Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Prolls

Professional trolls - or "prolls", as I'm inclined to call them now after hearing the term for the first time yesterday - are just bigger, more noticeable versions of those people you get on messageboards or in the comments section of news stories; and rather than doing it just to wind people up, they do it for a living.

Yesterday's article by Andrew Alexander in the Mail which I blogged about here is a classic example of a proll hard at work. Smugly revelling in his lack of research, preferring to light his pipe and 'ruminate' rather than actually check that what he's saying is true, there's not much more than a cigarette paper - or indeed an x-ray with an ominous shadow on it - between Alexander's "Smoking's not so bad, you know" and the kind of trolling absurdity you get underneath almost every story nowadays. Indeed, the pride in ignorance brings to mind those BBC Have Your Say types so splendidly taken down over at Speak You're Branes.

I've said this before in the wake of Jan Moir's miserable attack on Stephen Gately and no doubt I'll say it again, before I manage to fully form the argument: but I think the behaviour of certain columnists and professional writers is little better than that of trolls. But these prolls are seen as being intelligent, useful, articulate; their trolling nonsense is elevated from the level of 'some bloke on the internet trying to wind other people up' to Polemicist of the Year, in the case of Richard Littlejohn.

And there's nothing wrong with being a good polemicist, of course; it's just that Littlejohn, Phillips, Alexander, Hitchens (P) and Liddle - and many others - seem to get things wrong quite often. By which I mean those pesky facts and evidence they need to back up their arguments. We've seen this week Melanie Phillips claim that Alan Titchmarsh is a 'distinguished climate-related scientist' to back up her 'climate change is all a big con' line. We've seen Littlejohn barking about immigrants staying the country because they've got a cat to back up his "Gorblimey, don't those immigrants get a good deal innit?" argument - except that wasn't the case; or laughing at the names of someone's children in a rolling-eyes at the state of Bonkers Britain rant - except they weren't children at all, they were pets. Which a simple bit of research would have discovered - yet the vastly salaried journalist Littlejohn (catchphrase "You couldn't make it up!") apparently decided he couldn't be bothered to do much more research than reading the Daily Mail.

Then there's Liddle. One of the arguments I read this week was from Kwasi Kwarteng, who said of Wiltshire-based Liddle's woefully inaccurate diatribe about London street crime:

You may not admire Mr Liddle's style of writing, nor agree with his views, but that does not mean that he should be sacked from the magazine for which he writes, as some have suggested. It is his job to provoke. And that is exactly what he has done.

I'm all for freedom of speech, of course, and I know it's Liddle's job to provoke - it's certainly not his job to research things properly, as we've seen. But provocation with incorrect and misleading facts behind it - which will be picked up like a baton by the BNP and other extremists as if it's gospel - is a fairly smelly thing, which Kwarteng signally failed to acknowledge throughout his entire article. You can try and give Liddle some wriggle-room by saying: Sure, he didn't research anything properly, he didn't get it right, he made assumptions based on his own prejudices rather than evidence, he said something which, because it was published by the Spectator will now be used as evidence by the far-right that even the mainstream press are saying the stuff they've been banging on about for ages, but hey, the 'goat curry' bit was funny, wasn't it?

But no, it wasn't funny. Not even funny. That last line of defence for prolls - that they're entertaining - doesn't stand up as being good enough if they're fuelling, through ignorance or on purpose - the flames of hatred. Once published by a leading newspaper or magazine, poisonous views and misleading stories are used by those who have real hatred and real venom to make their case. We saw that earlier this year with an English Defence League video which used Daily Mail and Daily Express stories and headlines to make its point. That's why it matters whether you get things right or wrong. A lot of readers will shrug their shoulders and take what you say with a pinch of salt; others will use your prestige - that fading prestige of publications like the Mail and Express and possibly even Spectator after this week's nocturnal emission by Liddle, but prestige nonetheless - and use it as proof that their hatred is right.

The irony is, of course, that we mere bloggers on the internet are the ones who are accused of being the trolls. I don't think that's quite the case. In fact, I'll take the internet trolls over the prolls any day of the week. At least trolls don't pretend to be anything other than trolls; they don't make lofty claims to be polemicists or to defend their role as being anything other than their right to a rant. Which everyone does have, of course. It's just that doing it underneath a banner of an official news source gives your rant a weight it wouldn't otherwise have; it implies a responsibility to get things right, because people will use what you say in their arguments, and sometimes, if you're not careful, you will give ammunition to some fairly despicable people.