The search is over.
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Update: This guy only beat me to it by 12 hours or so. Using the exact same Sooty photo no less. Memes and originality, eh?
Labels: Daily Mail, mockery, stupidity
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Thursday, February 04, 2016
Update: This guy only beat me to it by 12 hours or so. Using the exact same Sooty photo no less. Memes and originality, eh?
Thursday, May 29, 2014
Spectators of suicide.
Visitors to our house can be left in no doubt as to which pop stars my daughter Jessica likes.
Drinks are taken from a Suicide cup, their age-worn faces blearily staring out at us at breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The band's debut album, also titled Suicide, is on permanent loop, while at weekends Jessica deafens all and sundry with the lo-fi recordings captured between 1977-78 of their live shows. Posters of Alan Vega (64) and Martin Rev (age unknown) stare down from her bedroom wall.
Alan is her favourite, she tells me on a daily basis. She believes he can do no wrong. Last week, when my wife calmly suggested the late Sid Vicious was a better singer than Alan, World War III broke out.
Tears were shed and in the fallout, I found myself under attack for claiming, months earlier, that X-Ray Spex were more successful than Suicide.
I'll admit this makes my daughter rather strange. While all her friends are devoted to the likes of One Direction, she delights in the ten minute long Frankie Teardrop, a song about a Vietnam veteran who kills his wife and child in despair.
And you know what, I'm glad she likes an obscure proto-punk band who despite their lack of commercial success have been highly influential. I could be the type of father who is so devoted to the well-being of my daughter that I'm willing to write about her for a national newspaper, pretending to feel let down by her heroes appearing to smoke cannabis. I could be the type of father who denies taking his little girl to a concert by her favourite group on the basis she's too young, despite knowing full well 8-year-olds are the prime audience for One Direction, and now feels smug about it in light of the shock revelation. I could be the type of father who finds the fact young men in a beat combo are liable to get tattoos, have pop-star girlfriends and occasionally sample "Mary J" an example of their lack of responsibility, a betrayal of our trust, as proof they are unworthy of my daughter's loving affection, just as other men also will be in the future.
But I'm not. Mainly because I'm not real, and am just a device to weakly mock a Daily Mail article. If I was though, I'd be glad my daughter is already at a young age discovering what real life is like. At times it will feel like you're having axes thrown at you, as happened to Suicide at a gig in Glasgow. The sooner you learn that, the better. It might also stop my daughter from rebelling against my overly protective, 19th century values by getting knocked up when she's 15 by a kid called Spud. Your choice.
Drinks are taken from a Suicide cup, their age-worn faces blearily staring out at us at breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The band's debut album, also titled Suicide, is on permanent loop, while at weekends Jessica deafens all and sundry with the lo-fi recordings captured between 1977-78 of their live shows. Posters of Alan Vega (64) and Martin Rev (age unknown) stare down from her bedroom wall.
Alan is her favourite, she tells me on a daily basis. She believes he can do no wrong. Last week, when my wife calmly suggested the late Sid Vicious was a better singer than Alan, World War III broke out.
Tears were shed and in the fallout, I found myself under attack for claiming, months earlier, that X-Ray Spex were more successful than Suicide.
I'll admit this makes my daughter rather strange. While all her friends are devoted to the likes of One Direction, she delights in the ten minute long Frankie Teardrop, a song about a Vietnam veteran who kills his wife and child in despair.
And you know what, I'm glad she likes an obscure proto-punk band who despite their lack of commercial success have been highly influential. I could be the type of father who is so devoted to the well-being of my daughter that I'm willing to write about her for a national newspaper, pretending to feel let down by her heroes appearing to smoke cannabis. I could be the type of father who denies taking his little girl to a concert by her favourite group on the basis she's too young, despite knowing full well 8-year-olds are the prime audience for One Direction, and now feels smug about it in light of the shock revelation. I could be the type of father who finds the fact young men in a beat combo are liable to get tattoos, have pop-star girlfriends and occasionally sample "Mary J" an example of their lack of responsibility, a betrayal of our trust, as proof they are unworthy of my daughter's loving affection, just as other men also will be in the future.
But I'm not. Mainly because I'm not real, and am just a device to weakly mock a Daily Mail article. If I was though, I'd be glad my daughter is already at a young age discovering what real life is like. At times it will feel like you're having axes thrown at you, as happened to Suicide at a gig in Glasgow. The sooner you learn that, the better. It might also stop my daughter from rebelling against my overly protective, 19th century values by getting knocked up when she's 15 by a kid called Spud. Your choice.
Labels: bullshit, Daily Mail, Daily Mail-watch, media hysteria, mockery, One Direction
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Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Both the Mail and Harman have PIE on their faces.
(This is 1,705 words. Just so you know.)
Never let the facts get in the way of a good story. It isn't the Daily Mail's motto, unofficial or otherwise, but it easily could be. Perhaps though, in line with the Mail's sudden shock finding that paedophilia wasn't universally viewed with the same disgust as it is now back in the 70s, when the National Council for Civil Liberties had an extremely ill-advised sort of affiliation with the Paedophile Information Exchange, it could just as well be a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
That the NCCL, now Liberty, had links with PIE has been known since, err, it had links with them. It is not a startling new discovery. Indeed, not a single aspect of the Mail's investigation and its corresponding attacks on Harriet Harman, Jack Dromey (husband of Harman) and Patricia Hewitt, all leading members of the NCCL during the period when PIE was affiliated, is based on new information. I'm certain that there have been newspaper articles pointing this out on occasion in the past, pieces which have attracted a slight amount of attention and then been forgotten about. It's not a proud period in Liberty's history by any means, and it's one which current head Shami Chakrabarti has apologised for.
This said, and despite how it sounds like an excuse and a cop out, it has to be remembered that it was a different era. As the proposed changes to the law that Harriet Harman lobbied on make clear, up until this point it had not been a specific offence to take or make indecent images of children, although to an extent this would have been covered under other laws, such as the Obscene Publications Act. As we've been rather forced to acknowledge over the past couple of years, the 70s was the in-between decade, a period where the new freedoms and excesses of the 60s continued to an extent, not least in those few European nations which legalised possession of all types of pornography, even if the production remained unlawful, just not necessarily cracked down upon. It also wasn't unusual for "mainstream" European adult magazines of the period to feature post-pubescent girls under the age of 16, not surprising when the age of consent in the country of origin often was (and in some cases remains) under 16. By contrast, and as Harman in her paper quotes, the judge in the Oz trial defined indecent as a woman taking her clothes off on the beach in front of someone else's children, or athletes wearing clothing which didn't fit properly. Harman was writing only 17 years on from the Lady Chatterley trial, and a year and six months after the Sex Pistols and Bill Grundy had their tete-a-tete. Views on what was and wasn't filth were polarised far beyond what they are today, even by the Daily Mail's maiden aunt standards.
The Mail's fundamental problem with its claims, especially against Harman, is that they've produced the evidence against her in full and it doesn't stack up. Her paper's main suggestion is that images of naked children should not be held to be indecent unless it can either be proved or inferred from the photograph that harm to the child has taken place as a result. This sounds potentially outrageous, but in actuality this isn't far off from the test the authorities now have to apply when prosecuting those who have the lowest category of child abuse images in their possession, I.e. those where the child is naked and is posing in a manner considered to be erotic (see the controversy over Klara and Eddy Belly Dancing for instance). Harman's proposed amendment would have clearly left it up to the police and CPS and in turn judge and jury to decide whether or not a specific image or images were indecent. Her main justification was that parents could be prosecuted for taking such pictures when they had no malign intentions, something it was felt was possible under a new law. About the worst allegation that can be thrown at her is she was being naive, and that paedophiles would quickly exploit such grey areas. There is no evidence she was influenced in any way by NCCL's association with PIE, and the lobbying did not lead to the law being changed in the way she proposed.
Far more questionable is the NCCL's submission to the government on the age of consent, not signed but sent when both Dromey and Hewitt were with the organisation in 1976. While the Mail seems almost as upset about the proposal that it should be 14 instead of 16 (the age of consent was raised from 13 to 16 in 1885, so has never been set in stone, and while 16 seems a good middle ground between 14 and 18 to me, other Europeans nations continue to think differently), the real problem is that while it suggests that those under 10 cannot consent in any circumstances, in cases where those between 10 and 14 have sex with an older partner it should be considered that consent "was not present, unless it is demonstrated that it was genuinely given and that the child understood the nature of the act". The law as it currently stands holds that children under 13 cannot consent in any circumstances, and if the other person involved is over 18, then the act is defined in law as rape regardless of what the child felt. The NCCL's suggestion might not have quite been a licence for abuse, as the onus would still have fell on the older partner to prove the child understood and had given consent, but it most certainly would be a substantial dilution of the protection we have in force today.
Again though, the NCCL's submission did not win government support, and there is no evidence suggesting it was influenced by PIE. The other claims against the three Labour grandees is that the NCCL's association with PIE amounted to apologia or validation, in 1975 complaining to the Press Council about coverage of the group, describing it in their annual report as a "campaigning/counselling group for adults sexually attracted to children", which seems to be before the NCCL was properly aware that PIE was more than that; and that as late as 1982 the NCCL's newsletter carried a missive from a self-confessed paedophile defending himself. Clearly, newspapers and magazines have never published letters from those whose views they vehemently disagree with. One of the founders of PIE, Tom O'Carroll, was subsequently jailed for "conspiring to corrupt public morals" (and continues to promote sexual relationships between children and adults as being entirely normal), with Hewitt later writing that "[C]onspiring to corrupt public morals is an offence incapable of definition or precise proof", the Mail finding this especially damning. Except as Harriet Harman's paper makes clear, this is almost a direct lift from Roy Jenkins, who said something remarkably similar about defining "indecency". The other allegations the Mail makes, that the NCCL's submission to the Criminal Law Commission called for the decriminalisation of incest and also claimed that "[C]hildhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage", don't seem as yet to be supported by posted documents.
What though does any of this matter nearly 40 years on, and when so much has been known for so long? The obvious reason is that paedophilia is so despicable and beyond the pale that regardless of the passage of time, just the connection with a group like PIE is still to be regretted and apologised for. That the NCCL allowed anyone to affiliate and didn't at the time have a mechanism for expelling such groups isn't an adequate explanation, and indeed, it does seem as though there was a certain amount of sympathy within the NCCL towards PIE if only briefly, and then due to its stated mission as being to counsel those who found themselves sexually attracted to children. Some within the NCCL may have been more involved, as the Telegraph has reported. In part however it also seems to be about simple revenge and glee at finding three well known politically correct right-on Labour figures didn't condemn paedophiles on sight, regardless of how long ago it was, especially when the left has been so quick to pounce on the past allegiances of Tories or horror of horrors, the Mail's own history. Add in the typical Mail rage at how the BBC didn't address the topic until Ed Miliband did, and it all seems wearingly familiar. That perhaps they didn't cover it immediately as a direct consequence of being so badly burnt over Lord McAlpine doesn't seem to have entered their thinking.
It would matter more if there was even the slightest indication the three held such views at the time, which again there is no evidence that they did, let alone if they had then carried such opinions with them into the Labour party and then parliament. The fact is that they didn't, as Nick Cohen points out. While Harriet Harman has been right to express regret today, something she didn't do in her Newsnight interview last night, she has been right not to apologise, as she has nothing to apologise for. Whether perhaps Dromey or Hewitt do is more nuanced, considering their potential involvement with the age of consent submission and more besides, but again it needs to be stated that there are plenty of political figures who held opinions or which they even acted upon years ago they would now regret. Bringing Jimmy Savile into it, as the Mail attempted to, is a nonsense. They didn't validate Savile, just as the Mail and the rest of the media do not bear responsibility for failing to expose him while he was alive. Despite the criticism of the lack of response, if anything it's Patricia Hewitt's silence that seems vindicated. Reacting to the Mail just encourages it and convinces Paul Dacre that he was right. The real reason the rest of the media ignored the reports at first is there simply isn't any evidence of anything other than naivety. And if there's one thing that the Mail can't be accused of, it's precisely that.
Never let the facts get in the way of a good story. It isn't the Daily Mail's motto, unofficial or otherwise, but it easily could be. Perhaps though, in line with the Mail's sudden shock finding that paedophilia wasn't universally viewed with the same disgust as it is now back in the 70s, when the National Council for Civil Liberties had an extremely ill-advised sort of affiliation with the Paedophile Information Exchange, it could just as well be a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
That the NCCL, now Liberty, had links with PIE has been known since, err, it had links with them. It is not a startling new discovery. Indeed, not a single aspect of the Mail's investigation and its corresponding attacks on Harriet Harman, Jack Dromey (husband of Harman) and Patricia Hewitt, all leading members of the NCCL during the period when PIE was affiliated, is based on new information. I'm certain that there have been newspaper articles pointing this out on occasion in the past, pieces which have attracted a slight amount of attention and then been forgotten about. It's not a proud period in Liberty's history by any means, and it's one which current head Shami Chakrabarti has apologised for.
