Mail - like Heat magazine but worse

The Daily Mail website has taken great pleasure in the size and shape of blonde pop stars recently. First it was Jessica Simpson who was 'a bigger star than ever' and 'her now more relaxed approach to fitness and a good dose of her family's Texan cuisine over the Christmas holidays have caught up with her', pointing out, in case you hadn't got it, her 'expanding waistline', 'curvier figure' and her 'bulge'.

Now it's Britney's turn. After a comeback concert she was dubbed 'Bulky Spears' with a 'rather fuller figure these days.' So a young mother of two isn't in quite the shape she was when she was 17. Well there's a shock. But look at the pic on the left. Is that a 'bulky' frame? Of course not. Mock her for lacking musical talent or for lip-synching by all means, but this?

Now imagine a 13 year old girl, looking at those pics, and seeing comments that that is 'bulky' and in the tone of the Mail story, something to be pointed out and mocked. It's a worrying thought, but then the Mail has been doing this type of story for a long time. Maybe rather than its useless 'Facebook causes cancer' stories, it could do one on how newspaper mocking of a healthy looking woman's shape may cause eating disorders.

Recommended read: 5cc

Excellent (as always) dissection of the latest MigrationWatch/Mail immigration figures. It seems figures reckoned 'too unreliable for publication' appeared as hard facts in both. Funny that.

Racist bullying not important to Mail readers

Yes, yes, I know picking on the people who leave comments on the Mail website is an easy target, but this is particularly eye-catching.

An employment tribunal which is looking at racism in the Met Police heard that one officer said he'd 'bring down all the lazy blacks, one by one'. And:

PCSO Asad Saeed claimed inspectors allowed an 'apartheid culture' in which officers were sent out on operations in segregated 'white' and 'black' police vans. Ethnic minority PCSOs were also 'treated like dogs' and forced to spend hours standing outside in the rain at a police cordon while the white officers sat in the TV room back at the station, the tribunal heard.

Shocking stuff. Well, apparently not.

'Have we nothing better to do', says ymmot. 'Oh well, another payout coming', says Richard Brady.

Meanwhile, Feena's comment that 'this kind of behaviour is outrageous' has a favourability rating of -47.

Doesn't that make him British?

Freed detainee moans: Britain is just too cold, stormed the Express (26 Feb 09), in one of its typically balanced and proportionate reports about a Muslim.

The background to this story? Moazzam Begg says that Binyam Mohammed has come from Cuba - where it's 26C - to London - where it's 10C - and hadn't yet re-acclimatised, so 'he’s been wearing a jacket most of the time'.

Bloody hell, how dare he! Send him back to Morocco to torture him straight away for such insults!

Surely moaning about the British weather is the Express' job after all.

This week's privacy transgressions in full

The Mail on Sunday has been found guilty by the PCC of invading the privacy of Daniel Craig, by publishing a picture of the house where his new apartment is, with added details of local parks, so any stalker can find him. I bet Dacre or Wright wouldn't want their homes exposed in this way.

The News of the World has apologised to Kate Moss for writing she was pregnant, when she isn't. Moss is still going to sue for invasion of privacy.

The interesting point of the Moss case is that the original story was printed on 15 Feb. The apology came two weeks later. Compare that to the apology from sister paper The Sun to Muslim bus driver Arunas Raulynaitis, which took five months to appear.

Sun pays damages for 'completely untrue' anti-Islam story

The Sun has paid out £30,000 to a Muslim bus driver whose life it has wrecked.

A story on 29 March 2008 ('Get off my bus, I need to pray') revealed:

A MUSLIM bus driver told stunned passengers to get off so he could PRAY. The white Islamic convert rolled out his prayer mat in the aisle and knelt on the floor facing Mecca...“Eventually everyone started complaining. One woman said, ‘What the hell are you doing? I’m going to be late for work’.”

After a few minutes the driver calmly got up, opened the doors and asked everyone back on board. But they saw a rucksack lying on the floor of the red single-decker and feared he might be a fanatic. So they all refused. The passenger added: “One chap said, ‘I’m not getting on there now’.

