PCC & Jan Moir: business as usual?
There will be those, in the wake of the PCC's breezy rejection of 25,000 complaints about Jan Moir's despicable article about Stephen Gately, who think this is some kind of triumph for free speech, and a crushing defeat for the evil Twitter Mob. But that's missing the point entirely.
I don't think most of the thousands who complained about the pitifully nasty column did so in order to clamp down on the freedom of expression so enjoyed by Her Majesty's Press in this country. They didn't do so deliberately, and they didn't do so accidentally, not realising what they were doing, either. I think they were just exercising their own freedom of expression - to say they felt this article had offended them, and that it was patently horrible. Which it was.
We do have self-regulation of the press in this country, and it's right that people may use that route to challenge articles in the press they feel have broken the rules. We can argue about how many teeth the PCC really has, and whether it really wants to use them; and we can speculate, though we'll never really know, that it appears to be a cargo-cult construction that whirrs through the motions in order to produce a verisimilitude of regulation, while simultaneously never giving anything much more than a stinging slap on the wrist to the very worst transgressors. We could point out that it's powerless to punish, even when an offender has stepped right over the line, pulled down its pants and waved its hairy bum in the regulators' faces.
No matter. The PCC exists, and it's not an attack on the freedom of expression for people to choose to use that route to voice their displeasure over what's been written in the press. You could even argue - and call me naive if you want to - that that's precisely what it was established to do in the first place. (Or at the very least, to look like it was established to do. You could say, looking at this article by Malcolm Coles for example, that the PCC appears in this instance to have made a rather bizarre decision, but we can argue about that too.) If you feel that thousands of people complaining to the PCC was an attack on free speech, then by all means call for the dismantling of the PCC itself. Self-regulation is, after all, self-censorship, of a kind. To hell with anyone who has a complaint about what's been in the papers! Free speech trumps everything!
Or... maybe it's a bit more complicated than that. Perhaps there are occasions when free speech doesn't beat everything else. Perhaps there are times when the press - or ordinary citizens who happen not to work for the press - shouldn't say everything they want to say. We can argue about that too. But let's not pretend, as some will, that the Jan Moir affair was an attack on free speech, and that the PCC have bravely defended it. Because that's certainly not what it was.
As a fully paid-up member of the Twitter Mob, I am of course a bloodthirsty idiot who has a pitchfork and flaming torch kept in a steel box by the side of my computer - I simply break the glass in the event of being mildly offended by something. I am just a numbskull, unable to think for myself, an electronic sheep who needs to be whipped up into a frenzy of outrage by those meddlesome troublemongers Fry, Linehan et al. I am but a mere pawn in their empire-building game, taking power away from the responsible journalists who look after it so well and handing it over to the sans-culottes of the so-called Twitterati, who will only break it or something, and who can't really be trusted. And look, they will say, for all the huffing and puffing of people on Twitter, they failed in what they set out to do. It's good for getting people worked up, they will tell you, but not for getting things done.
Or you could look at it another way. You could say that until something as instant as Twitter arrived, it was hard to register the retching disgust at reading something as unpleasant as Moir's vile dribbling, and that it happened to be an efficient medium to express and channel this legitimate anger and frustration with the mainstream media. The protest failed to get Moir the sack, and failed to get the PCC to accept that a transgression had taken place, because this was never going to happen, but maybe that wasn't the point. Was it pointless to protest against the Iraq War, if it then took place? Is there no point in protesting about anything, if you aren't listened to the first time? Protest and dissent isn't a matter of getting your message across and then, because you're right, achieving all your goals and getting home before teatime. Protesting about things is quite often a matter of frustration, of meeting resistance, of those who have the power pulling up the drawbridge and hoping you'll go away. The Twitter anger over Jan Moir wasn't trying to break down the door. It was just politely knocking to let those inside know there was someone outside. These things take time.
The history of these things is already being written. Some will say this result just goes to prove that there's no value in Twitter, or in people other than the clever journalists being allowed to think about things, because the rest of us are silly billies who should just stick our thumbs in our mouths and let the big boys tell us what to think and how to think it. They're wrong. The anger over the Moir column was righteous, and right. Reading it even now still makes me angry. It was right to be angry about it. It's important to let people who have a million readers know that they need to be careful about what they say, because they may well upset a lot of people if they get it wrong, and that doesn't in any way clamp down on freedom of speech.
