Both Anton and Uponnothing have done excellent jobs in examing the media coverage of his sentencing.
Anton looks at the difference in the coverage of Muslim terrorists and those from the far-right, whereas Uponnothing shows how uninterested the Mail seems to be when terrorists are white. They even put a non-story about a Muslim getting married higher up their homepage than the Gavan coverage.
Gavan didn't make the front page of any of the national newspapers. Would a Muslim convicted of hoarding 54 explosive devices and 12 firearms been similarly ignored?
Another post by Uponnothing that is well worth reading is about the comments left on the Mail article about the thug who poured bleach over a woman in a cinema after she had asked him to be quiet.
When the mugshot of 16-year-old Jordan Horsley was released, the fact that his skin wasn't white brought out the unrepentant racists:
All these comments had been moderated in advance - and thus deemed suitable by people at the Mail - and remain up ten days on, with even higher green arrow scores.
On a lighter note, last week's very suspicious story about Myleene Klass being warned by police for wielding a knife at intruders looked increasingly dubious. Marina Hyde in the Guardian had - unlike just about every other journalist who wrote about it, including ones at the Guardian and Observer - 'bothered to establish the chain of events' and discovered:
the initial call to police was not placed by Myleene but by a man believed to be her agent or publicist, to whom she was naturally on the phone at the time.
And:
As for the story's appearance in the Sun the very next day, Hertfordshire police state: "We believe the media found out about the incident following a phone call from Ms Klass's publicist to Emma Cox from the Sun."
And, not in the least bit suspiciously:
despite having given copious quotes and assistance on the story all week, both publicist and agent declined to discuss this yesterday.
Hyde then reveals that Klass seems to have a bit of form in, shall we say, exaggerating...
Elsewhere, the Sunday Express had two (alleged) journalists write up a feeble BBC-bashing story. The article by David Jarvis and David Stephenson was so poor and so inaccurate that it was deleted from the Express website before end of play Monday.
They tried to prove that BBC employees were wasting their time, and your money, by being on Twitter. Yes, bashing the BBC and new-fangled-technology in one.
The problem was they are inept and their research was even worse. They didn't understand how Twitter works and misunderstood the difference between 'followers' and 'following'. They claimed, for example, Victoria Derbyshire had two followers when she actually has over 3,600.
It was unbelievably pathetic. More so, because it appears Stephenson, the paper's TV critic, is actually on Twitter.
Full story at No Rock and Roll Fun.
And finally, hat-tip to badjournalism, Paul E Smith and Bitter Wallet for this tastefully placed advert in the Metro.
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You said "acid" above but I think you meant bleach. By the way, I really enjoy your blog. Has it never occurred to journalists that if they spent more time pointing out the errors of their competitiors and less time raking though social networking sites and websites forums for non stories they'd fill plenty of pages. I suppose that isn't the done thing.
ReplyDeleteThanks Cat - I have now corrected that error.
ReplyDeleteAnd no, papers rarely turn againts each other because they know where each others' bodies are buried. The daily tit-for-tat between the Mail and Express that breaks out occasionally shows that.