This is the way the blog ends: not with a bang but a whimper

Regular visitors (both of you) may have noticed that this blog has been a little quiet of late. I’ve been busy with my actual job (the one that pays the bills) and have also been seeing a bit of the world, so haven’t really had time to keep it updated. And that’s part of the reason I’ve decided to take a break from this blogging thing for a while. I’m going to carry on tweeting (@PrimlyStable) as it takes much less time and effort, and I like the immediacy and interactivity of it all. But I no longer have the time or effort to devote to keeping the blog going with anything approaching regularity.

It’s been a fun year or so, and I’d like to think that I’ve provided some entertaining and thought-provoking articles. One post even managed to bring in 12,000 readers on one day , which would be considered a decent-sized crowd at a League Two football match (although that was mostly down to getting RT'd by the mighty Ben Goldacre).

High points included getting the PCC to rule that Richard Littlejohn was a liar and getting the Department for Communities and Local Government to admit that Eric Pickles’ claims about councils banning Christmas were not based on anything more than a tabloid urban myth.

But these were simultaneously low points, too. The PCC refused to uphold the complaint against Littlejohn because, astonishingly, they said he lied so often his readers wouldn’t assume he was telling the truth about anything, and that lying was actually just a rhetorical device.

And despite repeated letters and complaints (most of which I didn’t publish here) DCLG refused to retract Pickles’ claims and the minister himself keeps tweeting cheerfully away about openness and transparency and how Labour used to make things up just to get headlines.

So that’s the main reason I’m giving up. I’m sick of getting angry about what journalist and politicians say, pointing out the errors and nothing ever changing. I’m sick of the omerta-like code among the national press that prevents them ever criticising each other for fear of having their own dirty washing aired in public. I’m sick of the fact that a man can get paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a year for writing that prostitutes deserve to be murdered and that a woman hasn’t really been raped if she wasn’t violently beaten up by a stranger in the process.

In the words of Chris TT - who really deserves to be known as a supremely talented singer-songwriter rather than just that guy who started that #iamspartacus thing - “the Daily Mail readers have defeated me”. Why should I spend hours carefully researching the facts behind a story so that a thousand or so people can read it when hundreds of thousands of people, millions even, have already read the Mail’s version and decided that it’s true?

We live in an age where truth is defined by Wikipedia, and where any online argument can be won by providing a link to a story that supports your point of view, regardless of whether that story has any basis in truth whatsoever.

Newspapers demand an end to injunctions so they can delight in publishing sordid details of a footballer’s private life, claiming they must be able to report such information as part of their fundamental right to free speech, their divine mission to bring the truth to the people of Britain. Yet day after day after day the same newspapers publish lies – not opinions I disagree with, not even just wild distortions of the facts, but outright lies.

The same newspapers that insist that self-regulation works and that any attempt to restrict what they publish is unacceptable spent the whole of last Christmas smearing the name of an innocent man who had never even been charged with any crime, let alone convicted. In their rush to get “the truth” about him to the public, they went out of their way to print claims that he was a liar, a pervert, a lunatic, a man obsessed with death.

And once one paper starts behaving in such a way, the rest have to join in for fear of being left behind, of missing out on the story. Tony Blair was widely mocked when he accused the media of behaving like a pack of feral beasts, but I fail to see what was wrong with what he said. Accuracy no longer matters in journalism, only getting their first or at the very least churning out what your rivals have already published so that nobody can accuse you of missing the story.

So what if you’ve accused an innocent man of being a suspected paedophile? So what if you’ve accused a missing child’s parents of murdering her? Everyone will forget about it in a few weeks and you can move on to the next sucker. And in the meantime you can publish an outraged story about a woman who made a false allegation of rape, because isn’t it awful that this poor man has had his name dragged through the mud and shouldn’t she really be sent to prison for doing such a terrible thing?