There are more voices out there now. Time was when it was a one-way conversation between our masters in the Fourth Estate and the rest of us; they shouted and we had to listen. Now, we can shout back, if we like. More voices means more freedom of expression, and more freedom of speech. If the press choose to have self-regulation - and they do - then they should be prepared for the public to call them out when they get things horribly wrong. Perhaps this ruling just shows how irrelevant and pointless the PCC really is. Perhaps it shows that it was never going to give the answers that people wanted. Perhaps the PCC may listen to the consultation with the public it recently opened up, or it may simply shake its head and say, No, we don't want your input, but thanks all the same. In which case, it's not regulation at all, merely a pretence of regulation.
And have we really changed anything, those of us who complained, who tweeted, who wrote annoying blog posts about the Jan Moir saga? Perhaps changing anything wasn't the point. Perhaps by protesting, by announcing we were there at all, that was an achievement in itself. You can be sure that many journalists will simply turn away as if nothing happened; they will write valedictory columns about Moir and doing down the protesters, as Stephen Glover already did some time ago - at a time, incidentally, when the Daily Mail officially said it couldn't comment on the matter because it was waiting for the PCC adjudication.
But I think they would be wrong to do so. This was just a first skirmish. I've said before the tide was coming in - and got roundly slapped round the chops by a crusty old newspaper columnist, in a badly written and poorly researched piece that didn't do him any favours, for doing so, which if anything confirmed my suspicions. I think that kind of recalcitrance indicates something beyond mere contempt for us, the great unwashed, daring to speak out for ourselves on the issues we want to talk about rather than leaving it to our beloved journalists to do it for us, important and vital though real quality journalism is. I think it indicates fear that the tide really is coming in.
This, then, was just the beginning. It may be business as usual, for now, but things are changing. We are on the horizon. Not a mob. Just people, who don't want to be quiet any more.
Year of the Twitterstorm
I'll have to confess something now which I imagine a lot of people who read this blog may well disagree with, but I'm going to say it anyway.
I can't bear reading Roy Greenslade.
I know I'm supposed to read him and enjoy him, but I can't. Not a bit. Well, I think to be fair there was one thing he wrote this year that was quite interesting for a couple of paragraphs, but reading his usual output, to me, is a bit like plodding through a muddy field in high heels - awkward, embarrassing and demoralising, particularly if your dad happens to be driving past.
I can't adequately explain why I should feel this way and I'm sure he's a lovely man who, to most other people interested in the media, is a riveting read. Maybe he's just a much more successful and remunerated version of someone doing the kind of things I do, yet doing them much more articulately and more precisely, with less swearing, and that annoys me. That could be it, but I don't think so.
But reader, I have to tell you that given a choice between Greenslade and, oh I don't know, Clarkson, I'd go for Clarkson every time. I'm bound to agree with most things Greenslade says and disagree with most things Clarkson says; but I know who I'd rather read - Clarkson's words spark off the page and get your brain working - often to think "What the hell do you think you're saying, you donut? But that other thing you said did make me laugh, you naughty little guilty pleasure, you" - while Greenslade's make me feel like repainting the banisters instead. Sad but true, and like I say it's probably jealousy or something. But anyway, I needed to get that off my chest. Don't judge me.
Today, Greenslade ponders the Twitterstorms that have happened this year, with particular reference to the Jan Moir incident. Go there and read it if you must - I'll see you in a few hours' time, and don't blame me if you find yourself with your face in the keyboard, lightly moistened by drool that's lazily slobbered out of your mouth in your narcoleptic state.
Anyway, while I can kind of see some of the points he makes - that Twitterstorms aren't really that marvellous at effecting a great deal of change, and are going to lose their impact over time - I can't agree entirely. I think that the Jan Moir episode was a splendid reaction to being spoonfed the same sort of bollocks repeatedly by the mainstream media time and time again, and having things said that were just plain nasty and beyond the pale. It's a similar case when you look at what happened with the 'Should homosexuals be executed?' discussion on the BBC's Have Your say website. It's not a case of saying: "I don't think anyone should discuss this" - it's a case of asking: Why do you think it's a good idea? Why do you choose to host such poisonous views?