Yesterday the driver, who said his name was Hrun, told The Sun: “I asked everyone to get off because I needed to pray. I was running late and had not had time. I pray five times a day as a Muslim — but I don’t normally ask people to get off the bus to do it.”

Turns out, this was all total bullshit. The Sun apologised - in an unusually unequivocal way - 5 months later:
We now accept that these allegations were completely untrue. Mr Raulynaitis is not a fanatic and he did not ask passengers to leave his bus to allow him to pray. In fact, he was praying during his statutory rest break. We apologise to Mr Raulynaitis for the embarrassment and distress caused.

But after 5 months, it's not going to register at all. It's far too bloody long to correct such a story. In the meantime, Stormfront, Freerepublic and loads of other deeply unpleasant anti-Islam blogs published it and got lots of deeply unpleasant comments in response (Google the headline and see what comes up). A mobile phone vid was apparently watched by thousands of people on Youtube.

So on 26 Feb 09, The Sun coughed up £30,000 in damages. Which is good news, but hardly undoes the harm caused by the story in the first place. His lawyer said:

It transpires that an individual who noticed Mr Raulynaitis at prayer chose to film this act on a mobile phone and sent the video to the Sun, which then reproduced stills from it alongside the article, as well as the footage itself on the Sun's website.

Sadly, this is an all too common way of running a tabloid these days. Get some juicy pics and to hell with the accuracy. Surely a little bit of, you know, journalism, might have nipped this story in the bud before it got near the paper. But it fits the anti-Islam agenda that these papers want to propigate and sadly, a £30,000 pay-out isn't going to make them stop.

Philip Davies gone mad

Philip Davies, Conservative MP for Shipley, is one of those awful rent-a-quote people that the tabloids love to call on for some 'outrage' quote on any political correctness story going.

On 25 Feb 09 he appeared on Radio 5 Live to discuss Hazel Blears' latest about political correctness. His main point was that you can't call people Chairmen any more, which seemed to prove the point that these stories are exaggerated nonsense.

But he very clearly said that one of the problems with all this political correctness is that people can't make jokes these days for fear of offending someone.

Would this be the same Philip Davies who was quote everywhere during the 'Sachsgate' affair, saying things such as: ‘I know Jonathan Ross has been handsomely rewarded by the BBC for being rude, inappropriate and as vile as possible, but I would hope that even the BBC would accept he’s overstepped the mark this time. In any other walk of life, anyone who did this type of thing would face serious disciplinary proceedings. I hope the BBC will consider what consequences there may be if they don’t take him to task for this.’ The same Philip Davies who said Ross should have been sacked for making this, er, offensive prank call.

Of course, the best Philip Davies moment came during the saga of The Sun's 'Brave Heroes Hounded Out' story of 7 October 2006. You can find the story here (although this site is not recommended reading!) - The Sun withdrew the full story after complaints. The story began:

MUSLIM yobs who wrecked a house to stop four brave soldiers moving in after returning from Afghanistan sparked outrage last night. The house in a village near riot-torn Windsor had BRICKS thrown through windows and was DAUBED with messages of hate.

Davies was quoted as saying: 'This is outrageous. If there’s anybody who should fuck off it’s the Muslims who are doing this kind of thing. Police should pull out the stops to track down these vile thugs.'

The Sun eventually withdrew the story completely, 3 months later: ('we have been asked to point out no threatening calls were logged at Combermere Barracks from Muslims and police have been unable to establish if any faith or religious group was responsible for the incident').

His response to the truth was pathetic.

More migrant numbers to fight over

The new immigration figures from ONS give all the papers a chance to spin a story that fits their agenda. The lot released today (24 Feb 09) will be no different.

From The Guardian - The flow of Polish and other economic migrants from eastern Europe has fallen by more than 40% as the recession in Britain bites, according to the latest immigration figures published today. The Office for National Statistics said the number of work applications from the EU's former communist countries dropped to 29,000 in the last three months of 2008, down from 53,000 in the same period in 2007.

