The hangover
Yesterday it was me who was hung over - a few too many beers while avoiding the election debate (and the 'arseoisie') while on a night out in Bristol. But a look at today's front pages makes me think it's our friends in the inky press who are hung over. The stories are lame, unappetising, bland. Dry white toast news. They overdid it a bit the other day in the Get Clegg frenzy, and now the dead-tree screamsheets are licking their wounds, nursing a headache and feeling pretty sorry for themselves.
So much has been said already about the astonishing events of Thursday. But read Tabloid Watch for a good summary, and this article by Kevin Marsh from the BBC College of Journalism, who compares and contrasts the tabloid frenzy with the built-in fairness rules of broadcast:
I am writing this after reading most of this morning's election press online and while watching party news conferences and interviews on live and continuous TV - I cannot reconcile the two.
They are glimpses of different universes.
I think the problem, the terrifying problem for the dead-tree press and the 'Murdochracy', is that this election has been electrified by the television debates in a way that no-one could see coming; the expectations were that smooth operator David Cameron would blow everyone away, but it hasn't quite worked out like that. So now the press are reduced to trying to tell you that what you saw on television wasn't what you saw: yesterday David Cameron's cheerleaders on the news-stands claimed he had clearly won the second debate, despite viewers not seeing it that way. Who do I believe, my own eyes, or what someone else is telling me I saw with my own eyes? Newspapers have been reduced to someone standing in front of you while you're watching a film or a football match, telling you what to think about it; all you want to do is shoo them out of the way - you can see for yourself.
Today, then, in the wake of all that, and seeing that a four-pronged attack on the Lib Dem leader failed to produce a significant dent to his popularity, the papers have crawled back into their kennels. The Daily Mail has written so much about Lib Dems recently that even their own readers are starting to wonder if he's the messiah; today they go back to an old classic, and a time-honoured bogeyman: the wheelie bin.
There is a 'Cameron in surge past Clegg' attempt on the right-hand side*, but largely this front page is about bins. Let's get panicked about teh evilz of recycling, and it's a shoddy shambles of a campaign that they've been cranking on about for an awfully long time (see 'Bin there done that', 'Oh fucking grow up' and 'It's wheelie bin a shit campaign' for the backstory). You could be forgiven for thinking, as this blogger did, that there are more important issues in the world than wheelie bins, but not if you're the Mail. When in doubt, go for the bins! If making Clegg the bogeyman didn't work, then bring back one you know and love: the horrors of having to sort out your rubbish and wheel bins out to the kerb! Wasn't it better when we had massive dustbins to lug around, or you could just chuck your bin bags all over the place and get them ripped up by foxes? Those were the days!
And, yet again, from the newspaper which criticised Clegg (in 2002) for saying that the British had some kind of obsession with the Second World War, is a massive advertisement for a Second World War 13-DVD set. Obsessed much?
The Telegraph, while talking about the election, is much more sombre.
Though it still can't resist a bit of a scare story about how a hung parliament will cost 'you' £5,000 (it won't, you'll be utterly unsurprised to hear). It's very downbeat though, almost waving the white flag for their chosen candidates. That massive front page the other day about a rather unexciting expenses story on Clegg which had been blown up and puffed up well beyond what it actually was seems such a long time ago already. This is more gloomy, reflective, still trying to scare you away from a Conservative overall majority, of course, but starting to wonder if that's really going to happen, preparing themselves and their readers for the possibility of Tory defeat, or at the very least a lack of Tory convincing success. Which for me makes the 'relax... it's going to be a beautiful day' all the more delightful a juxtaposition. But that is a long, long way away and I am sure that a lot of things may change.
The Express, meanwhile, have abandoned politics altogether and have gone for the ashpocalypse.
The trouble is, what are readers going to think about that front-page headline? Are they going to think: "Yesterday you told me that David Cameron had won the TV debate, when most people I'm talking to, even among Conservative Party supporters, think he didn't win it. So why am I meant to believe this stuff today?" - or are we meant to think that Express readers are credulous ninnies thinking "Oh, OK Mr Express, whatever you say!" - who knows.