This said, and despite how it sounds like an excuse and a cop out, it has to be remembered that it was a different era. As the proposed changes to the law that Harriet Harman lobbied on make clear, up until this point it had not been a specific offence to take or make indecent images of children, although to an extent this would have been covered under other laws, such as the Obscene Publications Act. As we've been rather forced to acknowledge over the past couple of years, the 70s was the in-between decade, a period where the new freedoms and excesses of the 60s continued to an extent, not least in those few European nations which legalised possession of all types of pornography, even if the production remained unlawful, just not necessarily cracked down upon. It also wasn't unusual for "mainstream" European adult magazines of the period to feature post-pubescent girls under the age of 16, not surprising when the age of consent in the country of origin often was (and in some cases remains) under 16. By contrast, and as Harman in her paper quotes, the judge in the Oz trial defined indecent as a woman taking her clothes off on the beach in front of someone else's children, or athletes wearing clothing which didn't fit properly. Harman was writing only 17 years on from the Lady Chatterley trial, and a year and six months after the Sex Pistols and Bill Grundy had their tete-a-tete. Views on what was and wasn't filth were polarised far beyond what they are today, even by the Daily Mail's maiden aunt standards.
The Mail's fundamental problem with its claims, especially against Harman, is that they've produced the evidence against her in full and it doesn't stack up. Her paper's main suggestion is that images of naked children should not be held to be indecent unless it can either be proved or inferred from the photograph that harm to the child has taken place as a result. This sounds potentially outrageous, but in actuality this isn't far off from the test the authorities now have to apply when prosecuting those who have the lowest category of child abuse images in their possession, I.e. those where the child is naked and is posing in a manner considered to be erotic (see the controversy over Klara and Eddy Belly Dancing for instance). Harman's proposed amendment would have clearly left it up to the police and CPS and in turn judge and jury to decide whether or not a specific image or images were indecent. Her main justification was that parents could be prosecuted for taking such pictures when they had no malign intentions, something it was felt was possible under a new law. About the worst allegation that can be thrown at her is she was being naive, and that paedophiles would quickly exploit such grey areas. There is no evidence she was influenced in any way by NCCL's association with PIE, and the lobbying did not lead to the law being changed in the way she proposed.
Far more questionable is the NCCL's submission to the government on the age of consent, not signed but sent when both Dromey and Hewitt were with the organisation in 1976. While the Mail seems almost as upset about the proposal that it should be 14 instead of 16 (the age of consent was raised from 13 to 16 in 1885, so has never been set in stone, and while 16 seems a good middle ground between 14 and 18 to me, other Europeans nations continue to think differently), the real problem is that while it suggests that those under 10 cannot consent in any circumstances, in cases where those between 10 and 14 have sex with an older partner it should be considered that consent "was not present, unless it is demonstrated that it was genuinely given and that the child understood the nature of the act". The law as it currently stands holds that children under 13 cannot consent in any circumstances, and if the other person involved is over 18, then the act is defined in law as rape regardless of what the child felt. The NCCL's suggestion might not have quite been a licence for abuse, as the onus would still have fell on the older partner to prove the child understood and had given consent, but it most certainly would be a substantial dilution of the protection we have in force today.
Again though, the NCCL's submission did not win government support, and there is no evidence suggesting it was influenced by PIE. The other claims against the three Labour grandees is that the NCCL's association with PIE amounted to apologia or validation, in 1975 complaining to the Press Council about coverage of the group, describing it in their annual report as a "campaigning/counselling group for adults sexually attracted to children", which seems to be before the NCCL was properly aware that PIE was more than that; and that as late as 1982 the NCCL's newsletter carried a missive from a self-confessed paedophile defending himself. Clearly, newspapers and magazines have never published letters from those whose views they vehemently disagree with. One of the founders of PIE, Tom O'Carroll, was subsequently jailed for "conspiring to corrupt public morals" (and continues to promote sexual relationships between children and adults as being entirely normal), with Hewitt later writing that "[C]onspiring to corrupt public morals is an offence incapable of definition or precise proof", the Mail finding this especially damning. Except as Harriet Harman's paper makes clear, this is almost a direct lift from Roy Jenkins, who said something remarkably similar about defining "indecency". The other allegations the Mail makes, that the NCCL's submission to the Criminal Law Commission called for the decriminalisation of incest and also claimed that "[C]hildhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage", don't seem as yet to be supported by posted documents.
What though does any of this matter nearly 40 years on, and when so much has been known for so long? The obvious reason is that paedophilia is so despicable and beyond the pale that regardless of the passage of time, just the connection with a group like PIE is still to be regretted and apologised for. That the NCCL allowed anyone to affiliate and didn't at the time have a mechanism for expelling such groups isn't an adequate explanation, and indeed, it does seem as though there was a certain amount of sympathy within the NCCL towards PIE if only briefly, and then due to its stated mission as being to counsel those who found themselves sexually attracted to children. Some within the NCCL may have been more involved, as the Telegraph has reported. In part however it also seems to be about simple revenge and glee at finding three well known politically correct right-on Labour figures didn't condemn paedophiles on sight, regardless of how long ago it was, especially when the left has been so quick to pounce on the past allegiances of Tories or horror of horrors, the Mail's own history. Add in the typical Mail rage at how the BBC didn't address the topic until Ed Miliband did, and it all seems wearingly familiar. That perhaps they didn't cover it immediately as a direct consequence of being so badly burnt over Lord McAlpine doesn't seem to have entered their thinking.
It would matter more if there was even the slightest indication the three held such views at the time, which again there is no evidence that they did, let alone if they had then carried such opinions with them into the Labour party and then parliament. The fact is that they didn't, as Nick Cohen points out. While Harriet Harman has been right to express regret today, something she didn't do in her Newsnight interview last night, she has been right not to apologise, as she has nothing to apologise for. Whether perhaps Dromey or Hewitt do is more nuanced, considering their potential involvement with the age of consent submission and more besides, but again it needs to be stated that there are plenty of political figures who held opinions or which they even acted upon years ago they would now regret. Bringing Jimmy Savile into it, as the Mail attempted to, is a nonsense. They didn't validate Savile, just as the Mail and the rest of the media do not bear responsibility for failing to expose him while he was alive. Despite the criticism of the lack of response, if anything it's Patricia Hewitt's silence that seems vindicated. Reacting to the Mail just encourages it and convinces Paul Dacre that he was right. The real reason the rest of the media ignored the reports at first is there simply isn't any evidence of anything other than naivety. And if there's one thing that the Mail can't be accused of, it's precisely that.
Labels: Daily Mail, Harriet Harman, Labour, Liberty, Mail-watch, media analysis, media coverage, Paedophile Information Exchange, paedophilia, Paul Dacre, scandals
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Saturday, October 12, 2013
Let the shitstorm commence.
Paul Dacre, then, has broken cover. It's interesting that like so many tabloid editors before him he won't actually be interviewed and instead leaves that to his underlings, only prepared to engage with critics on his own terms, but such is the way of those who demand accountability from everyone else and accept none themselves.
A few points:
1. Dacre's obsession with the BBC is a wonderful projection of how he seems to imagine the left is obsessed with his paper (although it must be said, some are). It would be nice to get an audit on just how many hours of programming were devoted to discussing the Mail's attack on Ralph Miliband, but I'm willing to wager right now that it doesn't amount to hundreds. Dacre and the Mail also wouldn't attract quite as much hostility if they didn't resort to hyperbole at the first opportunity; it was obvious by Thursday that some within Labour were trying to exploit the issue shamelessly, and the use of Alastair Campbell was questionable. The point remains however that the BBC was entitled to cover the issue when it wasn't just Labour or the "Twitterati" but politicians on all sides who raised concerns.
2. Even now Dacre is repeating his and Geoffrey Levy's lies about Ralph Miliband. He did not give "unqualified support" to Russian totalitarianism until the mid-50s, and besides there is nothing in Levy's article to back up that claim. As Chris and a myriad others pointed out, being a Marxist does not make you a Stalinist or a Leninist, which is something that either the pair cannot get their heads round, or as you have to suspect, are being willfully misleading about. If we want to get into how political beliefs have resulted in "evil", then we have to discuss both right and left, as well as how governments both Labour and Tory have supported authoritarians and dictators when it's suited them. If hating Britain is not liking its institutions, as Dacre has repeatedly argued, then he clearly loathes modern Britain. Now that is a paradox.
3. Dacre, again like numerous tabloid editors before him, justifies his paper's viewpoints on the basis that he's reflecting his readers' interests, which just so happen to also be his. Regardless of the political party in power, in Dacre world Britain is constantly ruled over by the liberal left, and all Daily Mail readers object most strongly to this elite and their contempt for ordinary people. In Dacre world the politicians don't fight like rats in a sack for the support of the middle classes and the centre ground, they only represent the "metropolitan classes" and sneer at decent working Britons. Only the Mail stands up and protects these salt of the earth victims from having their interests ignored, and thank goodness it does.
4. Gosh, Labour really is a ghastly party, isn't it? No other political party has engaged in "corruption" like that of Damian McBride, except all of them (nor has any journalist ever facilitated the exchange of smears). The Mail only focused on Ralph Miliband because his son wants to reintroduce price fixing, an unacceptable form of state intervention quite unlike Help to Buy, or the Stalinist seizing of land, quite unlike the compulsory purchase order legislation that has been on the statute book for decades. They even covered up unnecessary and horrific deaths in NHS hospitals, except the Care Quality Commission disagrees entirely with that interpretation.
5. When everything else has failed, resort to a straw man argument. Who suggested that the Ralph Miliband article necessitated statutory regulation? Precisely no one, but that didn't stop Tory politicians from acting as though that's what the criticism implied, nor does it stop Dacre now. Dacre would have a point in saying politicians can't be trusted with the freedom of the press after this week's assault on the Graun, if err, his paper hadn't led the charge after friendly briefings from those same politicians and indeed MI5 itself. Amazingly, he attacks the BBC more than he does the Graun for "ignoring" the story, as though leading on it repeatedly over the last couple of days was trying to push it down the news agenda. Apparently they should have focused more on Jack Straw's criticisms of the paper. After all, who better than the foreign secretary who called the initial reports on the rendition programme "conspiracy theories" at the same time as he signed off on the rendition of two Libyan men back to Gaddafi's torture chambers to lecture the Guardian on the importance of such things remaining secret?
6. Which says everything about what this has really been about. After accusing the Graun of treachery, he now of course wants to get the paper on side in rejecting the newly agreed press charter. While I think the last couple of days has made clear both the press and government charter are untenable, the idea that you suddenly forget both sides have said you're helping terrorists and choose one over the other is hilarious.
7. Dacre says if you dish it out, you take it. Except as is obvious, he doesn't take it, he throws even more shit back in return. To quote Glenn, it's time to throw so much shit back at him that he can't pick up shit, he can't throw shit, he can't do shit. On your marks everyone.
A few points:
1. Dacre's obsession with the BBC is a wonderful projection of how he seems to imagine the left is obsessed with his paper (although it must be said, some are). It would be nice to get an audit on just how many hours of programming were devoted to discussing the Mail's attack on Ralph Miliband, but I'm willing to wager right now that it doesn't amount to hundreds. Dacre and the Mail also wouldn't attract quite as much hostility if they didn't resort to hyperbole at the first opportunity; it was obvious by Thursday that some within Labour were trying to exploit the issue shamelessly, and the use of Alastair Campbell was questionable. The point remains however that the BBC was entitled to cover the issue when it wasn't just Labour or the "Twitterati" but politicians on all sides who raised concerns.
2. Even now Dacre is repeating his and Geoffrey Levy's lies about Ralph Miliband. He did not give "unqualified support" to Russian totalitarianism until the mid-50s, and besides there is nothing in Levy's article to back up that claim. As Chris and a myriad others pointed out, being a Marxist does not make you a Stalinist or a Leninist, which is something that either the pair cannot get their heads round, or as you have to suspect, are being willfully misleading about. If we want to get into how political beliefs have resulted in "evil", then we have to discuss both right and left, as well as how governments both Labour and Tory have supported authoritarians and dictators when it's suited them. If hating Britain is not liking its institutions, as Dacre has repeatedly argued, then he clearly loathes modern Britain. Now that is a paradox.