Let me explain a little more clearly - probably less clearly (this won't do my slagging-off of Greenslade any good, if I end up being even less interesting than him; it'll kind of make me look silly. But I'll press on anyway). If you owned a pub, and you found out that that nice group of lads who held a meeting upstairs every week were actually BNP, would you be happy for that to carry on? You might well. But you might not, and it would be your decision as to whether they met there or not. They couldn't say to you: "Wurrrrgh, freedom of speech mate, you've got to let us, or you're a fascist, though hang on a minute, that's something we aspire to, shit, haven't thought this through properly, bugger..." - or they might say exactly that, who knows? The point is, it's your decision. Society at large says you can't, for example, refuse to serve black people into your public bar; but you can do whatever you like with your own space. And it's the ownership and the publicness of the space that I'm talking about.
True freedom to say whatever you want without consequences doesn't really exist, and nor should it in every circumstance. (If you think that's a horrendous thing for a liberal to say, then you won't mind me popping this letter in the post to your boss, next-door neighbour and children's school, saying that you're a convicted paedophile, will you.) There's a balancing act when you're dealing with media with thousands and millions of viewers and readers; there's an implicit responsibility not to offend unless it's in the public interest, and not to offend at all in certain circumstances.
Which brings me to the Gately story. Now his partner has complained to the PCC, this does change things slightly. Whereas before the 25,000 complaints could be summarily dismissed with a pat on our heads and a "Sorry, you just don't understand what the clever adults are up to". They must take it seriously - and how they deal with it will determine what kind of PCC we have. I'm fairly sure what kind of PCC we have, but I'll reserve judgement on this particular occasion until they've decided.
A couple of things need to be added to the Moir story to bring it up to date. Firstly, one of the Sunday red-tops (and I forget which) carried an interview with the other person who was in the holiday home the night Gately died, giving fairly intimate details of the kind of thing which, he claims, went on. Secondly, Stephen Glover wrote in the Mail that that story therefore validated everything Jan Moir had said. I didn't link to it at the time because I didn't want the cunt to get any meagre dribble-through of traffic from here, as he didn't deserve a single page impression, let alone the 25-odd extra he'd have got. Incidentally, at around this time, the Mail refused to give a quote to Gay Times on a story they were running about the Moir debacle, using the defence that the PCC complaint was still going on - funny that didn't seem to matter when Glover sharpened his pencil (or had his butler do it).
But Glover was wrong, and it's worth reiterating a couple of things. Firstly, we have only this one person's view that that's what happened on the fateful night. You might say "Why hasn't Andrew Cowles sued him?" and I'd say "Oh, I don't know, something about being recently bereaved and not wanting lurid accusations to be thrown around in court, something like that". So you have to bear that in mind. But secondly, and most importantly, it still doesn't matter, even if there was a massive gay orgy going on in that holiday home on that night, with dozens of people involved and all sorts of spectacularly filthy things going on: that still doesn't make it right for Moir to have written what she wrote, when she wrote it, being nasty, saying his death was 'not a natural one by any yardstick', not waiting for the corpse to get cold, calling into doubt the involvement of drugs in the death - that was all wrong. Factually incorrect in the case of the doubts about the death, and just plain nasty in the case of the lurid speculation.
Should she be prevented from writing that kind of thing? If it's factually incorrect, then yes. For the nastiness, I don't think so - but if it offends a lot of people, you'd better have a bloody good public interest argument as to why you did it; and if it offends a person directly connected, then you're really in trouble unless you are terrifically sure that what you wrote benefits the wider reading population. Otherwise you end up looking like a pretty vile and malicious individual who has hurt someone at a time of great stress and grief, just to make a bitchy comment or two. Is that all right? My freedom of speech instincts (much as I'll be accused by my usual trolling friends of not having them) begrudgingly say yes, but I wonder how much damage can be done to a brand by causing such widespread offence. Maybe the Mail loved all the attention and hoped it would all die down, which it hasn't. Maybe they don't get it. Maybe they get it and don't care. Who knows.
But as ever with these things, we keep coming back to Trafigura, another Twitterstorm this year. As I wrote the other day, the BBC have taken down an article about Trafigura and toxic waste dumping under huge financial and legal pressure. If you're rich enough to afford top libel lawyers rather than go through the PCC process, you're in a much stronger position. As ever, it's money that really talks when it comes to 'freedom of speech'.
On the one hand, you have people genuinely fighting for the freedom to report, who are being squashed by the libel system and huge corporations who have knowingly poisoned people; on the other, the feeble-minded bastards who do nothing more than say offensive, vicious and disgusting things hide behind the 'freedom of speech' defence and demand the right to be heard without any consequences whatsoever.