The Sun, meanwhile, has turned its fire from Lib Dem to Labour. Having failed to sink the Clegg battleship, they're now trying to blow Gordon Brown out of the water. Oh, the irony, the irony, of the DON'T STOP DECEIVIN' headline, on the Sun of all places; the double irony of attacking someone else for printing lies; the triple irony of attacking someone for saying that printing lies is OK. Maybe it isn't a headline at all, but the Sun sub-editors misunderstood the memo they'd been sent.
It's the Mirror I feel for most in all of this really. They've had to try and convince their readers that Gordon Brown has been performing best in the TV debates, when even the staunchest of Labour supporters must have suspected that wasn't really the case. They've also got to try and reconcile the fact that their chosen candidate is being abandoned by many people on the political left for someone else. No wonder they can't be bothered to keep that pantomime going this weekend, preferring instead to tell you that, in a television programme, something will happen, and it will be on TV. Thank goodness for that exclusive! Of course, they could well be judging - accurately perhaps - that many readers are fed up with the election now, and simply want the vote to happen as soon as possible. Even so, you could have hoped there might have been some kind of news-style story to present, instead of a "Wuurghgghh, telly" effort. No...? No, apparently not. Sigh.
So are they running out of steam, or are we? Have they decided that we've made up our minds and there's no point in trying to influence us any more? Or are they redoubling their efforts for fresh salvoes to be launched in the direction of their opponents next week? I would imagine it's probably the latter - but the good news is I'm on holiday next week, and I intend to have no contact with newspapers, or television, or anything. Which makes me very lucky, and means you're going to have to suffer, I'm afraid.
* I don't think they're referring to the poll on their website which was pulled down when it showed Nick Clegg winning, then reinstated with a sudden and mysterious lead for David Cameron, but you never know.
Cleggicide special
At the last general election, the Liberal Democrats pursued a strategy of 'decapitation' against the Tories. It failed. Now it's the Lib Dems who are under attack from those who would seek to decapitate their hopes by killing off their leader's credibility; however, this time it isn't their political rivals in the main who are launching the assault, but the dead-tree press.
Whether the Mail, Telegraph, Sun and Express are doing this because they think it's right; or because they want to ally themselves with the Conservatives in return for favours somewhere further down the road if they are successful; or because the Conservatives have fed them these stories to attack the rival they fear could see their support crumble, and the newspapers have agreed; or because these papers have nailed their inky colours to the mast of the Good Ship Tory and don't want to be made to look like mugs for getting it wrong; or for any combination of these is a bit of a mystery for we mere punters perusing the papers at the news-stand or seeing their efforts online.
But what's clear is the overwhelming impression you get from it all. As I said yesterday, there's a whiff of desperation, of hysteria, of readers being told that they are wrong and that they should jump into line, rather than reflecting their mood and writing for them. Is it crossing a line from seriously covering the election and putting the Lib Dems under the correct amount of scrutiny, to an out-and-out "Get Clegg" campaign? If it has crossed that line, that might reflect badly on those who are doing it. We've seen this level of personal attack before, against Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot, but that was during a time when there were fewer competing sources of information, when newspapers had more clout - and more readers - and when the internet wasn't there to hold the scrutineers up to scrutiny, watching them, watching us.
Are these front pages, then, the death throes of our inky friends at the national newspapers, desperately trying to wind themselves up for one last big swing at power, doing everything they can to bring the Conservatives to power, hoping they might get something in return one day somewhere along the line (or possibly even having been promised something in return)? Who's listening? And is there a danger that this could all backfire, and create a recalcitrance among their readers, who are fed up with being told what they should and shouldn't think?