3. Dacre, again like numerous tabloid editors before him, justifies his paper's viewpoints on the basis that he's reflecting his readers' interests, which just so happen to also be his. Regardless of the political party in power, in Dacre world Britain is constantly ruled over by the liberal left, and all Daily Mail readers object most strongly to this elite and their contempt for ordinary people. In Dacre world the politicians don't fight like rats in a sack for the support of the middle classes and the centre ground, they only represent the "metropolitan classes" and sneer at decent working Britons. Only the Mail stands up and protects these salt of the earth victims from having their interests ignored, and thank goodness it does.
4. Gosh, Labour really is a ghastly party, isn't it? No other political party has engaged in "corruption" like that of Damian McBride, except all of them (nor has any journalist ever facilitated the exchange of smears). The Mail only focused on Ralph Miliband because his son wants to reintroduce price fixing, an unacceptable form of state intervention quite unlike Help to Buy, or the Stalinist seizing of land, quite unlike the compulsory purchase order legislation that has been on the statute book for decades. They even covered up unnecessary and horrific deaths in NHS hospitals, except the Care Quality Commission disagrees entirely with that interpretation.
5. When everything else has failed, resort to a straw man argument. Who suggested that the Ralph Miliband article necessitated statutory regulation? Precisely no one, but that didn't stop Tory politicians from acting as though that's what the criticism implied, nor does it stop Dacre now. Dacre would have a point in saying politicians can't be trusted with the freedom of the press after this week's assault on the Graun, if err, his paper hadn't led the charge after friendly briefings from those same politicians and indeed MI5 itself. Amazingly, he attacks the BBC more than he does the Graun for "ignoring" the story, as though leading on it repeatedly over the last couple of days was trying to push it down the news agenda. Apparently they should have focused more on Jack Straw's criticisms of the paper. After all, who better than the foreign secretary who called the initial reports on the rendition programme "conspiracy theories" at the same time as he signed off on the rendition of two Libyan men back to Gaddafi's torture chambers to lecture the Guardian on the importance of such things remaining secret?
6. Which says everything about what this has really been about. After accusing the Graun of treachery, he now of course wants to get the paper on side in rejecting the newly agreed press charter. While I think the last couple of days has made clear both the press and government charter are untenable, the idea that you suddenly forget both sides have said you're helping terrorists and choose one over the other is hilarious.
7. Dacre says if you dish it out, you take it. Except as is obvious, he doesn't take it, he throws even more shit back in return. To quote Glenn, it's time to throw so much shit back at him that he can't pick up shit, he can't throw shit, he can't do shit. On your marks everyone.
Labels: abuses by tabloids, Daily Mail, Daily Mail-watch, Ed Miliband, Labour, Paul Dacre, politics, tabloid mendacity
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Thursday, October 03, 2013
No one to blame but himself.
When the Mail gets it wrong, it tends to get it spectacularly, boneheadedly, irredeemably wrong. Ever since Geoffrey Levy and (presumably) Paul Dacre decided it was a great idea to portray the deceased father of the Labour leader as a man who hated the country that gave him refuge and which he had to request to serve in the navy for, it has just kept on digging. Mocked for claiming a juvenile diary entry proved his loathing, it shifted to claiming his Marxism is why he hated our freedom. Except, as scholars and those who were taught by him have pointed out, his Marxism never extended to apologia for the Soviet Union or any other communist state. His socialism was democratic, just to the left of that offered by Labour. All they can point to is that his home played host to other thinkers on the left, not all of whom entirely rejected communism. By the same yardstick countless of those on the right could be equally condemned for their cosying up to authoritarians and dictators. That his son is now the leader of the party he wrote would always betray the working class also gives the lie to the idea that he is a "dangerous" influence.
Quite what the executives who sent the reporter to the memorial service for Miliband's uncle possibly thought they would achieve is therefore difficult to ascertain. Did they seriously imagine those there would tell them something they could use? Or was this simply classic tabloid behaviour, deliberately pestering them simply because Ed had dared to respond in kind? The PCC code (which is still in operation, fact fans) forbids journalists from entering private sections of hospitals unless there is a public interest in doing so, which while Paul Dacre would inevitably claim there was, is quite apparently not there.
It's Dacre's role since the beginning which is major point in all this. Was he the one who decided upon the "man who hated Britain" headline? Was he the executive who sent the Mail on Sunday hack to Professor Harry Keen's memorial? And was he also responsible for deciding this morning that the paper shouldn't apologise, the MoS editor Geordie Greig, who was apparently unaware of the doorstepping, having told Miliband one would be issued this morning? If so, then he seems to have made miscalculation after miscalculation, not expecting that Miliband would go to Rothermere himself with his complaint.
One thing people shouldn't be getting however is carried away. While this has been classic Mail behaviour, it pales in comparison to the kind those who aren't leaders of the opposition have gone through. For now at least, Miliband and the Labour leadership have judged their response just about right, but the letter to Rothermere almost crosses the boundary between justified complaint and the suggestion that they should think twice before writing anything. Miliband might be dead right in saying that this entire episode is indicative of the Mail's culture and practices, or at least is of Paul Dacre's, as that's clearly the sentiment being expressed, but there's an extremely fine line between criticising newspapers for going beyond what's acceptable and politicians being seen to be potentially intimidating their critics.
That, frankly, is what some either within Labour or now outside have been attempting to do. We can all agree that Alastair Campbell's lambasting of the Mail's Jon Steafel on Newsnight made for great television, yet Campbell is the absolute last person to be taking the moral high ground when it comes to smear stories. One aspect of the Damian McBride book serialisation which was undeveloped was that neither he nor Campbell, or those in the Blair camp after Campbell left could have run their operations without the help of journalists willing to write up their attacks on each other. Politics is only as dirty as the media that facilitate such briefings. Nor is this a Milly Dowler moment, and for the likes of John Prescott to be trying to make it into one by suggesting to advertisers that they should stop doing business with the Mail is absurd.
The most significant thing is that unlike during the 80s, when tabloid smearing of Labour figures was par for the course, this time politicians of all parties have been explicit in condemning the Mail. True, Cameron and Boris Johnson claimed not to have read or seen the piece and so only said they would defend their fathers from unfair criticism as well, but others such as Francis Maude have gone far beyond that. With the Sun clearly in decline, not least thanks to Murdoch's decision to put it behind a paywall, the Mail is without doubt the most powerful newspaper in the country. If some Tories are now prepared to go against it, it's indicative of just how quickly the influence the media barons once had is declining. And how delicious that Dacre has no one to blame but himself.
Quite what the executives who sent the reporter to the memorial service for Miliband's uncle possibly thought they would achieve is therefore difficult to ascertain. Did they seriously imagine those there would tell them something they could use? Or was this simply classic tabloid behaviour, deliberately pestering them simply because Ed had dared to respond in kind? The PCC code (which is still in operation, fact fans) forbids journalists from entering private sections of hospitals unless there is a public interest in doing so, which while Paul Dacre would inevitably claim there was, is quite apparently not there.
It's Dacre's role since the beginning which is major point in all this. Was he the one who decided upon the "man who hated Britain" headline? Was he the executive who sent the Mail on Sunday hack to Professor Harry Keen's memorial? And was he also responsible for deciding this morning that the paper shouldn't apologise, the MoS editor Geordie Greig, who was apparently unaware of the doorstepping, having told Miliband one would be issued this morning? If so, then he seems to have made miscalculation after miscalculation, not expecting that Miliband would go to Rothermere himself with his complaint.
One thing people shouldn't be getting however is carried away. While this has been classic Mail behaviour, it pales in comparison to the kind those who aren't leaders of the opposition have gone through. For now at least, Miliband and the Labour leadership have judged their response just about right, but the letter to Rothermere almost crosses the boundary between justified complaint and the suggestion that they should think twice before writing anything. Miliband might be dead right in saying that this entire episode is indicative of the Mail's culture and practices, or at least is of Paul Dacre's, as that's clearly the sentiment being expressed, but there's an extremely fine line between criticising newspapers for going beyond what's acceptable and politicians being seen to be potentially intimidating their critics.
That, frankly, is what some either within Labour or now outside have been attempting to do. We can all agree that Alastair Campbell's lambasting of the Mail's Jon Steafel on Newsnight made for great television, yet Campbell is the absolute last person to be taking the moral high ground when it comes to smear stories. One aspect of the Damian McBride book serialisation which was undeveloped was that neither he nor Campbell, or those in the Blair camp after Campbell left could have run their operations without the help of journalists willing to write up their attacks on each other. Politics is only as dirty as the media that facilitate such briefings. Nor is this a Milly Dowler moment, and for the likes of John Prescott to be trying to make it into one by suggesting to advertisers that they should stop doing business with the Mail is absurd.
The most significant thing is that unlike during the 80s, when tabloid smearing of Labour figures was par for the course, this time politicians of all parties have been explicit in condemning the Mail. True, Cameron and Boris Johnson claimed not to have read or seen the piece and so only said they would defend their fathers from unfair criticism as well, but others such as Francis Maude have gone far beyond that. With the Sun clearly in decline, not least thanks to Murdoch's decision to put it behind a paywall, the Mail is without doubt the most powerful newspaper in the country. If some Tories are now prepared to go against it, it's indicative of just how quickly the influence the media barons once had is declining. And how delicious that Dacre has no one to blame but himself.
Labels: abuses by tabloids, Daily Mail, Daily Mail-watch, Ed Miliband, Labour, Paul Dacre, politics, tabloid mendacity
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Tuesday, October 01, 2013
Better living through irony.
It used to be said, by our more patronising commentators, that Americans didn't "get" irony. They always have of course, it's just that different countries have different traditions of comedy. To get things off to an exceptionally meta start, it's highly ironic that some of us seem to have forgotten what irony is.
Like, for instance, referring to the Labour leader as "Red Ed" non-ironically. As an insult or jibe, it just doesn't work on any level other than it rhyming. The closest Ed or the party he leads come to being "red" in the old socialist style is that he answered in the affirmative recently when asked whether he would bring socialism back, when he clearly meant social democracy, the same principle part of the coalition continues to profess to adhere to, and that the party laughably continues to sing the "Red Flag" come the end of conference. It signifies about as much as the way Putin's Russia continues to display the ever deteriorating rubberised corpse of Lenin. Think of the way the Sun took to calling Heather Mills Lady Mucca, on the basis that she had once posed for some softcore snaps, highly similar to those appearing on the paper's third page every day. It was and is phenomenally stupid, but seems to please the little minds in charge of the nation's gutter rags.
Then again, part of our media and political class don't seem to like having even an occasional joke, let alone descend into silliness for say, the reason of having fun. I can't quite believe I'm defending Godfrey Bloom, but the whole "sluts" row at the UKIP conference was mindboggling in its inanity. I don't care whether he was using "sluts" in either the sexually promiscuous or lazy sense of the word, everyone in attendance laughed. It wasn't meant seriously, no one in the room was offended, and had it not been for the fact he then went out and smacked Michael Crick with the conference programme, it most likely would have been brushed off just as his "bongo bongo" jibe was, when he should have been held to account then. That the UKIP programme declared that the "new face of politics" was entirely white, as befits a party that can be summed up as being consumed with first world problems, ought to have been enough rope to hang them in the first place.
Not that we can just point the finger at those who think politics and humour shouldn't mix outside of Yes, Minister, The Thick of It or sketch columns. Last week also saw Alastair Campbell reaching new levels of sanctimony, touring television studios lecturing Tesco and Asda for the crime of selling Halloween costumes that apparently stigmatised or belittled those with mental health problems, reinforcing prejudices that we should instead be seeking to overcome. Fine sentiments indeed, but coming from the man who did more than anyone other than bloggers to paint Gordon Brown as "psychologically flawed", to put it in the politest possible terms, and over fucking Halloween costumes that simply reproduced age-old tropes from horror films and would never have been taken seriously by anyone other than those looking to be offended, came uncomfortably close to beggaring belief. I couldn't give a toss about Halloween, but if for one night a year people want to dress up as figures from history or in other potentially offensive ways in the spirit of enjoying themselves, perhaps the rest of us should, within reason, get over ourselves? Yes? No. Of course not.
