"With the same long brunette hair and wide eyes, little Suri Cruise is beginning to look more like mother Katie Holmes every day. The lookalike pair certainly mirrored each other's expressions as they stopped by a local ice cream store in Los Angeles yesterday.""The lookalike pair"? Just so I'm absolutely clear here, Suri Cruise is FOUR YEARS OLD. Her mother is 31. She has breasts, and hips and other adulty things that her "lookalike" daughter lacks. Despite the Editor's Code being very clear about the fact that you can't run stories about a child simply because her or his parents are famous, there's also a full-length pic of the "long-limbed" Suri on her own. The caption takes things to a whole new level:
"Ballerina beauty: The four-year-old is growing into a gorgeous little girl"I really don't want to labour the point but SURI CRUISE IS FOUR YEARS OLD. FOUR! I'd tell Uncle Creepyhands over at Associated Newspapers to get a grip on himself, but I get the horrible feeling he already has, and not in the way I'd hope.
Note that at the foot of the story is a little appeal:
Do you have a story about a celebrity? Call the Daily Mail showbusiness desk on 0207 938 6364 or 0207 938 6683Yes, you too could scale the journalistic heights of the 21st century Daily Mail website (motto: "News is far more important to us than showbiz. News is what drives our site") if you can come up with a scoop as devastating as "Mother takes young daughter for ice cream after ballet class".
PS: Suri Cruise is FOUR YEARS OLD.
5 comments:
Oh man, I hate the DM as much as anyone but I think this is a bit overboard. Go watch the Brass Eye paedophile special.
This is not to say that the DM aren't scumbags for running this story and asking for more, but we have more than enough to be displeased about without spuriously bandying about words like "paedophile".
...and it appears I can't read, because you didn't actually say "paedophile". Please substitute "pervert" where appropriate. Soz! Wine Friday in the office.
I would disagree with you, Bill. I think the article is part of a larger trend over at the Daily Mail which has a tendency to focus only on the physical aspects of females. And yes, this does extend to children (as the Angry Mob has pointed out somewhere).
Hi Bill, thanks for the reading. I have to disagree with you and for the reason why I'd point you to Jon's post.
If this was a one-off it wouldn't be so bad, but with the Mail it's part of pattern of behaviour that verges on disturbing. The paper is forever sexualisng underage girls, often using the "all grown up" approach. Just last week they even ran a headline that described Miley Cyrus as "almost an adult", which harked back to the Sun's freaky "how long until Charlotte Church is legal" countdown from a few years back.
When they start describing a four-year-old as "long-limbed" - a phrase that, on the website at least, only ever crops up in stories about models and actresses - it's downright creepy. A fiver says that in 10 or 11 years from now the Mail will be running stories about how the teenage Suri is wearing "inappropriate" clothes, along with lots of pictures to show just how inappropriate it all is.
And none of this would be so bad but for the fact that the Mail is at the very heart of the paedo-panics Chris Morris was satirising, which adds a hypocrit-shaped cherry to the voyeuristic ice cream. Can you imagine how the Mail would report a court case in which a middle-aged man was found guilty of taking long-lens photos of four-year-old girls in their ballet kit?
@ P. Stable, the DM already does exactly that. They often critize the behaviour of badly behaved so-called celebs and then they publish lots of pics of said celeb misbehaving, the hipocrisy is rank.
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