Something strikes me about this as being a little bizarre. If we are to have free speech (within certain parameters, and balancing it within the right to privacy) then let's really have it. Otherwise, can we sort out the real bullies and real enemies to freedom before we go around protecting the rights of people like Jan Moir to be vacuous and offensive?
Good things Jan Moir has written
Sometimes as a hand-wringing bleeding heart leftie idiot you find yourself thinking: crumbs, I may have been a bit mean to poor old Jan Moir in the past, calling her a numpty and swearing at her, and so on; perhaps she's not so bad after all. She's a human being, with feelings, and thoughts, and everything like that, at least I'm pretty sure that's the case. Why not look at the positive side of Jan Moir? Surely there must be something she's written that isn't self-harmingly awful?
So that's what I've decided to do. I'm going to focus on her column this week and find something in it that's actually good. Maybe I'll do it every week. Try and sprinkle a bit of happiness around. Prove that bloggers aren't just meanies who try and insult others: we can be kind, generous creatures who are always looking for the best in our fellow writers. What would be so wrong with that?
Now obviously, when looking at this week's Jan Moir outpouring, there is the business of her totally and utterly misguided piece about 'lessons in wifebeating' in which she gets facts wrong, comes to barking mad conclusions, writes badly and generally fucks everything up. To which I say: yes, that's certainly happened, and for a better analysis of that I should point you in the direction of my fellow blogger No Sleep Til Brooklands, who has written an excellent article discussing Moir's litany of failures.
But I'm not here today to look at the bad things in Jan Moir's output. I'm here to show you that there's another side, a witty side, an intelligent side, a fun side; and that it's wrong to portray her as something who gets every single thing wrong that she ever talks about, or is wilfully ignorant of what's going on, or someone who really should be down the JobCentrePlus. All that would be wrong. I'm here to prove that she can do something good.
So here's Jan's nugget of the week. You might say to me: Look, it's like trying to find Maltesers in human shit - but I would reply: no, it's worth doing this. I'm going to find the scraps of good writing in Jan Moir's output, and prove that she isn't all bad. Quite bad, yes. Pretty bad, you could say that. Very bad, well sometimes. But look. Here's the bit I liked:
[Jane Andrews] appeared to have spent most of her time in a muddy graveyard, before checking into a Premier Inn.
Then she was taken away by the police before even having time to enjoy the Freeview TV or the tea and coffee-making facilities.
There we are! See. Reasonable attempt at writing something amusing, there.
(I wouldn't go reading on after that point, mind. Just a friendly warning. You might end up punching your own face or running into a door to try and stop the feelings of revulsion and misery welling up inside you.)
Now let these idiots fade away
It's only been a week since Jan Moir's spectacularly stupid column, but she's tried her best to outdo it today with a spectacularly stupid 'apology' that's more 'je ne regrette rien' than 'mea culpa'.
And no, I'm not linking to it. She got the link-love last week, quite rightly, as everyone wanted to share around the awfulness of what she wrote. But not this week. Go and find it if you want - if you can bear the thought of her web traffic going up by one more number. Last week everyone read her shite, and she claimed few of us did; this week let no-one read her pisspoor excuse of a gritted-teeth apology, and she'll probably imagine the whole world has been delighted by her brilliant words.
But she'll fade away, if we let her, and we should. It's all dying down now. She'll carry on with the same old crap, time after time, but she won't get the attention she so clearly was delighted with. It's time to let her fade away into the mass of other tabloid columnists, some of whom will outdo her for stupidity, for bigotry, for insensitivity in the coming weeks and months. There will be times to call out others when they step over the line. And there will be a chance for the PCC to appear to be anything other than the Wizard of Oz, an impressive front with nothing backing it up. But we'll see whether they decide to have some courage, or wait for the dust to settle and accept the matter has been somehow 'resolved'. I have a fair idea what the answer is.
And farewell to Nick Griffin, too. He's had his week in the sun. People feared he might come across well on Question Time, that he might appear statesmanlike or intelligent and might be able to dodge the questions cleverly. Not really, from the glimpses I've seen so far. He looked shifty, edgy, not particularly bright, and came out with the kind of bigoted shite you'd expect - shite that's not a million miles away from what the tabloids have been printing this week with regard to population growth, of course, or what they regularly print about Muslims, but shite nonetheless. It wasn't a sparkling performance and now the mystique has gone down a little bit.