Then we come to the levels of hypocrisy as well as irony in the Daily Mail deciding to smear Red Ed's long deceased old man. As someone born in the 80s, I don't remember the good old days when the Tory press used to savage the "loony left" time after time, and have only read about it. When such overbearing Tory bias hits you straight in the face then, as it has since Miliband's speech last week, it's a bit of a shock. Yes, the Sun was bad during Labour's last term when it declared the country was on the brink of anarchy, even as crime continued to fall, something it believes is happening now the natural party of government is back in charge, but this is something else. We saw a bit of it after Nick Clegg's performances in the debates, and earlier in the year during the Eastleigh by-election as the Mail splashed on Lord Rennard repeatedly, but to really invoke the hammer and sickle? If it wasn't so ridiculous and truly meant it would be comical.
The Mail describes Ed's piece in response to Geoffrey Levy's obviously Paul Dacre-approved hatchet job as "tetchy and menacing". Anyone who reads it can see it is neither. It is in fact a tender defence of his father, setting out exactly what he owed to this country and how he loved rather than hated it. You would have thought that Dacre, notoriously sensitive about the bringing up of the Mail's support for the Blackshirts in the 30s, might have realised that questioning the dedication of a man who fought for Britain would lead to critics pointing to the treachery of those who the Mail applauded, but apparently not. Levy and Dacre in their deliberately obtuse manner can't imagine why a 17-year-old Jewish refugee from the Nazis was suspicious of nationalisms of all varieties. The only other evidence it has for his hatred for this country is that he attacked the establishment, the self same establishment that Dacre has repeatedly said he rejoices in "tweaking the nose of".
Giving up any semblance of reasonable critique, the paper's editorial in response to Miliband's demand for a right of reply indulges in classic red-baiting, as Martin Kettle writes. Ralph Miliband was a life-long Marxist, ergo even if he didn't support the Soviet Union, he "validated this most pernicious doctrine", which presumably is the "evil legacy" the editorial is concerned with. It then lets the cat out of the bag by going straight on to the paper's monomaniacal obsession with the proposed royal charter on press regulation, as though whatever emerges from that tortured process will be anything approximate to actual state control of the press. Indeed, when press freedom is genuinely threatened, as it has been by the government's response to the Guardian's revelations of surveillance of the internet by GCHQ, the Mail has taken the side of... the government.
Irony, as a rather good band once had it, smothers us. It infects our speech and actions whether we like it or not. Some, however, like the Mail, ignore the way it nags and carry on regardless. Like George Osborne promising to run a budget surplus if the Tories are re-elected when he couldn't even keep his promise to eliminate the deficit in this parliament, thanks to the plan he now lauds as having laid the foundations for the recovery, just the three years later than scheduled. That level of chutzpah still doesn't come close though to that of the newspaper that pretends, as Miliband scathingly put it, to uphold "the best of British values of decency", even as it has repeatedly attacked and smeared those who can't answer for themselves. As when the Sun attacked Gordon Brown for his handwriting, the Mail might well find that this time it's gone that one step beyond the pale.
Like, for instance, referring to the Labour leader as "Red Ed" non-ironically. As an insult or jibe, it just doesn't work on any level other than it rhyming. The closest Ed or the party he leads come to being "red" in the old socialist style is that he answered in the affirmative recently when asked whether he would bring socialism back, when he clearly meant social democracy, the same principle part of the coalition continues to profess to adhere to, and that the party laughably continues to sing the "Red Flag" come the end of conference. It signifies about as much as the way Putin's Russia continues to display the ever deteriorating rubberised corpse of Lenin. Think of the way the Sun took to calling Heather Mills Lady Mucca, on the basis that she had once posed for some softcore snaps, highly similar to those appearing on the paper's third page every day. It was and is phenomenally stupid, but seems to please the little minds in charge of the nation's gutter rags.
Then again, part of our media and political class don't seem to like having even an occasional joke, let alone descend into silliness for say, the reason of having fun. I can't quite believe I'm defending Godfrey Bloom, but the whole "sluts" row at the UKIP conference was mindboggling in its inanity. I don't care whether he was using "sluts" in either the sexually promiscuous or lazy sense of the word, everyone in attendance laughed. It wasn't meant seriously, no one in the room was offended, and had it not been for the fact he then went out and smacked Michael Crick with the conference programme, it most likely would have been brushed off just as his "bongo bongo" jibe was, when he should have been held to account then. That the UKIP programme declared that the "new face of politics" was entirely white, as befits a party that can be summed up as being consumed with first world problems, ought to have been enough rope to hang them in the first place.
Not that we can just point the finger at those who think politics and humour shouldn't mix outside of Yes, Minister, The Thick of It or sketch columns. Last week also saw Alastair Campbell reaching new levels of sanctimony, touring television studios lecturing Tesco and Asda for the crime of selling Halloween costumes that apparently stigmatised or belittled those with mental health problems, reinforcing prejudices that we should instead be seeking to overcome. Fine sentiments indeed, but coming from the man who did more than anyone other than bloggers to paint Gordon Brown as "psychologically flawed", to put it in the politest possible terms, and over fucking Halloween costumes that simply reproduced age-old tropes from horror films and would never have been taken seriously by anyone other than those looking to be offended, came uncomfortably close to beggaring belief. I couldn't give a toss about Halloween, but if for one night a year people want to dress up as figures from history or in other potentially offensive ways in the spirit of enjoying themselves, perhaps the rest of us should, within reason, get over ourselves? Yes? No. Of course not.
Then we come to the levels of hypocrisy as well as irony in the Daily Mail deciding to smear Red Ed's long deceased old man. As someone born in the 80s, I don't remember the good old days when the Tory press used to savage the "loony left" time after time, and have only read about it. When such overbearing Tory bias hits you straight in the face then, as it has since Miliband's speech last week, it's a bit of a shock. Yes, the Sun was bad during Labour's last term when it declared the country was on the brink of anarchy, even as crime continued to fall, something it believes is happening now the natural party of government is back in charge, but this is something else. We saw a bit of it after Nick Clegg's performances in the debates, and earlier in the year during the Eastleigh by-election as the Mail splashed on Lord Rennard repeatedly, but to really invoke the hammer and sickle? If it wasn't so ridiculous and truly meant it would be comical.
The Mail describes Ed's piece in response to Geoffrey Levy's obviously Paul Dacre-approved hatchet job as "tetchy and menacing". Anyone who reads it can see it is neither. It is in fact a tender defence of his father, setting out exactly what he owed to this country and how he loved rather than hated it. You would have thought that Dacre, notoriously sensitive about the bringing up of the Mail's support for the Blackshirts in the 30s, might have realised that questioning the dedication of a man who fought for Britain would lead to critics pointing to the treachery of those who the Mail applauded, but apparently not. Levy and Dacre in their deliberately obtuse manner can't imagine why a 17-year-old Jewish refugee from the Nazis was suspicious of nationalisms of all varieties. The only other evidence it has for his hatred for this country is that he attacked the establishment, the self same establishment that Dacre has repeatedly said he rejoices in "tweaking the nose of".
Giving up any semblance of reasonable critique, the paper's editorial in response to Miliband's demand for a right of reply indulges in classic red-baiting, as Martin Kettle writes. Ralph Miliband was a life-long Marxist, ergo even if he didn't support the Soviet Union, he "validated this most pernicious doctrine", which presumably is the "evil legacy" the editorial is concerned with. It then lets the cat out of the bag by going straight on to the paper's monomaniacal obsession with the proposed royal charter on press regulation, as though whatever emerges from that tortured process will be anything approximate to actual state control of the press. Indeed, when press freedom is genuinely threatened, as it has been by the government's response to the Guardian's revelations of surveillance of the internet by GCHQ, the Mail has taken the side of... the government.
Irony, as a rather good band once had it, smothers us. It infects our speech and actions whether we like it or not. Some, however, like the Mail, ignore the way it nags and carry on regardless. Like George Osborne promising to run a budget surplus if the Tories are re-elected when he couldn't even keep his promise to eliminate the deficit in this parliament, thanks to the plan he now lauds as having laid the foundations for the recovery, just the three years later than scheduled. That level of chutzpah still doesn't come close though to that of the newspaper that pretends, as Miliband scathingly put it, to uphold "the best of British values of decency", even as it has repeatedly attacked and smeared those who can't answer for themselves. As when the Sun attacked Gordon Brown for his handwriting, the Mail might well find that this time it's gone that one step beyond the pale.
Labels: abuses by tabloids, Daily Mail, Daily Mail-watch, Ed Miliband, irony, Labour, Paul Dacre, politics, tabloid mendacity
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Wednesday, May 01, 2013
We might deserve it, but we're not complicit.
One of the arguments made in the aftermath of the extent of the phone hacking at the News of the World becoming clear was that, to a certain extent, those who had bought the newspaper or tabloids and gossip rags in general had in some way contributed to the pressure on journalists to do whatever it took to uncover new scandals or affairs. It's not an argument that can be completely dismissed, as increased competition or sales cleary have driven journalists in the past to ever greater lows (see the entire Madeleine McCann disgrace, or the Sun in the 80s under Kelvin MacKenzie), but it's absolute nonsense that readers would ever have wanted hacks to break the law in order to provide them with them the type of stories hacking generally produced.
Although it's not necessarily hacks themselves that made the point (although some of the more egregious definitely alluded to it), the effect is the same: it takes the whole of the blame away from those actually responsible and places it on those who buy a newspaper in the morning for any number of reasons. One of the most obvious examples is the panic over the MMR vaccine, and the consequences now playing out in Swansea. The more than slightly sheepish way the Daily Mail has reported the outbreak of measles hasn't gone unnoticed, the paper having been the foremost national champion of Andrew Wakefield's study claiming that the MMR vaccine could lead to autism.
This isn't to play down the fact that Wakefield's study was published in the Lancet, or indeed that the Mail was far from the only publication to repeatedly draw attention to Wakefield's claims, local newspapers and Private Eye having also dedicated campaigns and column inches to demanding answers, yet no other media outlet went so far out of its way to attack politicians over the scare, or has such a large circulation. Certainly, the media can't be held responsible for parents deciding not to let their children have the jab, but they most definitely can for continuing to claim there's a link years after Wakefield's research was discredited and the man himself struck off.
The idea that we are all in some way guilty or responsible for the media we have especially sticks in the craw when it comes to the coverage given to sensational murder cases. Andrew Gumbel, reviewing Amanda Knox's memoir of her time in Perugia, suggests that all those "who feasted on her story contributed in some way to the hysteria". Gumbel most certainly has, considering he co-authored Knox's co-accused Raffaele Sollecito's own account of what happened following the murder of the British student Meredith Kercher. While the case was bound to lead to substantial media interest considering the circumstances in which a young woman away from home in a foreign country was found dead, what almost immediately commenced was a free for all, the normal restrictions and holding back on reporting that would follow a murder in this country completely ignored. Even before Knox and Sollecito were charged, the Mail for one was running pieces such as this, all but saying outright that she was guilty of whatever it was she would be accused of.
In a week when the 50-year-old Profumo scandal is once again making the headlines, it's not surprising that sex and violence in the sun should have led to such lurid reporting. What should be is that so soon after the Portuguese police had been denounced, their Italian counterparts' every word was believed. They never came up with a motive for Knox's involvement beyond the utterly risible claim that she and the others killed Kercher because she refused to join in their sex game, yet down to how Knox had already been reported as having a voracious appetite for casual sex, whether true or not, this was deemed enough.
Knox as it turns out was a thoroughly typical student: she had a liking for parties, smoked cannabis and horror of horrors, had sex. She was also on her own in a country where she had only slight knowledge of the language, as well as being young and naive. She responded as many others would in the same situation, although not all would have tried to pin the blame on another innocent. As a result she was presented as a devil with an angel face, a conniving, murderous whore, an American harlot who snuffed out a virtuous British flower. They ignored that the real killer had already been convicted as the fiction was easier to sell.
There is perhaps something to be said for how, back in America, Knox was thought innocent from the beginning and how her family attempted to influence the coverage, reminiscent of how Louise Woodward was regarded in this country. It can't possibly be the case though that it was readers as opposed to the media and the Italian prosecutors who contributed to the hysteria, as the narrative from both was there from the very beginning. We might have the media we deserve because we don't protest or complain enough about what they publish, but we most certainly aren't complicit as a result.
Although it's not necessarily hacks themselves that made the point (although some of the more egregious definitely alluded to it), the effect is the same: it takes the whole of the blame away from those actually responsible and places it on those who buy a newspaper in the morning for any number of reasons. One of the most obvious examples is the panic over the MMR vaccine, and the consequences now playing out in Swansea. The more than slightly sheepish way the Daily Mail has reported the outbreak of measles hasn't gone unnoticed, the paper having been the foremost national champion of Andrew Wakefield's study claiming that the MMR vaccine could lead to autism.