From the Mail - there are signs the weakening pound and a squeeze on jobs could be stemming the tide of workers from Eastern Europe.

Signs? Could be? A drop of 40% is rather more conclusive than that. If it was a 40% rise, do you think the Mail would say there were 'signs' that there 'could be' a rising tide of workers from Eastern Europe? No, of course not. It'd be splashed on the front page that we're being swamped by this 'tide' of foreigners who want our jobs and benefits.

Sugar sues Sun

So Alan Sugar is going to sue The Sun for its very dodgy front page story suggesting he was on a terrorist target list.

The back story can be read at Bloggerheads, where The Sun's source for the story seems to have posted the original comment the article was based on, in a forum.

Given all the times the Star relies on Muslim forums for 'shock' stories...well, it makes you wonder...

Recommended read - No sleep til Brooklands

Terrific post by Jonathan on last week's Daily Mail (some stories have been highlighted here, but he includes several that weren't). Read Balloons, arses and Facebook.

His point about the Mail website and its Heat-like fascination with celebrity (and celebrity skin in particular) is a good one - it's such a curious dichotomy with the newspaper and its self-proclaimed 'values' it's hard to imagine they are part of the same organisation. Unless they're hypocrites, of course.

This was particularly true of the article about Peaches Geldof being topless on a beach and the Mail writing in a neat little box about every one of her 20 tattoos, where they are and what they are. The idea of some sleazy middle-aged Mail journos leering over her pics in the name of research, well, makes you proud to be British, doesn't it? Ahem.

Beyond parody (cont.)

Last week, Facebook was giving everyone cancer. Now it is damaging the brains of children.

In Social websites harm children's brains: Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist (24 Feb 09), Susan Greenfield makes this stark warning. And what scientific study is this claim based on? Umm, well, there doesn't seem to be one. Instead, 'Lady Greenfield told the Lords a teacher of 30 years had told her she had noticed a sharp decline in the ability of her pupils to understand others.'

So a story from an old teacher becomes a front page story about the dangers of social networking. Weird to pick on Facebook and Twitter and not the internet in general, but then it's quite weird to pick this claim and treat it as a serious story.

(This nonsense has also appeared in The Guardian)

A quick thought (cont.)

Only a few hours, it seems.

This Littlejohn piece on Binyam Mohammed ('Happy Birthday, Mr Resident') has all the same old drivel that he has written about every other released Guantanamo inmate.

He's not even British (although Littlejohn's knowledge of the asylum system is, shall we say, incomplete)...blah, blah...makes you wonder why he was out there....blah, blah...Guardiantista's and their human rights...blah, blah....books deals...blah, blah.

I'll look up the column he wrote on Moazzam Begg and compare sometime...

Key quote at the end: "his unsubstantiated claims of torture to bash America and undermine our own security services." Because torturing people doesn't undermine America or British intelligence, but claims of torture do.

Recommended read: Peter Wilby

Excellent piece by Peter Wilby ('The press has lost the moral plot') in the MediaGuardian (24 Feb 09). It suggests far from all the pointless, knee-jerk hand-wringing about a 'broken society' we should focus on the role of the media in the shameful episode of Alfie Patten. He writes:

In truth, the story was about the media - not schools, the NHS or welfare. Several columnists nostalgically recalled the days when a teenage pregnancy was hushed up. They didn't mention how the media-created stardom of Alfie and Chantelle suggests premature parenthood has become a route to instant riches and fame. Once, when a girl got pregnant, every teenage boy in the neighbourhood would deny he ever laid a finger on her. Last week, they fell over themselves to claim fatherhood of Chantelle's baby - two candidates were named - presumably in the belief they might get a small slice of the rewards on offer.

A quick thought

Now that Binyam Mohammed is back in the UK, how long before Richard Littlejohn writes a column saying 'well, there's no smoke without fire is there, eh, eh, nudge wink'?

Beyond parody

Daily Mail. 19 Feb 09. How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer.

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