So it's time for him to fade away, as well. He's been given the 'oxygen of publicity' and he's looked like a fairly crap politician. It's what I'd always suspected. He's not some evil genius who's going to hypnotise the world; he's just a racist who is marginally more clever than most racists. That's all. Just because someone went to Cambridge it doesn't make them Erasmus. To the Oxbridge elites who run our newspapers - and yes, I'm looking at you, The Guardian - it might seem that way, but it isn't.
So let's let them fade away, Griffin and Moir both. They've had their say and now it's time to tell them, with all politeness and respect, to fuck right off. Because there are more important things to detain us between now and the next general election, wars being fought in our name, torture happening in our name. It's easier to focus on something personal, an arsehole like Moir or Griffin, and less easy to focus on something wider, more complex, more detailed; but that doesn't mean that it's impossible. But these two clowns have had their time and have detained us for long enough, I think.
The cargo-cult PCC
The PCC is constructed in such a way that it looks like a regulatory body for the press. It's got letterheaded notepaper and a website and everything. It's even called "the Press Complaints Commission", which might lead some people to think it has something to do with responding to complaints about the press.
What people are becoming increasingly aware of, though, in the wake of the Jan Moir story and its record-breaking volume of complaints, is that it's a bit cargo-cult: it looks like a rough approximation of a regulatory body, and it's quite a good job, but it's never going to do what you want it to do. Hoping for the Press Complaints Commission to investigate press complaints? You might as well sit in a bamboo control tower with coconut earphones waiting for a plane to land on your rubble airstrip. It ain't going to happen.
It's worth looking back re-reading the experience of one person who complained to the PCC to try and sort out what they had seen as a gross inaccuracy. You might not be startled to learn that despite their meticulous case and best of intentions, the newspaper concerned - and you won't be bowled over to know its identity - managed to weasel out of it: specifically, by saying that readers would understand the columnist in question - and you won't be amazed to know who it was - was not stating a fact when they wrote "The fact is".
The PCC has announced that it will politely ask the Daily Mail to make a response to the 21,000 complaints over the Jan Moir atrocity. Yes, that's right, regarding the most complained about newspaper article in history, it's going to ask the Mail to have a free hit at defending itself.
Well, that's jolly tough of them, isn't it? As Sunder Katwala says:
The tone of that offer to write to the Daily Mail is rather deferential - in the "is there anything else you would like to say to us today, Mr Dacre" style of the 1950s television interviewer.
And what punishments await if they don't respond? A stamped foot? A kicked doorstop? A mumbled "Well that's not very sporting, is it?" Or even - and this is probably a censure so great that it won't come to pass - a letter written in a slightly harsh tone, saying that it's not entirely right that they've done what they've done.
Sarah Ditum points out that this is progress, of a sort:
One of the problems with the PCC is its institutionalised refusal to look on accuracy as a responsibility held by newspapers to all their readers, rather than a duty they only have towards the people they choose to write about. That means that the PCC has previously been able to ignore any complaints from a third party, and avoid adjudicating on matters (like Moir’s Gately column) when the harm and offence caused spreads much wider than the direct subjects of the piece.
The only thing to hope is that the 'third-party complaints aren't allowed' policy is now jettisoned by the PCC as going completely against the spirit of genuine self-regulation, but I'm not sure even that is certain. All they are saying is that they'll do it on this occasion. They don't even seem to think that it's a bad policy in the first place. What if a person with no relatives dies and has appalling inaccuracies written about them - is there really no justifiable way that readers who may have been offended by such bad journalism should have their complaints dealt with? Why shouldn't general readers be included in the list of people who can complain, as they are with Ofcom?
Now don't imagine for a moment I'm all for huge censorship of the press. But wanting newspapers to be accurate isn't anti-free speech. There's a difference between saying "I may not like what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it" and "I may not like what you say, particularly when you tell lies about people who aren't rich enough to seek redress through the courts and ruin their lives, but I know that you're trying your best, so we'll let it slide." And please. Jan Moir is hardly Camille Desmoulins. It's not like writing nasty stuff about recently dead pop stars is some kind of search for democratic freedom - indeed, that's precisely why the piece upset so many from right across the political spectrum; it was the sheer superfluousness of it that made it a hundred times worse.