This isn't to play down the fact that Wakefield's study was published in the Lancet, or indeed that the Mail was far from the only publication to repeatedly draw attention to Wakefield's claims, local newspapers and Private Eye having also dedicated campaigns and column inches to demanding answers, yet no other media outlet went so far out of its way to attack politicians over the scare, or has such a large circulation. Certainly, the media can't be held responsible for parents deciding not to let their children have the jab, but they most definitely can for continuing to claim there's a link years after Wakefield's research was discredited and the man himself struck off.
The idea that we are all in some way guilty or responsible for the media we have especially sticks in the craw when it comes to the coverage given to sensational murder cases. Andrew Gumbel, reviewing Amanda Knox's memoir of her time in Perugia, suggests that all those "who feasted on her story contributed in some way to the hysteria". Gumbel most certainly has, considering he co-authored Knox's co-accused Raffaele Sollecito's own account of what happened following the murder of the British student Meredith Kercher. While the case was bound to lead to substantial media interest considering the circumstances in which a young woman away from home in a foreign country was found dead, what almost immediately commenced was a free for all, the normal restrictions and holding back on reporting that would follow a murder in this country completely ignored. Even before Knox and Sollecito were charged, the Mail for one was running pieces such as this, all but saying outright that she was guilty of whatever it was she would be accused of.
In a week when the 50-year-old Profumo scandal is once again making the headlines, it's not surprising that sex and violence in the sun should have led to such lurid reporting. What should be is that so soon after the Portuguese police had been denounced, their Italian counterparts' every word was believed. They never came up with a motive for Knox's involvement beyond the utterly risible claim that she and the others killed Kercher because she refused to join in their sex game, yet down to how Knox had already been reported as having a voracious appetite for casual sex, whether true or not, this was deemed enough.
Knox as it turns out was a thoroughly typical student: she had a liking for parties, smoked cannabis and horror of horrors, had sex. She was also on her own in a country where she had only slight knowledge of the language, as well as being young and naive. She responded as many others would in the same situation, although not all would have tried to pin the blame on another innocent. As a result she was presented as a devil with an angel face, a conniving, murderous whore, an American harlot who snuffed out a virtuous British flower. They ignored that the real killer had already been convicted as the fiction was easier to sell.
There is perhaps something to be said for how, back in America, Knox was thought innocent from the beginning and how her family attempted to influence the coverage, reminiscent of how Louise Woodward was regarded in this country. It can't possibly be the case though that it was readers as opposed to the media and the Italian prosecutors who contributed to the hysteria, as the narrative from both was there from the very beginning. We might have the media we deserve because we don't protest or complain enough about what they publish, but we most certainly aren't complicit as a result.
Labels: Amanda Knox, Daily Mail, media analysis, media hysteria, MMR vaccine, phone hacking, tabloid analysis
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Friday, February 15, 2013
The tabloids: publishing death porn since the advent of the printing press.
Much comment, understandably, on the Sun's decision to run a front page splash (and in this instance it really does seem the right word) on the death of Reeva Steenkamp, illustrated with a full page photo of the model and presenter appearing to undo her bikini top. It's certainly tasteless, and as Marina Hyde notes, just happens to come the day after the One Billion Rising protests, the campaign intended to bring more attention to violence against women.
It's hardly the most egregious recent case of tabloid death porn though, and one which at the time barely caused a ripple of complaint as far as I can remember. Back in 2008, the Daily Star splashed on the latest evidence heard at the trial of Mark Dixie, who was subsequently found guilty of the murder of Sally Anne Bowman. "MY SEX WITH SALLY ANNE'S DEAD BODY", the front page screamed, alongside the ubiquitous shot of Bowman from her modelling catalogue, hands in the top of her jeans.
As for the motivation behind using such photographs to illustrate crime cases, Dixie's trial more than provided a clue. Found on Dixie's digital camera was a video of a man masturbating over a copy of the Daily Mail, the front page of which featured a photograph of Bowman. The police also found said copy of the Mail in Dixie's possesion, and noted the cover was dashed with a "sticky substance". The Mail, all but needless to say, merely reported that the police had found a video of Dixie "performing a lewd sex act on the six-month anniversary of the model's death". Not, you understand, which publication and what material had further energised his "lewd sex act".
It's hardly the most egregious recent case of tabloid death porn though, and one which at the time barely caused a ripple of complaint as far as I can remember. Back in 2008, the Daily Star splashed on the latest evidence heard at the trial of Mark Dixie, who was subsequently found guilty of the murder of Sally Anne Bowman. "MY SEX WITH SALLY ANNE'S DEAD BODY", the front page screamed, alongside the ubiquitous shot of Bowman from her modelling catalogue, hands in the top of her jeans.
As for the motivation behind using such photographs to illustrate crime cases, Dixie's trial more than provided a clue. Found on Dixie's digital camera was a video of a man masturbating over a copy of the Daily Mail, the front page of which featured a photograph of Bowman. The police also found said copy of the Mail in Dixie's possesion, and noted the cover was dashed with a "sticky substance". The Mail, all but needless to say, merely reported that the police had found a video of Dixie "performing a lewd sex act on the six-month anniversary of the model's death". Not, you understand, which publication and what material had further energised his "lewd sex act".
Labels: Daily Mail, Daily Star-watch, Mail-watch, Scum-watch, sexism, Sun-watch, tabloid analysis
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Monday, December 10, 2012
The Daily Mail has spoken.
The great tradition when new reports on drug policy are produced is to see what the blessed Daily Mail thinks. Last time round the Mail claimed the UK Drug Policy Commission's final report said using cannabis was comparable to eating junk food when it naturally said nothing of the kind. If anything, the Mail has today misrepresented the Home Affairs Select Committee's ninth report on drugs to an even greater extent: it takes the committee's recommendation that ministers visit Portugal, where possession has been decriminalised, and implies this means the government's considering legalising "heroine and crack". Getting quite so many distortions into one headline takes real talent.
As was inevitable then, this latest report has been dismissed by those wielding actual power. It doesn't matter whether or not Jeremy Browne is prepared to go and visit Portugal, a no doubt very agreeable junket should he delay his journey until midway through next year, as David Cameron has already decided we don't need a royal commission into drug policy. According to him, the current policy is working swimmingly as drug use amongst the population is at its lowest rate since 1996. The same message has also come from the Home Office, which claimed quite incredibly that current laws "draw on the best available evidence". As lies go, this ranks up there with the best produced by the Mail, considering that the HO have completely ignored the last two recommendations from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to keep cannabis in Class C and downgrade MDMA to Class B respectively.
We've had so many similar reports produced now, all recommending more or less the same things, all recognising that prohibition has failed miserably and that we have to move from criminalisation towards decriminalisation that it's apparent we need a major, front line politician unafraid to take on the tabloid press in order to make progress. Some, amazingly, thought David Cameron might be that politician, seeing as he served on the HASC prior to becoming leader of the Conservatives. More realistically, it needs to be someone in opposition who can set out their stance and then claim a mandate for change should their party win the election. The problem with this is that, if anything, the post-Brownite wing of Labour tends to be more authoritarian on drugs than even the Tories. Could this be the perfect next campaign for Stella Creasy?
Labels: Daily Mail, Daily Mail-watch, drug policies, drug prohibition, drugs, Home Office, politics, Stella Creasy, war on drugs
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Thursday, November 29, 2012
Free press with all four volumes.
Despite everything that was said beforehand and will no doubt be bellowed from the editorials of the majority of the press tomorrow, Sir Brian Leveson's report is both cautious and carefully calculated. When he started chairing the inquiry, he made clear that he had no intention of doing so if his final recommendations were to be ignored as the previous 6 commissions into the press more or less had been. The almost 2,000 pages he's served up, and in such a relatively short period of time, itself extraordinary considering how long we've waited for other inquiries to report, reflect this precisely. Politicians and the police are criticised, but for the most part in lawyerly language which declines to condemn them outright. The tabloid press by contrast is excoriated, and considering that Leveson was limited in what he could write on phone hacking due to the upcoming trials, he couldn't have gone much further.
They can hardly say they weren't warned, and they also can't complain that it wasn't pretty much apparent from early on that statutory underpinning would be one of the key recommendations. It cannot be stated often enough, and Leveson himself makes this point repeatedly, that the media as a whole have had plenty of opportunities to institute an effective, genuinely independent form of self-regulation. They flunked the test in 1992, they failed again following the death of Princess Diana, and they refused to even admit there was a problem after both the jailing of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire and the publication of the What Price Privacy? report. Indeed, the Press Complaints Commission all but guaranteed its own extinction when rather than criticise the News of the World, it chose to attack the Guardian for supposedly exaggerating its reports on the scale of hacking at the now closed paper.
Even after all this, some sections of the press have devoted their time to attacking Leveson personally rather than accepting that for too long there was a complete lack of ethics and morals in old Fleet Street. Away from the News International stable, which has for the most part kept quiet, recognising if they were to get too involved in the "Free Speech Network" it would be taken even less seriously than it has been, the Daily Mail has upped the ante in their stead.
Long ago alerted to how heavily he would be personally criticised by Leveson, Paul Dacre gave the go-ahead for a fantastically amusing 12-page long hatchet job on adviser to the inquiry Sir David Bell, variously linked by the paper to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Common Purpose, the Media Standards Trust and the Orwell Prize, which dared to give an award to Johann Hari before it was rescinded. Common Purpose for those not aware is one of the conspiratorial right's favourite organisations, as they deign to see its machinations behind everyone and everything vaguely on the left. You expect the likes of James Delingpole to fall for such crap, but not Dacre, for the simple reason that he's not an idiot. When he then splashes with a piece that describes CP as "a giant octopus" and "a quasi-masonic nexus", the only explanation has to be quite how rattled he is at the potential for a change in tabloid culture.
It's on this culture that Leveson is at his strongest. His identification of the "aggressive defence" often made by the tabloids when they are subjected to even the merest criticism is spot on (pages 481-2 of Volume II), as is his noting of three separate parts to this defence, both the overt types of intimidation, such as the messages sent to Richard Peppiatt and the mother of Hugh Grant's child, the fear of or actual retaliation in the papers themselves, such as when JK Rowling's daughter was pictured in the press after she asked them not to publish her address, and lastly ad hominem criticism on third parties, such as the attacks on Justice Eady after he ruled in favour of Max Mosley. Paul Dacre notably described Eady as "amoral" in a speech to the Society of Editors, a lecture he concluded with a whine about Nick Davies' Flat Earth News and how criticism of the "popular press" was doing huge, unjust harm to it. There's been no suggestion Dacre has changed his mind since.
Where Leveson fails to do himself justice is in those half-hearted criticisms of both politicians and police. David Cameron crowed in the Commons about how his party had been cleared of doing a deal with News International over the takeover of Sky in exchange for support at the election, something the judge was never going to be able to prove when any such deal was hardly going to be written down and all those involved would always strenuously deny any such thing took place. Such deals are almost always conducted with a nod and a wink, not with a paper trail.
Cameron additionally claimed Jeremy Hunt had been cleared of all wrongdoing, which isn't quite the full truth. Yes, Leveson does find there wasn't "any credible evidence of actual bias on the part of Mr Hunt", but he is highly critical of the role played by Hunt's special adviser Adam Smith in his dealings with News International's lobbyist Fred Michel, which do give rise to a "perception of bias". As Labour argued at the time, ministers are responsible for their SpAds, and the idea that Hunt didn't know what Smith was doing is absurd. If it hadn't been for the Graun's exposure of the Milly Dowler hacking, News International would now almost certainly be in full control of BSkyB, with all that would have entailed for press plurality. Hunt would have been more than happy had the takeover gone ahead.
Much as Leveson's recommendations were expected, so was David Cameron's refusal to countenance any form of statutory regulation, including that of a simple underpinning. To be fair to Cameron, he is in an almost impossible position: go along with legislation and he enrages a media which is already none too enthusiastic about him, as well as the Tory right; reject it and he risks being defeated by an unholy alliance of the Liberal Democrats, Labour and rebel Tories, while also going back on a pledge he made to support Leveson's proposals unless they were "bonkers".
The recommendations are not bonkers, but Cameron is right to be extremely wary. The current form of press self-regulation has never been anything of the kind, and it's also the case that the current proposals for reform from Lords Hunt and Black are nowhere near good enough. They are the continuation of the failed cartel of the past, as the Independent, Evening Standard, Guardian and Financial Times have also recognised. Leveson's recommendations on how they can be improved are excellent, and to judge from Trevor Kavanagh's appearance on Newsnight, even the old Fleet Street die-hards seems to realise that nothing less than their implementation will be sufficient. If an agreement can be reached between media groups, then Leveson's proposed statutory underpinning might not be necessary, as the judge himself makes clear.