It’s just the tabloids that are guilty of the pack mentality. Has anyone ever actually learned anything from an interview on the Today programme, apart from the fact that John Humphreys likes the sound of his own voice? Over on Newsnight Paxman has become a parody of himself – fuck finding out the truth, Brand Paxo depends on him sneering at his guests, interrupting, arguing, never actually interviewing them. And waiting in the wings are an army of wannabe Paxmans, all thinking that the pinnacle of journalistic achievement involves asking Michael Howard the same question 3,000 times, all thinking that they’re terribly clever because they know that the first rule of interviewing a politician is to ask yourself “why is this bastard lying to me”, even if he’s not.

Sigh. I’ve just poured all this out in one go. Ijust re-read it and it's a bit ranty. I was going to edit it to make it scan better or make a bit of sense but figured I’d leave it as at it is. Sorry about that.

Thanks for all the nice comments, re-tweets, and general lovelyness over the past 12 months. It all helps me remember that not everyone in the world is a Mail-reading arse.

AND FINALLY... There’s no particular reason why you should be interested in my opinion, but if you are here are 10 simple rules to live by:

• Visit TabloidWatch, 5CC and Minority Thought on a regular basis. They do what I do, but more often, better, funnier and with less swearing.


• If a headline has a question in it, the answer is almost certainly “no”.


• Pineapple juice with psyllium husk helps you lose weight but lacks nutritional value.


• Admit it, Mad Men jumped the shark around about the time of the lawnmower accident.


• The phrase “jumped the shark” jumped the shark long before I started using it.


• Cold weather in northern Europe in the winter is not evidence that global warming is a myth.


• Never read the Wikipedia entry for “notable alumni” from your secondary school, unless you want to feel like a miserable failure.


• Edward Is Deadward by Emmy The Great really should be in your record collection (or on your iPod). Her continued lack of international superstardom baffles me, especially at a time when Mumford and Sons are touring stadiums.


• Dan & Dan’s Daily Mail Song is simultaneously the funniest and most depressing thing on YouTube.


• Don’t believe what you read in the paper. Any paper. Ever.

Littlejohn in "predictable" shock

On Monday afternoon I was pottering around on the internet, having a look at the various reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden, and tweeted this little prediction:

Littlejohn's first post-OBL column appears today. I could go on about the way he equates a mass-murdering terrorist living near a military academy in Pakistan with some non-mass-murdering non-terrorists building a mosque near a military academy in England, but I figured it would be more fun to cut to the chase:

"From what we can gather, there was no British involvement in this operation, which is probably just as well. Judging by the rules of engagement now imposed on our armed forces, if we’d tracked down Bin Laden we’d have had to read him his human rights, assign him a Legal Aid lawyer, cook him a religiously appropriate dinner and hand out nicotine patches to any of his lieutenants trying to give up smoking and suffering withdrawal symptoms."

Does Richard 'Cloaca' Littlejohn have a single original thought in his tiny little mind? How much, exactly, is the Mail paying him to either recycle his old columns and books or spew out cliches as predictable as this?

Mail locates bottom of barrel, gives it a good scraping

I'm out of the country for a year or so. I'm somewhere nice and sunny - it's 30C outside right now - and really should be seeing the sights, sipping coconuts, that sort of thing. But instead, like a moth to a flame, I find myself drawn to the pages of Mail Online. I just can't help it. Maybe I have some kind of mental problem. And despite not having visited it for three whole weeks, within roughly six seconds of my return to intellectual masochism I'd stumbled across something that made me decide to break my self-imposed blogging moratorium. After I'd banged my head repeatedly against the laptop, obviously.

Now you don't have to have been at this tabloid-watching malarky very long to see a headline like that and instantly think "What are the chances that said ban ISN'T down to health and safety - or even the childish cloacaism that is 'Elf N Safety', something that surely has no place in a serious news story?" And were you to think that, you would of course be entirely correct. In the intro, lazy hack Nick Fagge, perhaps jealous of colleague Steve Doughty's 5CC tabloid bullshit of the month award, makes this bold claim:

Every year the Christians from different churches get together to march a 400-yard route to celebrate Easter. But this year their Good Friday parade has been banned – because it breaches health and safety laws.

This being a Mail health and safety story, Nick is legally required to undermine his own argument within the next few paragraphs. Hence these two sentences:

Previously organisers of the parade in Willesden, north London, had only needed to inform police of their route. But new red tape means they now need permission from Brent Council. Officials said they banned the procession because they were contacted too late to carry out a ‘consultation’ to close the roads.