Accuracy is important. Newspapers' opinions do still carry a lot of weight, sadly enough. And it's perfectly possible for polemicists to get all worked up about all kinds of things without having to resort to getting it wrong, or failing to check their facts. Having to be accurate would make the press better, not less free. This isn't about sacking people when they get it wrong; it's about whether it's right to offend thousands of people not in a life-or-death struggle but in a casually horrible article about a dead person who's not around any more to defend themselves. It's about there being some form of redress and some form of regulation over the press, not just a procedure set up by the press itself which allows the escape hatch of a microscopic correction on page 94.
But still, the PCC creaks along. You can't see the matchsticks and Blu-Tack holding it all together, but you just get the suspicion that something isn't quite right. It still looks like a regulatory body, and it's trying - under intense scrutiny - to behave kind of like a regulatory body might do; but there's no suggestion that the Moir case has brought about any soul-searching or questions about whether they're really doing a good job or not. They'll just keep their heads down and hope they can carry on with business as usual once this business has all died down. They might well be right - unless enough people notice, enough people care, and enough people do something to stop them.
Real-life trolls
We've seen marvellous scenes today as Twitter has joined together against the horrific, homophobic, deeply unpleasant article by Jan Moir about Stephen Gately's death. I am delighted to have been a tiny part of it, and hello to all the new readers. I'm not usually this rubbish. Bit of stage fright.
I'd love to think that it would make a difference to complain to the PCC and I certainly wouldn't want to put anyone off doing so - the relevant clauses include privacy, intrusion and accuracy. Let's hope it will. History doesn't bode especially well, though: when the PCC said the Express's reaction to its Dunblane story atrocity was unacceptable, the Express just shrugged its shoulders and said: "What are you gonna do about it?" - and that was the end of that. Perhaps this time that won't happen. Sure, it'll be embarrassing for Paul Dacre, who is a senior player with the PCC and coincidentally also the editor of the Daily Mail; but it's not like they haven't ridden the storm out themselves in the past.
You have to ask why Moir wrote what she did in the first place. Was it prejudice, laziness, being an idiot or just plain trolling? I might even head towards the latter, and I'll explain why: fellow Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn was feted with an award this week, an 'Editorial Intelligence' award if you can believe it for 'polemicist of the year', despite having been caught lying, getting his facts wrong and writing appallingly offensive pieces about gay people, gypsies and immigrants all year long. As Tabloid Watch put it:
It comes after his unreserved apology for falsely claiming most robberies are committed by Eastern Europeans, making up a dog story, claiming £8 billion could pay off a £800 billion debt many times over, stating there are nearly three times more illegal immigrants in the UK than most academic researchers, knowing no offence was given in a conversation he hasn't heard, knowing better than a jury what the outcome of a trial should be when he hasn't attended any of it, claiming someone has been granted asylum when they haven't, attributing an MP to the wrong party, attributing a town to the wrong county, and - of course - mistaking humans for labradors.
And all that's just since the start of September.
There's awards in doing that kind of thing as a columnist - being a real-life troll, a photo-bylined and salaried troll, not patrolling internet sites to try and snipe at other people's views but just to go all-out and be offensive off your own bat. After all, the Mail website will have garnered a whole load of web traffic today and some people might imagine there's no such thing as bad publicity - but I disagree. This has been a terrible backfire for the Mail - they've been shown up to be hopelessly out of date, prejudiced, nasty, disrespectful and disgraceful. This is the bloody 21st century. It's not a question of even 'tolerance' - it's a question of not giving a shit about what other people get up to in the bedroom.
That's where Moir has fallen down. She claims to write what everyone else is thinking, but today everyone else is thinking: "That Jan Moir's pretty nasty and pathetic, isn't she? What the hell did Stephen Gately do to deserve that?"
There's even a Facebook group been set up in response, calling for the article to be withdrawn. In the meantime, the Mail has changed the headline. But it wasn't the headline that was the problem. The headline was only written the way it was because of the content of the story underneath it; it's the actual article that has caused an angry response, not the headline. Changing that won't make a difference.*
Yes, the Mail website will get some traffic, but it's only right and proper to link to the things you talk about, even if you hate them (I sometimes break this rule with Littlejohn and the BNP, but I try to be good really). The only people who will be appalled by what that brand is doing. It's been said before that the Mail can create a toxic environment for brands through the sheer offensiveness of reader comments, but this is one step beyond that: this is offensiveness through the content of its editorial. *update* thanks to Malcolm Coles and RTs on Twitter, adverts have been removed from the article.