If this banging of heads together fails to result in an improvement, however, there seems little option other than to implement the statutory part of Leveson's proposals. For all the hysterical bawling about Mugabe and Iran, and how even the merest form of legislation could lead to a slippery slope, something that isn't always a fallacious argument, we really should try everything other than statute. The point surely though is that we've been here before. To descend into the clichéd analogies of the day, much as we don't want to cross the rubicon, staying in the last chance saloon for one more round isn't going to cut it either.
Unless a personal intervention from a cross-party delegation can convince the press groupings to put aside their personal differences and hang-ups to organise a truly independent form of self-regulation, then the government is going to have to step in. This might be horrendously unfair on the former broadsheets, most magazines and the regional press, but it's been the hubris of the populars and their editors that have led inexorably to this point. Nemesis has duly followed. The least Dacre, Desmond, Murdoch and Trinity Mirror can do now is ensure that their failures and abuses don't lead to restrictions across the board.
They can hardly say they weren't warned, and they also can't complain that it wasn't pretty much apparent from early on that statutory underpinning would be one of the key recommendations. It cannot be stated often enough, and Leveson himself makes this point repeatedly, that the media as a whole have had plenty of opportunities to institute an effective, genuinely independent form of self-regulation. They flunked the test in 1992, they failed again following the death of Princess Diana, and they refused to even admit there was a problem after both the jailing of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire and the publication of the What Price Privacy? report. Indeed, the Press Complaints Commission all but guaranteed its own extinction when rather than criticise the News of the World, it chose to attack the Guardian for supposedly exaggerating its reports on the scale of hacking at the now closed paper.
Even after all this, some sections of the press have devoted their time to attacking Leveson personally rather than accepting that for too long there was a complete lack of ethics and morals in old Fleet Street. Away from the News International stable, which has for the most part kept quiet, recognising if they were to get too involved in the "Free Speech Network" it would be taken even less seriously than it has been, the Daily Mail has upped the ante in their stead.
Long ago alerted to how heavily he would be personally criticised by Leveson, Paul Dacre gave the go-ahead for a fantastically amusing 12-page long hatchet job on adviser to the inquiry Sir David Bell, variously linked by the paper to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Common Purpose, the Media Standards Trust and the Orwell Prize, which dared to give an award to Johann Hari before it was rescinded. Common Purpose for those not aware is one of the conspiratorial right's favourite organisations, as they deign to see its machinations behind everyone and everything vaguely on the left. You expect the likes of James Delingpole to fall for such crap, but not Dacre, for the simple reason that he's not an idiot. When he then splashes with a piece that describes CP as "a giant octopus" and "a quasi-masonic nexus", the only explanation has to be quite how rattled he is at the potential for a change in tabloid culture.
It's on this culture that Leveson is at his strongest. His identification of the "aggressive defence" often made by the tabloids when they are subjected to even the merest criticism is spot on (pages 481-2 of Volume II), as is his noting of three separate parts to this defence, both the overt types of intimidation, such as the messages sent to Richard Peppiatt and the mother of Hugh Grant's child, the fear of or actual retaliation in the papers themselves, such as when JK Rowling's daughter was pictured in the press after she asked them not to publish her address, and lastly ad hominem criticism on third parties, such as the attacks on Justice Eady after he ruled in favour of Max Mosley. Paul Dacre notably described Eady as "amoral" in a speech to the Society of Editors, a lecture he concluded with a whine about Nick Davies' Flat Earth News and how criticism of the "popular press" was doing huge, unjust harm to it. There's been no suggestion Dacre has changed his mind since.
Where Leveson fails to do himself justice is in those half-hearted criticisms of both politicians and police. David Cameron crowed in the Commons about how his party had been cleared of doing a deal with News International over the takeover of Sky in exchange for support at the election, something the judge was never going to be able to prove when any such deal was hardly going to be written down and all those involved would always strenuously deny any such thing took place. Such deals are almost always conducted with a nod and a wink, not with a paper trail.
Cameron additionally claimed Jeremy Hunt had been cleared of all wrongdoing, which isn't quite the full truth. Yes, Leveson does find there wasn't "any credible evidence of actual bias on the part of Mr Hunt", but he is highly critical of the role played by Hunt's special adviser Adam Smith in his dealings with News International's lobbyist Fred Michel, which do give rise to a "perception of bias". As Labour argued at the time, ministers are responsible for their SpAds, and the idea that Hunt didn't know what Smith was doing is absurd. If it hadn't been for the Graun's exposure of the Milly Dowler hacking, News International would now almost certainly be in full control of BSkyB, with all that would have entailed for press plurality. Hunt would have been more than happy had the takeover gone ahead.
Much as Leveson's recommendations were expected, so was David Cameron's refusal to countenance any form of statutory regulation, including that of a simple underpinning. To be fair to Cameron, he is in an almost impossible position: go along with legislation and he enrages a media which is already none too enthusiastic about him, as well as the Tory right; reject it and he risks being defeated by an unholy alliance of the Liberal Democrats, Labour and rebel Tories, while also going back on a pledge he made to support Leveson's proposals unless they were "bonkers".
The recommendations are not bonkers, but Cameron is right to be extremely wary. The current form of press self-regulation has never been anything of the kind, and it's also the case that the current proposals for reform from Lords Hunt and Black are nowhere near good enough. They are the continuation of the failed cartel of the past, as the Independent, Evening Standard, Guardian and Financial Times have also recognised. Leveson's recommendations on how they can be improved are excellent, and to judge from Trevor Kavanagh's appearance on Newsnight, even the old Fleet Street die-hards seems to realise that nothing less than their implementation will be sufficient. If an agreement can be reached between media groups, then Leveson's proposed statutory underpinning might not be necessary, as the judge himself makes clear.
If this banging of heads together fails to result in an improvement, however, there seems little option other than to implement the statutory part of Leveson's proposals. For all the hysterical bawling about Mugabe and Iran, and how even the merest form of legislation could lead to a slippery slope, something that isn't always a fallacious argument, we really should try everything other than statute. The point surely though is that we've been here before. To descend into the clichéd analogies of the day, much as we don't want to cross the rubicon, staying in the last chance saloon for one more round isn't going to cut it either.
Unless a personal intervention from a cross-party delegation can convince the press groupings to put aside their personal differences and hang-ups to organise a truly independent form of self-regulation, then the government is going to have to step in. This might be horrendously unfair on the former broadsheets, most magazines and the regional press, but it's been the hubris of the populars and their editors that have led inexorably to this point. Nemesis has duly followed. The least Dacre, Desmond, Murdoch and Trinity Mirror can do now is ensure that their failures and abuses don't lead to restrictions across the board.
Labels: Daily Mail, dark arts, journalism, Leveson inquiry, media analysis, Paul Dacre, phone hacking, Press Complaints Commission, tabloid analysis
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Monday, October 15, 2012
Want a true legacy, Nick?
Whenever there's a new, in-depth, excellently researched and extremely carefully worded report released which calls for a reform of our increasingly antiquated drug laws, it's always worth going and seeing what the Daily Mail has written about it. The influence of newspapers may well be in long-term decline, but when it comes to social policy it's still the right-wing tabloids that rule the roost. If they're against it, it's an incredibly brave government that does the opposite.
Much as we now spit at the very mention of the name Tony Blair, it's worth remembering that on occasion he did go against the puritanism of the Mail; not on crime, obviously, as that was a battle he was at one with them on, but as for the liberalisation of gambling, the licensing laws and also on the reclassification of cannabis to Class C he ignored Paul Dacre's opposition and pushed the reforms through. One of Gordon Brown's first acts as prime minister was to ignore the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and put cannabis back in Class B, in an act that certainly wasn't meant to curry favour with his pal Dacre. Supposedly meant to "send a message" that use of any recreational drugs wasn't OK, all it did was waste more money and police time.
The UK Drug Policy Commission's final report has then, as you might have expected, been giving the Mail treatment. Their article, which doesn't feature on the voluminous front page of their website, does the classic trick of misrepresenting the report by picking on one comparison it uses, ignoring a crucial sentence which clarifies their stance, and then asks those opposed to the use of recreational drugs in all circumstances to comment on this calumny. Hence the Mail's report claims the report says "smoking cannabis is just like eating junk food", when it naturally says nothing of the sort. What it does say is (on page 108, PDF):
The Mail quotes the second half of the paragraph, but not the first part which makes clear why they're making the comparison. Much of the rest of the Mail's report is a fair summing up of the UKDPC's conclusions, but it's the headline and opening sentence that as always set the tone.
It's a great shame, and shows exactly the hurdles that still need to be leapt through to get anything approaching sensible coverage of calls for drug law reform, especially as the report's conclusions are thoroughly conservative and incremental rather than revolutionary. It doesn't advocate the decriminalisation of all drugs, let alone their legalisation; what it does suggest is that the possession of a small amount of a controlled drug could be made a civil rather than a criminal offence, leading to fines and referrals to drug awareness or treatment sessions rather than sanctions through the criminal courts. The report recommends that cannabis would be a good place to start, and if and only if evaluations of the policy suggested there hadn't been a substantial increase in usage or other negative effects, then it could be extended to other drugs. Similarly, it suggests that either decriminalising or altering the sanctions for the growing of cannabis for personal use could strike a blow against the current situation where empty houses or warehouses are rented or broken into and used by criminal gangs to grow the high-strength strains of the drug that have caused such concern over recent years.
For those who, like me, think we could go relatively quickly from prohibition to the strict regulation and sale of the relatively safe recreational drugs, such as cannabis, MDMA, LSD and "magic mushrooms" with few problems, while decriminalising the harder "Class As", this report is far less radical than it thinks it is. Where it shines though is in the area which is less sensational: with recommendations for supporting "responsible behaviour", recognising that drug specific education as it stands doesn't work, through to further encouraging the use of needle exchanges up to pill testing services it isn't afraid to say that drug use, like it or not, isn't going to disappear or be eradicated regardless of the apparent fall in use. It also notes that recovery has to be tailored to the individual, despite what some influential recovered addicts have been given an hour of prime time television to claim. Most of all, it accepts we need better research into prohibited drugs across the board, something made all the more difficult by their very illegality.
More optimistically, it calls for a cross-party political forum to be set up to examine where drug policy to go from here. Sadly, even if one were to be created, should it come up with the "wrong" conclusions and proposals then it's highly unlikely it would get us any further. With both the main parties clearly wedded to prohibition, regardless of how this report has apparently been welcomed even by the likes of Jack Straw, ideally there should be someone from the third party with a high profile who could make a break with the failed policies of the past by being clear about where we've been going wrong for so long. Want a legacy that could eventually sideline your role in the coalition, Nick?
Much as we now spit at the very mention of the name Tony Blair, it's worth remembering that on occasion he did go against the puritanism of the Mail; not on crime, obviously, as that was a battle he was at one with them on, but as for the liberalisation of gambling, the licensing laws and also on the reclassification of cannabis to Class C he ignored Paul Dacre's opposition and pushed the reforms through. One of Gordon Brown's first acts as prime minister was to ignore the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and put cannabis back in Class B, in an act that certainly wasn't meant to curry favour with his pal Dacre. Supposedly meant to "send a message" that use of any recreational drugs wasn't OK, all it did was waste more money and police time.
The UK Drug Policy Commission's final report has then, as you might have expected, been giving the Mail treatment. Their article, which doesn't feature on the voluminous front page of their website, does the classic trick of misrepresenting the report by picking on one comparison it uses, ignoring a crucial sentence which clarifies their stance, and then asks those opposed to the use of recreational drugs in all circumstances to comment on this calumny. Hence the Mail's report claims the report says "smoking cannabis is just like eating junk food", when it naturally says nothing of the sort. What it does say is (on page 108, PDF):
A small but significant segment of the population will use drugs. We do not believe that pursuing the goal of encouraging responsible behaviour means seeking to prevent all drug use in every circumstance. This is not to say that we consider drug use to be desirable. Just like with gambling or eating junk food, there are some moderately selfish or risky behaviours that free societies accept will occur and seek to limit to the least damaging manifestations, rather than to prevent entirely.
The Mail quotes the second half of the paragraph, but not the first part which makes clear why they're making the comparison. Much of the rest of the Mail's report is a fair summing up of the UKDPC's conclusions, but it's the headline and opening sentence that as always set the tone.