If you look at the individual attacks, it's perhaps only the Telegraph's that appears to be a story at all - and even then, it's a massive amount of coverage for money that has been dealt with and accounted for, and where there is no suggestion that the money was 'resting in the account' of Clegg, or had been used in any way improperly. It's a tale, of course, and something worth telling; but it's not a killer blow, much as roaring Tory cheerleaders might try and tell you it is. Is it worth as much of the front page as it gets? I'm not so sure. Which makes you wonder why it has got so much. Did the Tele put this together ages ago, and have it ready as a hand grenade for election time? Or did they go back through their expenses stories with a fine-tooth comb to find something to launch at the Lib Dem leader? If it's something they've been storing up, that doesn't reflect well on the Telegraph at all; it smacks of them trying to influence an election then claim credit for the result afterwards rather than tell stories when they're relevant - though of course there could be similar front-page massive stories about the Conservative Party that they've been holding in reserve until now - but we'll see about that.
The Sun's is simply a representation of Clegg making mistakes - though it's hard to overestimate, when you look at the detail, the seriousness of these supposed errors or how gravely they will really damage the party. Again, it's a front page story about something less than consequential. The Express, meanwhile, is of course obsessed with immigration, as it has been for some time, but that counts against it in the final analysis - we've seen so many immigration lies down the months and years, and so much rubbish spoken about it, that it's hard to take them seriously now, even if they had a point. Besides, there's nothing wrong with allowing asylum seekers to work, in my opinion - but it's nice for the Express to admit this, for once, when it usually claims asylum seekers are 'spongeing' and fails to mention that they're not permitted to earn a living.
And so to the Mail. If you haven't read the perfectly justified and well written Nick Clegg piece from November 2002 that's supposedly the cause of the 'Nazi' business, then read it here. I find it hard to argue with anything he writes there - or to be more specific wrote seven-and-a-half years ago, despite the Mail giving the impression in its headline that this has all happened recently (not that they cared at the time). And as Chris pointed out, it's a bit daft of the Mail to say Clegg's words about WW2 obsession are wrong on the same page as giving away a DVD of the Second World War - In Colour*. You could also say it's a bit rich for the Mail to say Clegg was wrong when one of its own writers has a rather unhealthy obsession with 'Nazis' and 'fascists''.
This isn't the first time the Mail has attempted a 'Nazi' slur on a Lib Dem. Last year I wrote about how the paper had launched an attack on Lembit Opik for his great uncle's' alleged collaboration during the war - though of course they didn't mention Mail owner Jonathan Harmsworth's grandfather, a friend of 'my dear Fuehrer' Adolf Hitler, or the 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts' heritage of their own publication - funny that.
None of which is to say that there shouldn't be due scrutiny of Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, because of course there should. But fair scrutiny and real stories, not just smears and mud-chucking, hoping that some of it will stick, which is what appears to be happening at the moment. There's a real chance that the right-wing press are going to dig their own graves with this one, either way - if they appear to influence the election and destroy a candidate, what does that say about our press, and about them? But if they are shown not to have any influence, what then? And of course there's another possibility - it's possible that they are already so discredited, these attacks only serve to make people decide that whoever they are attacking deserves to be taken seriously. Whatever happens, it's a fascinating time.
* In colour? In colour. The black and white bits have been shoved in a bin. Colour war only! Or 3-D! Now, the Boer War, in HD!
Bollocks, Bullshitting Cunts
Today's Sun does something remarkable which I didn't think was ever possible: they've made Biased BBC look relatively reasonable and intelligent in comparison with their dribbling inanity about Auntie's horrific pro-Labour bias.
What evidence is there?
...last Sunday BBC2's Basil Brush Show featured nasty "Dave" - complete with blue rosette.
He beat nice Rosie, with a purple rosette, by promising free ice cream but was arrested because it was out of date.
Oh. Well in the face of that evidence, it's a fucking slam dunk then, isn't it? What else:
Last week bosses tried to make Mr Cameron look a laughing stock by putting out footage of him checking his hair in the wind before making a serious statement on Northern Ireland.
Or, to put it another way, David Cameron made himself look like a laughing stock by his preening on Sky News, which was picked up by YouTube and eventually ended up on the Beeb. If he hadn't been preening, then there wouldn't have been anything for the sinister state-funded broadcasters to broadcast, would there?
Is this really the kind of anti-BBC campaigning we can expect all the way throughout the election from Murdoch's slobbering pitbulls at the Sun? I hope not. Cameron's hair and Basil Brush evidence of Labourlove from Auntie? Come off it.