And just in case you failed to understand that, there’s a handy quote from a council spokesman that spells it out extremely clearly (tucked away at the end of the article, natch):

“Brent Council was not contacted about the march until around a week ago. There is a strict legal procedure we have to follow to issue a traffic order closing roads so people can march in the highway, which includes advertising and consultation, and this takes about five weeks. We are very sorry to say there is now not enough time for us to legally facilitate this march.”

So it’s got nowt to do with health and safety at all – the council simply has rules requiring five weeks advance notice of any planned road closures so that people not involved in an event have time to plan for the road closure. The Catholic priest in charge of the march failed to check with the council five weeks ahead (maybe he forgot when Easter was?) so the road can’t be closed. I suppose you could accuse the council of being a little officious and inflexible, but thems the rules. And they have nothing whatsoever to do with health and safety, despite what the sub claims in the headline and Fagge claims in his intro.

The Mail has been blaming health and safety for everything from stepping stone repair to the non-banning of secret santa to parking arrangements at cheese-rolling events for donkey’s years now, but what makes this story remarkable is the way the paper has elbowed in a second pet theme – Christians being persecuted by authority and treated worse than assorted minority groups. Normally this kind of story has at least a vague basis in fact. But this time round it comes entirely from the imagination of the priest who forgot to give five weeks notice to the council:

Father Hugh MacKenzie, of St Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic Church, said: “The rights of Christians are being overlooked in favour of the rights of Islamic groups and gay rights organisations.”

Wait, what?

“One does wonder whether if it was a homosexual rights or Islamic group the council would have been more flexible, as it doesn’t seem like rocket science to permit us to walk 400 metres. The rights of Christians are just not respected in Britain.”

Riiiiiight. The road won’t be closed because the priest failed to follow the rules, yet this is evidence of the rights of Christians not being respected in Britain? What rights are those then? The right to break the law? The right to be treated MORE favourably than other people who want to organise a road closure?

And is there any evidence that Brent Council has been more flexible with homosexual rights groups or Islamic groups? Anything to prove the claim that the rights of Christians are being overlooked in favour of such people? No, there’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the slightly unnerving ramblings of a disorganised priest. But hey, his outlandish claims chime with the Mail’s ongoing narrative about Christians being treated worse than the minority groups the paper loathes so much, so Nick duly sets out to come up with some rock-solid evidence supporting Father Hugh:

Brent Council hosts a Diwali street celebration every year. Last November it boasted it had held the biggest Diwali event in the country, after more than 60,000 people turned out.

And? Brent has huge a huge population of Sikhs and Hindus, so it’s not much of a shock that they hold a Diwali celebration. But how is this in any way related to the story? Did the council fail to advertise any associated road closures five weeks in advance? Or is the Mail just complaining because the council put on an event aimed primarily at brown people? Oh wait, there’s more:

And in July last year the council appealed to the Muslim community to notify it of any Eid events so it could promote them free of charge. But it did not do the same for other religious festivals.

OMFG! STOP THE PRESSES! Brent Council offered to promote festivities being staged by a minority group so that people from the majority, who may otherwise be unaware, could get involved! BUT THEY DIDN’T ADVERTISE CHRISTMAS!!!!!!! Which is a travesty, because, without the council telling people, NOBODY WOULD KNOW THAT CHRISTMAS WAS TAKING PLACE! Sure, they might be a little confused as to why all the shops were really busy, there were decorations up everywhere and they had two days of work, but without the council telling them what was going on they’d never have any idea that it was all related to an obscure little festival celebrated by a tiny religious group called “Christians”.