It's a great shame, and shows exactly the hurdles that still need to be leapt through to get anything approaching sensible coverage of calls for drug law reform, especially as the report's conclusions are thoroughly conservative and incremental rather than revolutionary. It doesn't advocate the decriminalisation of all drugs, let alone their legalisation; what it does suggest is that the possession of a small amount of a controlled drug could be made a civil rather than a criminal offence, leading to fines and referrals to drug awareness or treatment sessions rather than sanctions through the criminal courts. The report recommends that cannabis would be a good place to start, and if and only if evaluations of the policy suggested there hadn't been a substantial increase in usage or other negative effects, then it could be extended to other drugs. Similarly, it suggests that either decriminalising or altering the sanctions for the growing of cannabis for personal use could strike a blow against the current situation where empty houses or warehouses are rented or broken into and used by criminal gangs to grow the high-strength strains of the drug that have caused such concern over recent years.
For those who, like me, think we could go relatively quickly from prohibition to the strict regulation and sale of the relatively safe recreational drugs, such as cannabis, MDMA, LSD and "magic mushrooms" with few problems, while decriminalising the harder "Class As", this report is far less radical than it thinks it is. Where it shines though is in the area which is less sensational: with recommendations for supporting "responsible behaviour", recognising that drug specific education as it stands doesn't work, through to further encouraging the use of needle exchanges up to pill testing services it isn't afraid to say that drug use, like it or not, isn't going to disappear or be eradicated regardless of the apparent fall in use. It also notes that recovery has to be tailored to the individual, despite what some influential recovered addicts have been given an hour of prime time television to claim. Most of all, it accepts we need better research into prohibited drugs across the board, something made all the more difficult by their very illegality.
More optimistically, it calls for a cross-party political forum to be set up to examine where drug policy to go from here. Sadly, even if one were to be created, should it come up with the "wrong" conclusions and proposals then it's highly unlikely it would get us any further. With both the main parties clearly wedded to prohibition, regardless of how this report has apparently been welcomed even by the likes of Jack Straw, ideally there should be someone from the third party with a high profile who could make a break with the failed policies of the past by being clear about where we've been going wrong for so long. Want a legacy that could eventually sideline your role in the coalition, Nick?
Labels: Daily Mail, Daily Mail-watch, drug policies, drug prohibition, drug stupidity, drugs, Home Office, politics, UK Drug Policy Commission, war on drugs
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Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Classic Mail.
Today's Mail front page is a joy to behold:
Yes, here's finally the truth about a how a THIRD of your tax bill is spent on welfare, but here's why the plan to remove child benefit from those earning over £42,000 a year is "insane" and "betrays families, aspiration and core Tory values". It's the most wonderful example of a newspaper coming right out and saying exactly why they think their readers are more deserving of "handouts" than dole scum and cheating scroungers, even when the welfare bill overall MUST be slashed. We're worth it, and everyone who isn't middle class, or part of a nuclear family or aspirational is not.
To be truthful I have been converted to the "universalist" argument for welfare provision, mainly down to how increasingly it looks as though most people haven't got the slightest idea how much the unemployed get a week. Why else would such large numbers say that those on jobseeker's allowance should get less than the pitiful £67.50 a week (£53.45 for the under 25) they currently get if they weren't completely ignorant of the true figure? At least if everyone receives child benefit regardless of their circumstances it gives them contact with the welfare state that they otherwise might not have, and so less likely to be immediately under the impression that you can live anything like comfortably on less than a quarter of the average wage.
In any case, anyone who actually looks at the proposed tax statements can see that, unsurprisingly, just less than half of overall welfare spending goes on pensions, rather than on the other social security schemes. The statements themselves are meaningless in practice, as all they do is break down the amount someone pays in tax into proportions based on overall government spending. Mr Patel for example obviously doesn't have his £2,438.12 salami sliced in such a way, as that would be ridiculous. In practice his whole £2,438.12 may well have gone towards buying what Del Boy once called a "strident missile", but he and we are never going to know exactly what our tax was spent on. What it does give is an insight, and it does rather bust a few myths: regardless of the overall spend on the EU, overseas aid and welfare other than pensions, broken down it's much harder to argue against. Someone on just about the average wage contributes less than a week's money to someone on JSA (£56.74), and just £28 to the EU. Plenty will still argue that's £28 too much on the latter but as a whole it's hardly going to turn the average person into a member of the Taxpayer's Alliance. Which you suspect was rather what Osborne and friends were hoping for.
Yes, here's finally the truth about a how a THIRD of your tax bill is spent on welfare, but here's why the plan to remove child benefit from those earning over £42,000 a year is "insane" and "betrays families, aspiration and core Tory values". It's the most wonderful example of a newspaper coming right out and saying exactly why they think their readers are more deserving of "handouts" than dole scum and cheating scroungers, even when the welfare bill overall MUST be slashed. We're worth it, and everyone who isn't middle class, or part of a nuclear family or aspirational is not.
To be truthful I have been converted to the "universalist" argument for welfare provision, mainly down to how increasingly it looks as though most people haven't got the slightest idea how much the unemployed get a week. Why else would such large numbers say that those on jobseeker's allowance should get less than the pitiful £67.50 a week (£53.45 for the under 25) they currently get if they weren't completely ignorant of the true figure? At least if everyone receives child benefit regardless of their circumstances it gives them contact with the welfare state that they otherwise might not have, and so less likely to be immediately under the impression that you can live anything like comfortably on less than a quarter of the average wage.
In any case, anyone who actually looks at the proposed tax statements can see that, unsurprisingly, just less than half of overall welfare spending goes on pensions, rather than on the other social security schemes. The statements themselves are meaningless in practice, as all they do is break down the amount someone pays in tax into proportions based on overall government spending. Mr Patel for example obviously doesn't have his £2,438.12 salami sliced in such a way, as that would be ridiculous. In practice his whole £2,438.12 may well have gone towards buying what Del Boy once called a "strident missile", but he and we are never going to know exactly what our tax was spent on. What it does give is an insight, and it does rather bust a few myths: regardless of the overall spend on the EU, overseas aid and welfare other than pensions, broken down it's much harder to argue against. Someone on just about the average wage contributes less than a week's money to someone on JSA (£56.74), and just £28 to the EU. Plenty will still argue that's £28 too much on the latter but as a whole it's hardly going to turn the average person into a member of the Taxpayer's Alliance. Which you suspect was rather what Osborne and friends were hoping for.
Labels: Daily Mail, Daily Mail-watch, politics, tabloid analysis, tax, welfare reform
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Monday, January 30, 2012
Looking for "errors" products?
The things you find when you look for the latest album by the "post-electro" band on Mogwai's Rock Action label:
(The Mail has apparently been tagged as such due to the mistakes in the paper's Kindle edition, but hey, it works both ways.)
(The Mail has apparently been tagged as such due to the mistakes in the paper's Kindle edition, but hey, it works both ways.)
Labels: Daily Mail, Daily Mail-watch, miscellany
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Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Footballers! Put up with racism!
(h/t to both Tabloid Watch and Angry Mob.)
If nothing else, Steve Doughty displays an interesting thought process in his quite remarkable article for the Daily Mail's RightMinds blog (edited by Simon Heffer, who just so happens to be Enoch Powell's biographer). After a couple of weeks in which it's been claimed that Premier League footballers have racially abused each other, Doughty does the sensible thing and relates how massively things have improved even since the 70s and 80s. He writes about how "it has been a long hard road" for black footballers, as indeed it has. He even relates an anecdote about how a man in front of him and his elderly mother at Highbury (before Arsenal moved to the Grove) racially abused Kanu, afterwards turning round and apologising for letting such an unacceptable sentiment just "slip" out.
An indication to how after all this there's a bizarre conclusion is in the aside about John Terry, accused of calling Anton Ferdinand a "fucking black cunt". Terry's explanation is that he was in fact saying to Ferdinand, after a confused encounter, that he didn't say he was a "fucking black cunt", although it seems Ferdinand hadn't realised in the first place Terry had said anything of the sort. According to Doughty, that Terry might have said such things is not that surprising "given Terry's general level of conduct". I'm not a Chelsea fan, but the newspapers have for a while now seemed to have it in for Terry: tales of him urinating at the bar in a club, showing businessmen round Stamford Bridge for a fee, the outrageous entrapment of his father and finally the more than possibly untrue story of his affair with Vanessa Perroncel would rile anyone. Even if all of these accusations were true, it's fatuous to claim that they make the allegations of racism more likely.
Having then set out how much worse things used to be, and how there are also "worse things to complain about", Doughty's advice to any players racially abused is to "put up with it and get on with the game". Yes, Patrice Evra, you should put up with opposing players repeatedly calling you a "nigger"; after all, those who blazed a trail before you had to. As for you Anton, well, you didn't even know about Terry's comments before you heard about it later, so what's the problem? Of all the absurd arguments to make, this has to be one of the most ridiculous. The sheer fact that it was fans who were so vociferous about Terry's alleged comments gives the lie to the idea that players, knowing the progress that has been achieved, should now keep quiet. The obvious truism is that if the players themselves are treating each other in such a way, then it hardly sets an example to the fans. All the more reason for players not to tolerate it.
Understandably, the Show Racism the Red Card campaign is "appalled". Leroy Resenior, who works for the campaign, put it far more brutally when asked about the situation in general:
Quite.
If nothing else, Steve Doughty displays an interesting thought process in his quite remarkable article for the Daily Mail's RightMinds blog (edited by Simon Heffer, who just so happens to be Enoch Powell's biographer). After a couple of weeks in which it's been claimed that Premier League footballers have racially abused each other, Doughty does the sensible thing and relates how massively things have improved even since the 70s and 80s. He writes about how "it has been a long hard road" for black footballers, as indeed it has. He even relates an anecdote about how a man in front of him and his elderly mother at Highbury (before Arsenal moved to the Grove) racially abused Kanu, afterwards turning round and apologising for letting such an unacceptable sentiment just "slip" out.
An indication to how after all this there's a bizarre conclusion is in the aside about John Terry, accused of calling Anton Ferdinand a "fucking black cunt". Terry's explanation is that he was in fact saying to Ferdinand, after a confused encounter, that he didn't say he was a "fucking black cunt", although it seems Ferdinand hadn't realised in the first place Terry had said anything of the sort. According to Doughty, that Terry might have said such things is not that surprising "given Terry's general level of conduct". I'm not a Chelsea fan, but the newspapers have for a while now seemed to have it in for Terry: tales of him urinating at the bar in a club, showing businessmen round Stamford Bridge for a fee, the outrageous entrapment of his father and finally the more than possibly untrue story of his affair with Vanessa Perroncel would rile anyone. Even if all of these accusations were true, it's fatuous to claim that they make the allegations of racism more likely.
Having then set out how much worse things used to be, and how there are also "worse things to complain about", Doughty's advice to any players racially abused is to "put up with it and get on with the game". Yes, Patrice Evra, you should put up with opposing players repeatedly calling you a "nigger"; after all, those who blazed a trail before you had to. As for you Anton, well, you didn't even know about Terry's comments before you heard about it later, so what's the problem? Of all the absurd arguments to make, this has to be one of the most ridiculous. The sheer fact that it was fans who were so vociferous about Terry's alleged comments gives the lie to the idea that players, knowing the progress that has been achieved, should now keep quiet. The obvious truism is that if the players themselves are treating each other in such a way, then it hardly sets an example to the fans. All the more reason for players not to tolerate it.
Understandably, the Show Racism the Red Card campaign is "appalled". Leroy Resenior, who works for the campaign, put it far more brutally when asked about the situation in general:
My son is a footballer and he has not experienced racism on the pitch, but he is of mixed heritage. Those who say that black players have to toughen up haven't got a clue and shouldn't be the ones our kids listen to.
Quite.
Labels: Daily Mail, Daily Mail-watch, football, John Terry, racism, racism rows, sport, Steve Doughty
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Thursday, June 23, 2011
Paul Dacre must die!
It's always nice being surprised. Just when you think those behind this nation's tabloids couldn't be any more hypocritical, pathetic or cowardly, along comes the legal threat from the Daily Mail to Kevin Arscott, blogger at Angry Mob. Two years ago he wrote a furious post on an atypical piece of Mail immigration dog-whistling which took what was a heart-warming story on the number of babies treated on a ward in Chelsea and Westminster hospital and turned it into an example of how NHS services were being exploited by foreigners, while also expressing horror at the number of mothers who themselves had been born abroad even if they were British citizens or legally resident here.