And besides, Basil Brush is just worried about the Tories scrapping the ban on hunting.
Tangerine dream
Robert Popper appears to have spoofed the Financial Times*, The Sun and the Telegraph with his phone call to London radio station LBC in which he claimed to be a factory worker who'd seen Gordon Brown throw a tangerine and call the manager a 'citric idiot'.
What I find interesting is that the host on the LBC show seems to be a bit suspicious, and makes it clear there isn't any independent corroboration. But that entirely reasonable and understandable level of scepticism is absent from the press reports. The comical but jarring phrase 'citric idiot' is missing from the Sun's coverage - they prefer to say Brown called the manager 'an idiot':
A FACTORY worker claims that during an official visit to his plant the PM hurled a tangerine into a laminating machine after flying into a rage while on a phone call. He said: "The fruit got stuck in the machine and clogged it.
"It was very embarrassing, we had to stop the tour and he got even more angry. He called the person that gave him the tangerine an idiot."
So you have to wonder why they omitted the word 'citric' in the quote. Is it because it made the claim seem a bit more iffy, and that's not what they wanted?
But then you see how these things progress. The Telegraph simply C&Vs what it read in the Sun:
One of the factory workers told The Sun Mr Brown became angry and threw a tangerine he was holding into a laminating machine causing it to breakdown.
The worker said: "The fruit got stuck in the machine and clogged it. It was very embarrassing we had to stop the tour and he got even more angry. He called the person who gave him the tangerine an idiot."
Sun: shite
One argument you'll often hear from people who (unlike me) know a thing or two about newspapers, goes like this: Say what you like about the Sun's politics, but it's brilliantly written and put together.
I know what they're saying - but is that actually true? Today's Sun front page, for example, might lead you to the opposite conclusion:
I can argue with you about the choice of stories: the prurient intrusiveness into the deaths of celebrities like Stephen Gately and Brittany Murphy; a visit by a Premiership manager to a brothel and so on. But what I'd like to look at most of all is how shit it is.
The 'Prem manager' for example, appears to have overdosed on Ready Brek in preparation for his next match. "Aha!" you might say to me, "but might the colour not be a clue as to the team he manages?" and I'd say, I doubt it somehow, but you never know, and even if it is, it looks fucking shit.
In the online edition, the manager appears to have transformed into a silhouette of a character from a 1980s ZX Spectrum adventure game, and so we're still left guessing. But surely if there's any manager out there who looks like he's made out of Lego, or bright red, then he'll be quickly spotted...?
The 'cocktail of drugs' attempting to piss on the freshly-dug grave of Brittany Murphy before she's even been lowered into it is fairly abysmal as well - ooh look, a list of things found in her house. Christ! "Here is a list of things" - whoa, thanks for that! I don't know how I'd get going into the day without a list of things! Sentences and words are a bit too tricky for me - can we just keep it to lists and pictures, then I'd be able to understand! I don't see any evidence here of the 'brilliantly written' Sun that people are always telling me about.
And the smiley face. The smiley face, what the fuck is that about? The Sun considers its readers so infantile that they'll only react to the simplest possible level of explanation - BIG SMILEY FACE GOOD, FROWNY SMILEY FACE BAD. What kind of regression is this? Even the bad old Sun didn't stoop that low - did it? Maybe it did and I don't remember.
It's truly woeful to behold, and if you were wondering why the Sun is struggling like all other newspapers then you'd probably do well to start with how comically shit it looks. Who knows - maybe everyone was out getting ratarsed at the Christmas party and they left the cleaner to to the front page. Maybe I'm doing them a disservice. But - and I never thought I'd say this - the Sun looks as bad as the Express. As bad as the Express! And it can't really get much worse than that.