That's a whole different matter. Littlejohn is no doubt wiping sweat off his brow (well it's still quite warm in Florida) and thinking: there but for the grace of God. Because it could so easily have been him. But no, he ends the week with an award, whereas it's Jan Moir who's been vilified.
See also (if you haven't seen them already):
Daily Quail: Why there's nothing natural about these gays
Eric the Fish: No matter what they say
If you've got any other suggestions then feel free to mention it in the comments.
* Johann Hari this week warns against complaining on the basis of headlines. He has a point, but headlines are generally reflective of the article beneath them; I think it's only when they're not that the writer can try and claim it's nothing to do with them.
Why there is nothing ‘natural’ about the life of Jan Moir
I was quite surprised this week. Ordinarily, when someone famous dies, it only takes about five minutes for the tabloid attack squad to move in, decide it was their fault and rip apart their life for no reason whatsoever. But Stephen Gately's death seemed to catch the hatemongers on the hop.
Until today. Here's Jan Moir:
Why there was nothing 'natural' about Stephen Gately's death
...except that he died of natural causes, you mean? Jan, though, has recognised her tardiness in sticking the boot into the fresh corpse of Gateley; she's now doing it in advance to other celebrities who might die soon:
Robbie, Amy, Kate, Whitney, Britney; we all know who they are. And we are not being ghoulish to anticipate, or to be mentally braced for, their bad end: a long night, a mysterious stranger, an odd set of circumstances that herald a sudden death.
No, it's not ghoulish at all to expect someone else's death, Jan. You tell yourself that. You cackling witch.
A founder member of Ireland's first boy band, he was the group's co-lead singer, even though he could barely carry a tune in a Louis Vuitton trunk.
He was the Posh Spice of Boyzone, a popular but largely decorous addition.
Keep going, Jan, I don't think you've been unpleasant enough yet. How about turning into Quincy and deciding you know better than the coroner?
Even before the post-mortem and toxicology reports were released by the Spanish authorities, the Gatelys' lawyer reiterated that they believed his sudden death was due to natural causes.
But, hang on a minute. Something is terribly wrong with the way this incident has been shaped and spun into nothing more than an unfortunate mishap on a holiday weekend, like a broken teacup in the rented cottage.
What killed him then, Jan? Being gay?
Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. Let us be absolutely clear about this. All that has been established so far is that Stephen Gately was not murdered.
Er, no, dying from fluid on the lungs is natural and unfortunately does happen to people with congenital heart conditions. It's rare, but it does happen all the time - just not to celebrities. That's probably why Moir doesn't know.
After a night of clubbing, Cowles and Gately took a young Bulgarian man back to their apartment. It is not disrespectful to assume that a game of canasta with 25-year-old Georgi Dochev was not what was on the cards.
Ah, I see. Yes, they were gay, therefore they obviously had sex with him. If that's what you think, Jan, don't be shy. If all gay people are by their very nature promiscuous then just pop up and say it, Jan. No-one will think the less of you. Because no-one could think any less of you.
Gately's family have always maintained that drugs were not involved in the singer's death, but it has just been revealed that he at least smoked cannabis on the night he died.
Nevertheless, his mother is still insisting that her son died from a previously undetected heart condition that has plagued the family.
BECAUSE HE DID, YOU FLAMING FUCKWIT. Tell you what, you do a few years of medical training, order a second postmortem, you carve up the corpse, then you come out with your half-baked "one spliff killed him" bullshit. Otherwise, maybe the people who do it for a living know that they might be talking about...?
For Jan, though, it's not about the one spliff which killed Gately. It's the fact he was gay.
Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.
Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened.
What the fuck do you mean by that? Kevin McGee killed himself after battling with drug addiction - it wasn't anything to do with his civil partnership as that had long since broken up. Is Jan Moir really trying to link drug use with being gay? Or saying that civil partnerships will lead to death? Or what is she trying to do?
Whatever it is, it's more seedy and disgusting than what she claims is to blame for Stephen Gately's death. Someone as decent and ordinary as Gately dies, yet Jan Moir lives. It's just not fair.
Jan Moir: I’m really a bit of a numpty
This doesn't really fall under my Mailwatch remit of politics/ethics, so I'll stick it up here. Don't worry, there's a pot on the boil for the other place in a bit.