By the standards of swear blogging (including some of my own angrier responses to Mail articles), it was fairly tame stuff. Arscott wrote:
Thanks to Google's wonderful algorithms, his post somehow became (and remains, for now) the second result when you search for Paul Dacre. Whether or not Dacre was Googling his own name (doubtful, considering his aversion to the internet) or he was simply alerted to it by an underling, it seems that he was enraged enough by Kevin's impertinence to set the Mail's lawyers after him. As Unity points out, it's apparent that nothing he wrote is either libellous or defamatory; it's simply abuse, nor is it similar to yesterday's case where a man in Northern Ireland was convicted of an offence after writing on Facebook that a DUP MP should "get a bullet in the head". Arscott merely hopes Dacre dies a slow and painful death, not the most pleasant thing to say, but by considering the depths some on the internet sink to it's incredibly tame.
The Mail's lawyers must have known that the chances of winning any case for defamation on something so slight were minute; that almost certainly wasn't their aim, however. Just through sending their threatening email to Angry Mob's UK based hosting company they will have counted on them caving in immediately, thanks to the notorious Demon ruling and successive EC directives, or demand that he take it down himself or else they'd terminate his account for breach of their terms of service. They did the second, and like myself when faced by threats from Schillings over Alisher Usmanov and Craig Murray, he's removed the post for now.
It is remarkable though, isn't it, that the editor of the very newspaper which has so fiercely campaigned against super-injunctions now resorts to the use of solicitors over something so unbelievably petty: he doesn't want an affair or something embarrassing about his private life hidden away, he just wants someone being nasty about him on the internet to feel his wrath. The editor of a newspaper that repeatedly attacks those whom it thinks have risen above their station, whether it be through a perceived lack of class or for "outraging decency", who feels so self-concious about the second Google result for his name being something that isn't entirely adulatory. An editor who according to numerous accounts treats his staff in the typical tabloid fashion, where they ask each other whether they've been "double-cunted" that day, having been called a cunt twice in one sentence by a man who dedicates page after page to why-oh-whying over the supposed decline of standards, dares to send in expensive briefs over a 2-year-old post which doesn't even begin to lower itself to such name-calling.
Mr Dacre, if you or your solicitors happen to come across this, I too hope that you die a slow and painful death and that people queue up to shit on your grave. It won't even begin to make up for the shit you've been forcing down the throats of the English public for the last 19 years.
By the standards of swear blogging (including some of my own angrier responses to Mail articles), it was fairly tame stuff. Arscott wrote:
I hope Paul Dacre dies a slow and painful death and that people queue up to shit on his grave.
Thanks to Google's wonderful algorithms, his post somehow became (and remains, for now) the second result when you search for Paul Dacre. Whether or not Dacre was Googling his own name (doubtful, considering his aversion to the internet) or he was simply alerted to it by an underling, it seems that he was enraged enough by Kevin's impertinence to set the Mail's lawyers after him. As Unity points out, it's apparent that nothing he wrote is either libellous or defamatory; it's simply abuse, nor is it similar to yesterday's case where a man in Northern Ireland was convicted of an offence after writing on Facebook that a DUP MP should "get a bullet in the head". Arscott merely hopes Dacre dies a slow and painful death, not the most pleasant thing to say, but by considering the depths some on the internet sink to it's incredibly tame.
The Mail's lawyers must have known that the chances of winning any case for defamation on something so slight were minute; that almost certainly wasn't their aim, however. Just through sending their threatening email to Angry Mob's UK based hosting company they will have counted on them caving in immediately, thanks to the notorious Demon ruling and successive EC directives, or demand that he take it down himself or else they'd terminate his account for breach of their terms of service. They did the second, and like myself when faced by threats from Schillings over Alisher Usmanov and Craig Murray, he's removed the post for now.
It is remarkable though, isn't it, that the editor of the very newspaper which has so fiercely campaigned against super-injunctions now resorts to the use of solicitors over something so unbelievably petty: he doesn't want an affair or something embarrassing about his private life hidden away, he just wants someone being nasty about him on the internet to feel his wrath. The editor of a newspaper that repeatedly attacks those whom it thinks have risen above their station, whether it be through a perceived lack of class or for "outraging decency", who feels so self-concious about the second Google result for his name being something that isn't entirely adulatory. An editor who according to numerous accounts treats his staff in the typical tabloid fashion, where they ask each other whether they've been "double-cunted" that day, having been called a cunt twice in one sentence by a man who dedicates page after page to why-oh-whying over the supposed decline of standards, dares to send in expensive briefs over a 2-year-old post which doesn't even begin to lower itself to such name-calling.
Mr Dacre, if you or your solicitors happen to come across this, I too hope that you die a slow and painful death and that people queue up to shit on your grave. It won't even begin to make up for the shit you've been forcing down the throats of the English public for the last 19 years.
Labels: abuses by tabloids, bloggocks, Daily Mail, Daily Mail-watch, legal threats, Mail-watch, Paul Dacre
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Monday, May 16, 2011
Anything else going on apart from...?
"It's been a week where you sit there thinking, is there anything else going on in this country apart from a bunch of z-list celebrities having sex with each other?"
So asked Ian Hislop, in what was to be the last episode of Have I Got News for You to feature Angus Deayton as host. It was also the same week in which Ulrika Jonsson said that she had been sexually assaulted by a well-known television presenter, who was inadvertently named by Matthew Wright shortly afterwards. The past week has seen a very similar situation, albeit it slightly hampered by how we're not supposed to know who some of those z-list celebrities are.
If nothing else, you have to hand it to the tabloid press: it often accuses the supposedly more serious-minded broadcasters and papers of hypocrisy on the grounds that they more or less duplicate their coverage, albeit under the guise of poking fun or discussing the potential implications for press freedom. There's been no such back-biting this time, for the reason that they've been amazingly successful in turning what have been only the latest incremental development in privacy principles into an issue of freedom of speech so vital that the prime minister has intervened on more than one occasion to declare his unease. Under the banner of "super-injunctions", almost none of which the recently issued orders have actually been, they've campaigned vigorously for their right to print more or less what they like about prominent individuals and what they might have been up to, invoking morality, censorship, democracy and almost anything else they think might win more supporters to their cause. Helped along by social networks and the difficulty of removing information once it's out in the wild on the internet, as well as a growing feeling, especially among those who live their lives online and hide very little about themselves from anyone who cares enough to look, almost no actual attention has been paid to the details of the cases themselves, the way the tabloids have personally fought the injunctions, or indeed to just how open they've been about why they really want to return the the height of "bonk" journalism as practised back in the late 80s.
Indeed, just how limited the general debate has been was showcased on Newsnight on Friday, where Hugh Grant and Charlotte Harris faced off against Helen Wood and Fraser Nelson. Grant, fresh from bugging a News of the World journalist, came across exactly you suspect as the tabloids would like: outraged that anyone should know absolutely anything about him without his express permission. Much as I find the argument that if you don't want to end up on the front page of a newspaper you shouldn't sleep with prostitutes to be self-serving in the extreme, Grant did his best to prove it, arrogant throughout while attempting at times to play the victim, demanding Nelson to condemn certain practices which he had never condoned. Charlotte Harris, who must be much more convincing in court than she has been in any of her innumerable television appearances, gave her questionable and limited legal analysis, while Fraser Nelson, who despite always looking incredibly pleased with himself seemed to be ignorant of many of the details of the recent cases. Then there was Wood, called on just twice during the entire programme, who looked distinctly uncomfortable throughout.
She wasn't helped by a quite incredible second report from Kate Williams, which happily alleged that injunctions were returning us to the Victorian era where rich men could do as they please and the women were left voiceless, as it galloped through over a century of sexual history in a couple of minutes. Solipsistic doesn't quite adequately describe it, and poor old Helen was so confused that she clearly hadn't quite grasped what the sexual revolution was when asked whether it had worked for her. Considering she was on Newsnight talking about working as a high class escort, and indeed has been paid a considerable sum having sold her story vis-a-vis Wayne Rooney, even if she can't identify another "high profile" male she performed sex acts on, it's hardly resulted in her penury and exclusion from society, referred to as a tart and hooker in the same press she made a deal with or not.
Just how potentially misled we've been by the self-serving reports in the tabloids, gobbled up and regurgitated whole by the rest of the media is demonstrated by the interim judgement in the case involving Imogen Thomas and the anonymous, although widely named footballer. Contrary to Thomas's (literal) sob story of how her name's been run through the mud despite not ever wanting to sell her story, Mr Justice Eady relates the footballer's side of events. According to him, the whole thing appears to have been a set-up between her and the Sun, where she demanded to meet the player on two separate occasions at different hotels, both times asking for money with the obvious implicit threat being that otherwise she'd sell her story. Each time it seems the paper was waiting to take pictures of their arrivals: if the player paid up, then she got her money and the paper still had the story with no evidence that Thomas herself had been involved; if he didn't, then she would presumably have been reimbursed by the Sun. The footballer additionally says that rather than the six-month long relationship Thomas claims, they had only met three times between September and December last year. While that hasn't been contradicted by Thomas's representatives, she did later deny that she'd either asked for money or had "caused" the Sun's initial report last month.
While Eady is only presenting the case as it currently stands before any trial, the footballer's side of the story is all too plausible. It also fits with the pattern that rather than most of the injunctions being issued after individuals getting wind of a story or being contacted prior to publication, there is often also an element of blackmail involved, as there was in the controversial ruling where Eady issued a contra mundum injunction, as well as in that involving Zac Goldsmith. Eady, clearly at pains, goes on to point out despite much of the comment that the current process has been built around two major rulings by the House of the Lords, with four even more recent cases where the Lords refused permission to appeal (paragraph 21). Moreover, as he writes, in cases where blackmail is either alleged or where it looks to have conceivably been involved, anonymity has been previously given as a "matter of public policy". It's only now, when all the details have not even begun to be made public that this has been questioned.
Damningly, as Eady goes on, the Sun's representatives didn't even attempt to argue that any story would be in the public interest. Instead they simply claimed that Thomas's rights to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights were being denied by the footballer's "reasonable expectation of privacy". Worth quoting in full are the two final paragraphs of his ruling:
On the evidence before me, as at 14 and 20 April, I formed the view that the Claimant would be "likely" to obtain a permanent injunction at trial, if the matter goes that far. As I have said, it remains uncontradicted. The information is such that he is still entitled to a "reasonable expectation of privacy" and no countervailing argument has been advanced to suggest that the Article 10 rights of the Defendants, or indeed of anyone else, should prevail. There is certainly no suggestion of any legitimate public interest in publishing such material.
Moreover, in so far as Ms Thomas wishes to exercise her Article 10 right by selling her life story, she is entitled to do so, but only subject to the qualification that she is not thereby relieved of any obligation of confidence she may owe, or free to intrude upon the privacy rights of others: see e.g. McKennitt v Ash, cited above, at [28]-[32] and [50]-[51]. In so far as there are any conflicts of evidence or of recollection between her and the Claimant, it will be for the court to resolve them at the appropriate time. I will discuss with counsel whether it would be appropriate to order a speedy trial for that purpose.
This more than rebuts Thomas's claim afterward that she was being denied the opportunity to defend herself: if she wishes at length to contradict the footballer's version of events, then she can and hopefully will, albeit without naming him.
If this latest ruling were the exception to the rule, then the campaign waged over the past few weeks would be worthy of support. As previously argued, some injunctions have been questionable in their sweeping nature, but far too often as the Guardian pointed out they've been confused with our libel laws, which are currently under review. Despite having emitted such sound and fury, in many of the cases the tabloids don't even pretend that the public interest will be genuinely served by their serving up of the celebrity shags of the week; instead they make the highly dubious argument that it's such sensationalism and gossip that has enabled them to provide other journalism and campaigns which have benefited the wider public. Deprived of them, they'd wither on the vine and die, especially now as the internet has so eaten into their market.
Even in this time of declining circulations, the Mail sells over 2 million copies a day while the Sun clocks in at just under 3 million. Neither have suffered the massive falls of their competitors, and both will continue to be printed for a long time to come. They might fear the effect of kiss 'n' tells being completely choked off, yet even under the most extreme reading of Eady's latest ruling it seems laughable that every z-list celeb will be lining up for an injunction to cover up their dalliances. As morally (and hypocritically) outraged as the tabloid editors and long-time hacks undoubtedly are by the turn of events, it's cover as much over the phone-hacking scandal as it is an attempt to provoke David Cameron into doing something about it. What's more, the ultimate victory has been in making everyone delve into this world of who's shagging who, to make those of us who'd rather just let them get on with it have to dive into the depths of the "privacy" debate. Where Orwell once wrote of the decline of the English murder, so too they want to forestall the decline of the English affair, and they'll try everything in their power to do so.
Labels: Daily Mail, human rights act, injunctions, Mail-watch, media analysis, morality, politics, privacy, privacy law, Scum-watch, Sun-watch, super-injunctions
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