The whole 'We can't tell you who this Premiership manager is because of bloody Human Rights and privacy' thing is fairly childish too, I think. Whereas the Tiger Woods exposes had the waffer-thinnest of justifications, that he had marketed himself as an all-American hero (though I still have yet to see evidence of him and his family in TV adverts - and besides, does anyone, anyone in the world, think: "Hang on a minute, before I buy these expensive razors, has the sportsman advertising them been completely faithful in his relationship? Otherwise I may question the effectiveness of the blades") this story has none. Who gives a shit - and, beyond that, how can you possibly justify telling the story in any kind of public interest way, given that you don't even have the "Woods defence", which (in my view) is bollocks anyway?
Perhaps I've just caught the Sun on an especially bad day. Maybe normally they're launching full-scale investigative reports about the things that really matter, rather than trying to trap celebs in brothels, and maybe normally they look like they're something other than a shite comic. But not today.
Let’s say Rupert Murdoch is completely benign
No, let's.
You might be thinking: How can you possibly say that? But wait. It's important to get our prejudices out of the way first. We may well have views about Murdoch and his children, about what they stand for and the way they do business; but these aren't important when considering whether it's right that he should get everything he wants from our elected (and probably soon-to-be elected) representatives.
Sure, it's easy to look at the Sun newspaper and think, isn't Daddy Murdoch meant to be the real editor? Haven't many former employees said that he's really pulling the strings there? And if that's the case, isn't he responsible for stuff like lying about football fans hours after a sickening tragedy?
Or implying that an innocent man was a murderer?
You could, if you wanted to, say that if Murdoch really was at the helm of the Sun rather than a hands-off proprietor, he was responsible for fairly obvious racism
about all kinds of people
from 'gipsy free-for-alls' to lying about exactly the kind of working-class people they claim to write for, just because they're Muslims
but that would be using too broad a brush, too easy to dismantle, too simple to dismiss as leftie scaremongering rubbish. Who knows whether Murdoch's the real editor or not? Who knows whether he approves of racism or lies about Muslims? We can't tell, so we can't say he does.
It might seem easy to suppose, for example, that simply because every single newspaper right across the world owned by Rupert Murdoch was in favour of the Iraq War, despite huge public opposition, that this was some kind of editorial influence at work. But we can't say for sure. They may have all reached the same (wrong) conclusion independently. It may be anticipatory compliance at work, but who knows? We don't, for sure.
But none of that matters. Let's say Murdoch is benign, despite our suppositions. Let's say he's a charming amalgam of everything we love, Joanna Lumley and Eric & Ernie mixed with Tim Henman and Alan Bennett. Let's say he's that. Let's say he's the best employer in the world, who aims to do only good, and he's a wonderful benevolent man who loves kittens and gives all that unpaid tax to charities in poor countries.
Even if he is completely benign, he still doesn't deserve to get what he wants from our political parties. He doesn't deserve to get Peter Mandelson giving him a cheery wave and lobbing him the power to try and smash his rivals:
Murdoch has recently said that he believes that copyright is being abused, particularly by organisations such as Google, which uses short extracts from online newspapers to create its Google News page, and the BBC, which he has accused of "stealing from newspapers".
Earlier this month Murdoch was vituperative about how search engines have aggregated news. "The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them," he said. "That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... They shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."
By giving the business secretary the power to amend the Copyright Act at will, Labour fears Mandelson could be creating a Trojan horse that under a Tory administration would allow Murdoch to be rewarded for his support for David Cameron over Gordon Brown, for example by making it illegal to use such extracts from a news site for profit.
He doesn't deserve promises from the Tories to do the smashing for him when it comes to his rivals at the BBC, nor to prop up commercial broadcasters (including ITV, in which Sky has a 17% stake) who made millions when the wind was fair and who are now bawling about how unfair it is that things are going the other way, nor to allow more cross-media ownership, which is also exactly what he wants.
He doesn't deserve any of these things, even if he's a saint. Because it's shabby. Can we really strain our naivety far enough to imagine there's no connection between this
and a sudden slew of announcements from the Conservatives of policies that will benefit Murdoch's empire enormously? Are we really meant to be that dumb? Did you really think we wouldn't notice?
