Feature Article #1

Mendacity is Contagious

British Sky Broadcasting, as most of us are all too aware, is part of the Murdochs’ News Corp. A nasty ailment they’ve picked up from their bedfellows in Wapping has just got them into trouble again.
For they have acquired from them the compulsive habit of making up stories and saying what they like about anyone, [...]

Peter | November 17th, 2008 | Continued

Feature Article #2

A NEW SET OF TEETH FOR THE PRESS COMPLAINTS COMISSION?

In April 2009, the Press Complaints Commission will have a new boss, Baroness Buscombe. Peta Buscombe is a former lawyer of broad experience, most recently as Chief Executive of the Advertising Association, where she earned the respect of a number of admirers.

 
In many ways she looks more suitable for the job at the PCC than [...]

Peter | November 15th, 2008 | Continued

Feature Article #3

GINGER WHINGER

For an editor of a national newspaper – if you choose to call the Sun a newspaper when there’s a strong case for reclassifying it as a comic – Rebekah Wade has a pretty flaky idea of how the law works. She told the Guardian today:  
The point of concern is there is just one [...]

Peter | November 11th, 2008 | Continued

Feature Article #4

Hypocrisy in the High Street

 Hypocrisy from any quarter deserves to be exposed, and especially when it comes from the largest retailer in Britain who will do anything to increase the footfall through their stores.
Tesco have consistently vowed that they will support government in not encouraging young people to drink by offering very discounted booze.
Not so.
The most recent [...]

Peter | November 11th, 2008 | Continued

Feature Article #5

The Spluttering Man from the Soaraway Sun

It was fun on the BBC’s Today programme this morning to hear a stuttering, burbling, ill-informed Graham Dudman – managing editor of the Sun, attempting feebly to defend the right of the popular press to plaster private details of individuals’ lives all over the pages of their unpleasant little organ.
      Like every Shag-Rag editor, Dudman [...]

Peter | November 10th, 2008 | Continued

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MUCK-RAKER DACRE decries the right to personal privacy.

November 10th, 2008 • Peter • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

When Max Mosley sued the News of the World for invasion of privacy last July, and won, Paul Dacre’s paper launched a vicious personal attack against Mr Justice Eady, the High Court judge who made the ruling. He ordered his hacks to write pages of frothy-mouthed vindictive in which the judge’s personal life was attacked from every angle. It was disturbing to witness a full-grown man behaving like a small child who thought someone was trying to take away his favourite toy. (see my blog: “Why are the Mail backing the Screws?” July 27th.)

The papers for which Dacre is responsible, the Mail and the Mail on Sunday rival the News of the World in their lust for the blood of wounded celebrities. The Mail on Sunday in particular, under the specious guise of Guardian of the Moral Values of Middle England, loves to get down and dirty among the private traumas of the rich and famous.

Yesterday at the Society of Editors Annual Conference in Bristol, Dacre once again put his marker down. He attacked Mr Justice Eady for applying the Human Rights Act, which was drafted by the British, adopted by Europe and incorporated into British Law 10 years ago. He expressed concern ‘that Justice Eady is ruling that, when it comes to morality, the law in Britain is effectively neutral’ – which is exactly as it should be in the view of any democratically minded thinker.

As Dacre knows only too well, and will apply when it suits his case, personal morality, which is largely subjective, is no business whatever of National Government. You should hear him, for instance, on the subject of Sharia Law.

In a display of classic Mail weaselly disingenuousness, he claims that the HRA is in some clandestine way being used to impose a privacy law, ‘allowing the corrupt and the crooked to sleep easily in their beds’ – ignoring the fact that at no stage has the defence of ‘Public Interest’ been diminished. Any story that reveals criminal activity or exposes hypocrisy is as immune as it ever was from legal privacy strictures.

Mr Dacre challenged Gordon Brown to try to create a more specific law against invasion of privacy, while admitting that the last time the government tried to tighten up on offences of this type by introducing a clause to jail journalists convicted of data theft, they were pounced on and lobbied mercilessly by News International and Associated Newspapers – the two organisations who most depend on the freedom to pry into individual privacy. He claimed that Mr Brown was ‘sympathetic to the industry’s case’.