If Father Hugh wants to trot out tired lines about being part of a persecuted minority that’s his lookout, but if Nick Fagges wants to call himself a journalist and the Mail wants to call itself a newspaper, they have a duty to seriously investigate whether his claims have any substance. Who knows, maybe just yesterday a group of gay Muslims were given permission to close the M1 for three hours at the drop of a hat – if it happened, Father Hugh has a point and the story has some merit. But based on the facts provided by the Mail, it’s nothing but another attempt to win sympathy for Christians at the expense of other groups, something the Mail is all too happy to collude with. And based on some of the comments from readers, it certainly seems to be working:

Journalist can't abide people making money from the royal wedding, so gets paid to write 500 words about how awful it is

Mail columnist Sandra Parsons is displeased with the news that the company owned by Kate Middleton's parents is launching a "Royal Wedding scratchcard", prompting this moan:

"Yesterday, I went on to their Party Pieces website to have a closer look at the scratch cards. I typed 'royal wedding' into the search facility and up popped an entire menu of offerings, from 'royal wedding Kate' — which throws up 24 products — to 'royal wedding party products', which brings up a jaw-dropping 1,883 items, an endless array stretching from drink stirrers to invitation holders to cake boxes."

For the purposes of comparison, I typed "royal wedding kate" into the Daily Mail's search facility. I don't know if the 759 results it brought up counts as "jaw-dropping", but I do know that it's more than 30 times as many hits as the Middletons had on their site. The simple phrase "royal wedding" produces 2,679 hits on the Mail's site, which isn't so much jaw-dropping as jaw-falling-off-your-head-entirely-inducing.

And as for those 1,883 hits on "Royal wedding party products", is Parsons really that shocked given that the company in question sells party products, and that a lot of people buy party products for their own weddings? Further inspection suggests that the search engine is returning matches for ANY of the words, not ALL of them - which is why it turns up things like this:





Yes, those awful Middletons. Why can't they stop cashing in on their daughter's wedding with their clockwork train sets and their pink party shoes? I bet on the day of the wedding they'll even sink so low as to try and cash in by producing a 36-page full-colour souvenir supplement about the day...

Speechwatching II

Remember last year when I pointed out that Ed Miliband seemed to be drawing inspiration from JFK during his speech at the Labour conference? Well the speechwriter behind yesterday's David Cameron address also seemed to have read a few too many "Great Speeches of the 20th Century" books:

"From Aberconwy in the North, to the Vale of Glamorgan in the South.
From the mountains to the valleys.
The message rang out..."

Or, as Martin Luther King Jnr put it in 1963:

"And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California."

Of course, Dr King's speech was a plea for racial tolerance, equality and justice for all. Cameron's speech was a call for a "No" vote in the AV referendum.

Daily Mail headline of the year

For some reason Mail Online doesn't mention in the headline that one of those newspaper websites was Mail Online. Still, kudos to the Northcliffe House massive for actually running this story online, even if they have disabled reader comments "for legal reasons". The other guilty party, the Sun, hasn't found room for the news on its website.

When is a German not a German?

Yesterday a gunman in Frankfurt shot dead two American airmen as they boarded a bus outside the German city's airport. The Mail has, via German paper Die Welt, got hold of a picture of the prime suspect. Here's the headline:



So he's a Kosovan? Someone from Kosovo, right? Which is why the Mail also provides a handy little box-out explaining all about the way Kosovans in Kosovo keep getting recruited by terrorist groups:


But hidden away in the middle of the story is this factoid:

"Uka, whose family come from the northern town of Mitrovica, was born and educated in Germany where his family moved to some 40 years ago."

So this Kosovan Muslim was actually born and raised in Germany a mere two decades after his family arrived in the country.

At least the Mail is being consistent - the paper has previously suggested that second- and third-generation immigrants in this country are not actually British, hence the suggestion that its headline on 29 April should read "Immigrant's grandson marries unemployed woman, moves to lavish house paid for by YOU".

The Mail also has form on this issue in Germany. Ahead of England's catastrophically poor showing in the second round of the World Cup last summer, they came up with this little gem:

There was also a nice little graphic to explain just how foreign those cheating Krauts are:


Close reading shows that of the 11 "foreign" players, six were born in Germany. Boggle-eyed Mesut Ozil is included in the list of foreigners despite being born in Germany to German parents, because his folks "are of Turkish origin". The Mail never got around to claiming that Ashley Cole (father born in Barbados), Emile Heskey (mother from Barbuda, father from Antigua) and David James (father from Jamaica) were "foreigners"...