No-one deserves to get exactly what they want from all political parties, regardless of voters' views, even if they're truly a force for good. That's not how it's meant to work. We're supposed to have a say in all this. Elections are supposed to be about us, not what favours you can do your mates. But no. On the one hand there's Mandelson, attacking the little guy in favour of the massive corporation; on the other, there's the Tories, doing everything they can to please their new master. And we lose out. And we don't have a say. And it doesn't matter whether Murdoch's magnificent, or neutral, or evil: it's just plain wrong, and undemocratic, and it stinks.
Katie Price and the value of celebrity
I've written before about the allegations Katie Price has made about being raped. They were widely reported, especially by Richard Desmond publications, as the interview in which they were contained appeared in Desmond's OK! magazine. The other papers covered it, but not to the same degree.
Now, though, there's been another spike in interest in the story - it's much bigger news than it was before. Why's that? Well now it turns out that Price has said an unnamed celebrity was behind the attack on her. All of a sudden, it becomes a bigger story, appearing on the front page of every tabloid every day this week so far. Today's papers are a good example:
Celebrity raped? Meh. Celebrity raped by celebrity? Wow! I don't know if I'm alone in feeling a little queasy about this state of affairs. I also think the use by the Sun of the phrase 'celebrity rape' is fairly grim as well - this from a paper which used the chortling headline "By gum" the other day to describe alleged sex attacks by a dentist. And is "I didn't rape Jordan" really a story? Whatever you think of Katie Price and her desire to be in the papers, this whole business does not reflect well on tabloid papers in this country.
The Express, meanwhile, has gone back to familiar territory in what is clearly a new policy to return to the old favourites:
The same old tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories; the same old nonsense. I even discovered today that the Mail have recently been delving into this drivel thanks to Lauren Booth's article implying Our Queen of Hearts may have been slaughtered because she was about to single-handedly destroy the arms industry. The sort of guff you'd laugh off if it appeared in a student magazine, but not something worthy of turning up in a national paper.
It seems little changes.
It’s Dennis the Politically Correct Menace!
Except of course, it isn't. But that didn't stop newspapers from churning around a story this week that the cartoon character had been 'toned down' by 'politically correct' BBC bosses.
Dennis is no longer the menace he once was after a BBC makeover that has transformed him into a politically correct shadow of his former self.
squawks the Mail, before re-hashing a couple of old articles to fill up the space, while providing no evidence to back up their story whatsoever. The Mail had lifted their effort from The Sun, who had roared:
COMIC tearaway Dennis The Menace has been turned into Walter The Softy by politically correct BBC bosses.
Except, as this fine blog post reveals, that's not the case at all, for anyone who actually wanted to check what they were writing to see if it resembled the truth or not (which naturally rules out tabloid journalists):
The Sun's story followed a traditional psychological redtop technique: printing alleged political correct quotes from anonymous "insiders" and "sources" to get their readers revved up, then a counter-claim from a named source at the end of the article. But by the the time the readers have reached the final quote they've already absorbed the myth and the red mist has descended.
They're all too willing to believe it, of course, because it weaves together two familiar and fire-stoking narratives: firstly, that Britain is going to the dogs because of the so-called politically correct brigade, who mean you can't even set fire to golliwogs any more without being labelled 'racist' by the Guardianista bastards; and secondly, that the socialist scum at the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation are trying to manipulate our children by producing a stream of extreme leftist propaganda. Combine the two, and bingo. No need to check. Why check? It might ruin the story!
Lew Stringer continues:
The way in which the national press can so easily and rapidly manipulate their readers with disinformation is quite disturbing. Yes, the "new" Dennis does look different to the way he was in the 1950s, but what these media reports ignore is that any changes have happened gradually over the past 50 years, not overnight by the BBC as they suggest. But if they admitted that they wouldn't have a story to pad out the pages of their bulging papers, and they wouldn't be achieving their usual remit - winding up "Little Englanders" into such a beetroot-faced apoplexy that they feel the right-of-centre papers are their only comfort zone.
Exactly. Someone take a slipper to the Sun and the Mail and take away their peashooters; it's the only language they understand.
Thanks to Suave for the tipoff!
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