Monday 7 January 2013

MailOnline Showbiz Awards deserve award for hypocrisy

Ladies and gentlemen, it's the awards you have been waiting for. No, not the Baftas or the Oscars, but the inaugural MailOnline Showbiz Awards 2012.

The idea is explained perfectly in the intro:

Just like you the readers, the activities of particular celebrities deserving of praise, and those not so deserving have been named in our own non-exhaustive list of recipients for the inaugural Mail Online Showbiz Awards.

We're then given the details. First: best bikini body. Cynics might suggest this is just an excuse to publish ten photos of scantily-clad female celebs - and they'd be right. There's also a 'rear of the year' award, illustrated by ten celeb arses.

To try and demonstrate that the MailOnline Showbiz Team are not totally in thrall to celebs, there's also a 'Put it away, love' category.

Curiously, Rihanna comes second in that category, depsite being 'awarded' 5th best bikini body and 4th best rear. Helen Flanagan also appears in the 'Best bikini body' and 'Put it away, love' categories.

The winner of the 'Put it away, love' category is Courtney Stodden. MailOnline has written 95 articles about Stodden in the last 18 months. Many of these are about her not wearing much: showing off acres of flesh in skimpy Halloween costumes; wearing a lacy crop-top and barely-there skirt; wearing towering see-through heels and a short red dress; wearing bikinis and stripper heels and so on and on and on. They even used the phrase 'All grown up at last!' when she turned 18.

The suggestion that they actually want her, or any of the other women they named, to cover up is utterly hollow, given the relish with which they have published photos of them all wearing so little.

Indeed, one week after suggesting Flanagan should 'put it away, love', MailOnline published five photos from a photo shoot it described like this:


In the 'Flab to Fab' category - and make of that name what you will - the top ten is missing a 5th, 6th and 8th placed person, which does nothing to dispel the idea this was a rush job.

Two other categories are worthy of note: Pointless Celebrity Tweeter and Vainest Celebrity Tweeter. The MailOnline Showbiz Team named Maria Fowler - who appeared in The Only Way Is Essex - as 'winner' of the former category.

If you search MailOnline for 'Maria Fowler Twitter' you get 138 results.

In this article, her tweets were so 'pointless' that members of the MailOnline team transcribed seven of them and took screenshots of six.

In this article, they included three more of her tweets and there were four more in this one, which also included three photos she had posted on Twitter.

There were two more of her tweets, and three more of her Twitter pics, in this piece, one tweet here, one pic here, two pics here, one tweet here, two here, three here, four here, and two tweets and three tweeted pics included here.

And that's just going back to 20 August 2012. 

If the MailOnline's hacks believe Fowler's Twitter feed is so 'pointless', why are they so keen to repeat so much of what she posts on it?

3 comments:

  1. Who on earth is Courtney Stodden??
    I have also never heard of Maria Fowler, but at least you did us the service of mentioning that she's on TOWIE.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Who on earth is Courtney Stodden??"
    Well she's American and famous for.... Er. Famous for being in the Mail 95 times in 18 months.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hmm, like Kim Kardashian then..!

    ReplyDelete

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