How about, ‘sympathetic to the idea of getting an easier ride in their papers’?

We, individual citizens of the United Kingdom, urgently need greater protection of our privacy, both from prying newspapers, like Paul Dacre’s, and from prying Government, who seek to store vast quantities of data about our phone calls and emails. And, paradoxically – hypocritically, you could say – no national newspapers get more heated in their antagonism against such government prying than Mr Dacre’s.

Obama – a brave choice, and a wise one.

November 5th, 2008 • Peter • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

Today was one of those days when provincial newspaper readers suffer from News Famine. None of the nationals on sale in South Shropshire knew that Obama had won, and they weren’t taking any chances on prognostication. For, despite his significant lead in the opinion polls, many commentators had been airing the view that when it came to that lonely moment in the polling booth, a lot of white folk would find they just couldn’t cast their vote for a black leader. 

I have been fairly sure for a couple of months that they were wrong, as it became more clear that blackness was one of the least important of Obama’s characteristics.

What has inspired millions of white Americans (and 61% of those who voted for Obama were not black or hispanic) was that they recognised a man who has integrity, gravitas, a sense of justice, and above all, sound judgement. That he is a skilled and impressive orator only adds to the mix.

Of course there are risks, given the sociological history of the US, in voting for an Afro-American – not least that his term will end fatally – but to run from those risks in favour of a candidate tainted by being of the same party as the incumbent and the disasters that surround him, would have been short-sighted and possibly terminally catastrophic for US world influence. America’s global reputation has reached what most hope will prove to be its nadir, and a radical, risky choice had to be made. As long as the US remains the most powerful nation in the world, the qualities of its leader are of paramount importance to the rest of us.

I congratulate the American electorate for giving world peace and justice a better chance through the choice they have made.

I thank them, too, for the fact that from now on it will be impossible to view any black person without being aware that beneath their other-coloured skin, they could possess the character, the talent and the drive to rise to the most influential position on Earth.

I thank them, too, for helping to remove the very last traces of a bigotry with which I, like most white westerners of the baby-boom, was shamefully, if unconsciously infected from a young age.

 

Mayo mesmerized by Fake Shiekh

November 4th, 2008 • Peter • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

It was surprising yesterday to hear Radio 5 Live invite News of the World investigative journalist Mazher Mahmood into their studios to puff his recent book. Simon Mayo’s show is usually more discerning.

Starting with a fatuous charade to obscure Mahmood’s identity, the lights in the studio were dimmed so that those viewing through the webcam wouldn’t see his visage, despite that fact that it can be seen on several well-used websites, including Wikipedia.

You might ask - Who gives a shit anyway? The man’s a busted flush. His brand of sloppy, largely fictitious journalism is less in demand than it was as the GB Public become more sophisticated (not enough yet, though; over 3 million morons still buy the News of the World every week to grubby up their Sundays.)

Brand New

October 30th, 2008 • Peter • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

Russell Brand (unlike his masters) has redeemed himself with a fulsome and thoroughly convincing apology to Andrew Sachs and the Satanic Slut. He must have been under a lot of pressure –  in the video footage on the mediaguardian site he seems to have lost weight, with something Edvard Munchian about his elongated visage. And, just as puzzling, his beard has grown substantially in the couple of weeks since his misdemeanour. Has he refrained from trimming his stubble in an act of self-deprecation.

Whatever… he’s apologised and resigned, and that’s laudable.

How not to treat a Man well?

October 29th, 2008 • Peter • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

There’s no question that Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross need their arses spanked for mobbing up one of the stars of the greatest British comedy of all time. But if not literally – how?

The BBC can’t take them off air for good; quite apart from difficulties with contracts and irritating though Ross’s ego can become, there’s no doubt that large numbers of licence-paying punters enjoy him. Perhaps some kind of ritual public humiliation for him. Maybe he should stand in a set of stocks in Trafalgar Square (or outside Broadcasting House) while passers by are invited to pelt his visage with sponges soaked in low-grade Vin Ordinaire.

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