Sometimes I wonder if there's really that much of a difference between the professional columnists and we mere amateur so-called 'bloggers'. I'm beginning to think there isn't, or if there is, it's that I'd much rather read a good blogger than one of the pisspoor columnists who siphon silly money out of the national press that could be better used paying journalists to find out about stuff rather than some dunce's wearily predictable loonery. Just my opinion, mind.
And so to Jan Moir, who sticks the knife in lends a consoling word to Zoe Ball, whose husband Norman Cook is apparently in rehab for alcohol addiction. So, a thoroughly nasty time for the woman, she must be desperately unhappy, what shall we do...? Let's slag her off! Hooray!
Ten years ago, Zoe Ball set off for her wedding to DJ Norman Cook in typical she-male style. With a cowboy hat on her head, a cigarette dangling from her lips and a bottle of Jack Daniel's in her hand, she was the poster girl for the nascent ladette movement.
Ah you see, this is an excuse to defrost the cobblers that got written all those years ago about 'ladettes'. Nothing new is being said. Did Zoe Ball want to be a 'poster girl' anyway or was she kind of, you know, just being herself regardless of what she was being called? Apparently not. Women mysteriously alchemised into ladettes because of evil role models like Zoe Ball. Really? Really.
By acting in this manner, these women apparently felt they were truly emancipated; redressing the balance between male and female, fulfilling their potential as human beings with every bottle of beer consumed.
...and there's the strawman. By imagining that that's why people did these things, Jan can dismantle their arguments. But surely people go out and get boozed up because, well, they like it... no? I don't think there's anything to do with 'emancipation' at all. And neither do they. But if Jan says there is, then she can claim it's a wrongful idea. Which it is, because no-one thinks that.
Here comes the next argument:
According to new figures released by the Youth Justice Board, violent offences by young females have risen sharply in recent years. Across the country, girl gangs and shemale bullies are now far more terrifying than their milksop male counterparts, while - unbelievably - violence is the most common reason for young females to be arrested in England and Wales.
And that's Zoe Ball's fault somehow? By going out and having fun, Zoe Ball has made lots of women go out and be violent? Really? Really. But it's bollocks. Men are still much more likely to be the perpetrators - and victims - of violence than women. But now a bit of what you want to read:
Meanwhile, teenage pregnancies are on the increase, alcohol consumption and drug abuse are escalating as girls grow up with no greater ambition than to get bladdered, get pregnant and move into a council house.
Teen pregnancies have gone up a bit - though of course let's remember the figures for pregnancies don't necessarily mean live births. Fuck that though, Moir chucks in another strawman - girls are getting pregnant not because of pisspoor contraceptive advice, but to get a council house. Really? Really. Evidence? No. But I think it's this, therefore it's this. Fair enough Jan, but it's flimsy to say the least.
Of course, no one is blaming Zoe Ball for every fatherless child born or catfight outside the Pink Flamingo. Or the sprawl of drunken girls splattered like guano over British city centres every weekend. Yet I do wonder.
No-one is blaming Zoe Ball, although... well, it can't hurt to lump her in with a general slagging-off of women, especially when she's had a really shit week, can it? I mean, that's fair enough, isn't it?
Don't forget, of course, that a lot of these figures on violence have gone through the filter known as James Slack - for more on his trusty sword of manipulation and general bullshit, see this excellent rebuttal from No Sleep Til Brooklands here. Regardless, what we have here is a splicing together of two very different things - one, slagging off 'ladettes' (and Zoe Ball as some kind of arch leader of those dirty 'shemales'; and two, slagging off kids for having fights and getting pregnant. Is there a real connection or not? The evidence isn't compelling.
The potency and influence of role models on modern society is sometimes exaggerated, but there is no denying that Zoe & Co started something with their glamorous, boozy buccaneering and their profligate ways. So maybe they have moved on, or at least are the recipients of a careful rebranding exercise in sobering up. Yet the legacy they have left behind continues to rise like a sick soufflé.
What legacy? Why? If you want to look at reasons why more boozing and violence is taking place nowadays, you need to look back to the early 1990s, under a Conservative Government (although Labour has done nothing to turn it around) when councils basically couldn't refuse permission for new town-centre pubs, which mushroomed all over every town and city centre in the country. There's an extra reason, but no, let's blame Zoe Ball, 'cheap' alcohol (e.g. poor people can't be trusted to get pissed, whereas everyone else can) and everything else under the sun.
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