is that modern technology can turn people into mindless zombies. All he failed to mention is that The Gazette then employs them as fact-checkers.
Although I've no idea if they'll return, having reached number 170 in Amazon UK's rankings, Barry's "reviews" all suddenly disappeared on 22nd October 2018 after a particularly prolific period of "reviewing". I wonder if Andrew Marr, whose Sunday Times review of a book on the Scottish Clearances from earlier in the month Barry transcribed the following day into his own 'review', grumbled?
ReplyDelete27th October 2018. Sadly, he's back on Amazon again now. Mind you, perhaps what he says is true and the people whose reviews he plagiarises have actually read the books....
ReplyDelete