Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Ooh look, she looks a bit like this doesn’t she?

It's a new kind of journalism for the new millennium. Hold your heads up high, Fourth Estate, for you have dug deep to reveal the truth of the world to your ever-grateful readers. Sure, it's been hard and you've had to battle against the forces waged against you to get to the facts, but when you were an idealistic journalism student all those years ago, I bet you were thinking to yourselves: Fuck the Pulitzer, fuck the awards, fuck actually reporting stuff; I just want to look at a picture of a celebrity woman and then say, hilariously, that she looks a bit like someone else. That's what I want to do with my career: that's what's really going to bring me happiness and a sense of real career fulfilment.

Yes, it's the Mail of course, though they didn't start this nonsense. The right place for flimflam like this is those badly-written shitrags you find in the dentist's waiting room, well thumbed through; you know, the ones with coverlines in dayglow orange and yellow, with LOADS OF CAPITAL LETTERS and exclamation marks, and dribbling twits tapping away at unfunny picture captions with big circles around tiny pimples or blemishes on women's faces, as if that's the most important fucking thing in the entire world. Ooh no! Here's a woman with a pimple! Fucking hell, she hasn't got a pimple, has she? Have the police been informed? Has she been arrested and extraordinarily rendered off to Diego Garcia for a spot of waterboarding to teach her a lesson? How dare a celebrity be a human being!

How can you take the Mail's political coverage seriously when half their output consists of sniggering playground insults aimed at celebrity women? Talk about Gordon Brown's 'big tent', the Mail's is even bigger. On the one hand you have hatred of immigrants with skewed statistics, then there are cretinously stupid columnists who can't actually think or write properly, and then there's some poor work experience kids locked away in a tin shack writing utter cobblers photo captions about how some bird off the telly looks like some other bird off the telly, and how we're supposed to give a flying fuck about it.

This should be when newspapers come into their own. The world is in crisis. Things are going catastrophically and spectacularly wrong. The right analysis now and that will improve the credibility of the brand for years to come: look at how Pearson shares are rallying this week, for example.

The Mail, on the other hand, shrugs its shoulders and says: Well, that's a bit complicated for us. We'd rather just slag off some women because then we get more international web traffic from people googling celebrities' names. Sure, it makes us look like a bunch of powder-puff pricks who haven't got a hope in hell of understanding the financial crisis, but look! We've had loads of clicks on the Madonna story and it was top of the google searches! Eh! Good for us!

So while the markets go into meltdown, Barack Obama trounces the Mail's preferred candidate John McCain in the presidential debate and Oxfam reports that nearly a billion people are on the brink of starvation, the Mail brings you the real news that's really important:

Keeley Hawes turns into the creepy clown from Ashes To Ashes

There's a picture of the actress and the character. She looks nothing fucking like it. Differences I spotted:

1. She's a woman, he's a man.
2. He has a giant white hat, she doesn't.
3. She's wearing a dress, he's wearing a clown costume.
4. She's wearing women's makeup, he's wearing clown makeup.
5. They're completely fucking different.

I imagine the conversation in Mail Towers goes like this:

"Ooh look, she's a bit pale! Bitch! Fucking slag. Who does she look like? Someone really pale - a polar bear, a ghost? Hang on, what about the clown in Ashes to Ashes? That's pale, and it's the TV show she's in!"

"Yeah but she doesn't look anything like it"

"Fuck that, let's go for it!"

And so we have:

It's a far cry from the tight lycra and Eighties perm Keeley Hawes sports as DI Drake on Ashes To Ashes.
With her ghostly white face, bright red lips and dramatic eye make-up, the actress bore a striking resemblance to the Clown - the mysterious figure who often appears in the background of scenes.

A 'striking resemblance' in the sense of 'nothing like it in the bloody slightest'.

As ever, with these showbiz stories, readers are actually allowed to criticise the poor workies who slave away for little or no cash to stitch together the dreadfully bollocks captions and stories - unlike £700,000 a year columnists, who are protected from any serious criticism by web moderators who refuse to permit any negative comments - and so they, like me, are rather baffled by the story:

She looks beautiful...and as to suggest she was "wise" to go with a shimmering black puffball dress as opposed to full on clown clothing. Because I'm sure as she was getting ready for the night she was saying to herself.."Gee, should I go for the full on clown look, or just my make-up?"
How ridiculous.
- Ashley, Calgary, Canada, 16/10/2008 1:33

You said it.

She looks gorgeous. All these negative comparisons of women are growing tiresome. Meg Ryan was compared to the Joker earlier on in the week. It is just cruel and I never see celebrity men given the same harsh comparisons over their makeup choices.
- Isabella, Lancs, 16/10/2008 8:28

Growing tiresome, you say? Then don't look at how the Mail covered the Mobos. Any mention of black music whatsoever? Er, not really, but Mel B looks exactly like Grace Jones, doesn't she? Doesn't she...?

Estelle wins a pair of Mobos but Mel B steals the show with her Grace Jones impression

Er... are we venturing into 'they all look the same' territory here? Because I can't see very much that's similar between them at all.

The dress code seemed to be the shorter and sparklier the better as the stars turned out in force for tonight's Music of Black Origin (MOBO) Awards.
Newly svelte Mel B showed off her fabulously toned body in a skin tight low-cut satin dress. Scary Spice looked the image of Eighties singer Grace Jones as she draped the fabric over her head.

Er... no, not really. Not at all, in my opinion. And it's not even Grace Jones, but Grace Jones's character in the Bond film A View to a Kill. Is there some cock at the Mail whose job it is to look through celebrity photos and say "Oh yes, she looks like X from XX, definitely"? And if so, is that person partially sighted? Well done for inclusiveness and diversity to the Mail (pffft) but Jesus wept, it's a fucking travesty on every level.

Anyway, look, this is the Mail, so let's not forget the real reason we're here:

Will they air the MOWO awards next?
I think not. Because THAT would be politically incorrect.
- Mel, UK, 16/10/2008 2:34

Hooray! A bit of thinly veiled racism at last! It had been such a long time since I'd seen it, as well!

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