The Daily Paedophile

I know that right-thinking people spend far much time thinking about the Daily Mail and its pernicious behaviour: the racism, the hatred of science, the cynicism, the misogyny, the hypocrisy, the obsession with celebrity and the small-minded suspicion of anything new, foreign or inconvenient to the lives of the selfish, Tory-voting, SUV-driving, golfing bourgeoisie. 

But some things it does require more than a resigned shrug. Like yesterday's illustrated article on a 'leggy beauty' snapped leaving a gymnasium strutting around like 'a model'. 

The 'leggy beauty' was in fact 8 years old. Despite the PCC rules about not featuring children going about their lives simply because their parents are famous (put in place by the PCC Executive, including the Mail's Editor in Chief Paul Dacre) and despite the Mail's long-broken pledge never to use paparazzi photos after the death of Diana, the Mail chose to buy pictures from a man who hid in some bushes outside a gym to snap pictures of an eight-year old girl solely because she has a famous mother. 

Just a quick reminder:

i) Young people should be free to complete their time at school without unnecessary intrusion.
ii) A child under 16 must not be interviewed or photographed on issues involving their own or another child’s welfare unless a custodial parent or similarly responsible adult consents.
iii) Pupils must not be approached or photographed at school without the permission of the school authorities.
iv) Minors must not be paid for material involving children’s welfare, nor parents or guardians for material about their children or wards, unless it is clearly in the child's interest.
v) Editors must not use the fame, notoriety or position of a parent or guardian as sole justification for publishing details of a child’s private life.

Then a Mail sub-editor dreamed up some words to go along with these unwarranted pictures. 

"It looks like Heidi Klum's daughter might be hoping to become a model just like her mother... Heidi's eldest Leni clearly stole the show with her workout attire..."

"All eyes on me: The eight-year-old showed off her best model walk through the parking lot..." 

There is no 'show'. Just a photographer certain he'll make a sale by going to the Mail. The only 'eyes' are his. What's a 'model walk'? It seems unlikely that this child was strutting along any imaginary catwalk.  

So far, so Mail: while the comment pages constantly decry moral decline and sexual deviance, its celebrity coverage encourages readers to sexualise and eight year old girl. There's a name for this, and it's paedophilia. 

But let's turn to Mr Dacre, and more especially, to his testimony to the Leveson Inquiry. Is he proud of the Mail, and everything that runs under its banner?

any editor who edits a paper, his values, his world view will obviously be relevant

OK, so he's cool with printing drooling copy about a little girl's legs. 

We employ the best writers, the best leader writers, the best reporters, the best executives, the best sub-editors et cetera to produce quality papers to appeal to our market

Yeah. Pics of a kid. 'Leggy beauty'. Top work. Pulitzer stuff. And if it appeals to Mail readers, then they're paedophiles too.   

But perhaps there's a public-interest defence to the 'leggy beauty' story. Has she, in fact, been a naughty girl who deserves public humiliation as a lesson to others?

a lot of celebrities, celebrity chefs, sportspeople make a lot of money by revealing their lives to the public. I believe newspapers should be given some latitude to look into their lives when they err.

A taste for titillation must explain some people's interest in Ryan Giggs' alleged extramarital activities, but for many others, cheap thrills were the last thing in their mind when they rebelled against private injunctions and remote judges. This (inaudible) majority resent public figures who think they can turn publicity on and off. We reserve the right to scrutinise and censure the conduct of people who have grown rich on our wages, or claim authority over our lives. In asserting democratic accountability, we are proclaiming our loyalty to a virtuous principle. Philosophers have developed a concept called the sanction of public opinion. They concluded that popular materiality should not ban infidelity or imprison men for betraying their wives but it could create an incentive to behave responsibly. 

People tempted to stray might be persuaded to think again by the certainty that their friends and neighbours would think less of them. Perversion in society has been with us for a long time 

Let Miss Klum stand as an example of the evils which can befall 8-yr old 'leggy beauties'. 

No. Try as I might, I still can't force this girl into the category of 'people who've made a lot of money by revealing their lives to the public' who deserve exposure 'when they err'. As far as I can she, Klum Jr simply went to the gym while in the possession of a well-known mother (though actually I'd never heard of her). I don't particularly think that Ryan Giggs's private life is a matter for moral majoritarianism, and I certainly don't think Miss Klum needs to have her picture in the paper, associated with lascivious text, to hold her accountable for being, er, related to someone famous in the vicinity of exercise machines. Mr Dacre would like you to believe that his paper is a virtual and virtuous witch-hunt against hypocrites and evil-doers, but in practice it's more usual to find pictures of the famous in their undercrackers, while the reader is invited to ogle their bodies – of legal age or not.

Perhaps there's another principle at work here. Mr Dacre is a doughty defender of Free Speech:

I was clearly trying to express the growing concern by newspapers in this country that certain areas of the jurisprudence were going in an anti-newspaper, anti-democratic direction. All right, yes, and I accused Judge Eady's judgment -- not the man -- of being amoral and arrogant. Arrogant in the sense that I felt it was worrying that one man, one judge, seemed to be handling some of the more contentious privacy cases. One man seemed to be attaching much more weight to the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act rather than the right to freedom of expression…

That's the ticket. If you don't let the Mail publish sexualised pictures of little girls, then before you know it, Freedom of Speech will be murdered and we'll all be locked up in some European Concentration Camp by Marxist Environmentalist Terrorists. Or something.  

But Dacre isn't completely hypocritical. He's a worried man:

There are broader issues that the industry needs to look at. You know, the problem of paparazzi. That worries me. I think we need to try and lookat that.

Oh OK, he is completely hypocritical. He doesn't want us to look at the 'problem' of paparazzi. He wants you to look at the material they provide. 

But perhaps little Miss Klum has attracted the attention of the Mail because she's a shameless publicity hound. After all, that's Dacre's explanation for harassing the mother of Hugh Grant's child to the point an injunction was awarded against his paper:

Mr Grant has spent his life invading his own privacy, exposing every intimate detail of his life

it's legitimate for the press to ask for a photograph or to make enquiries about when someone has a baby by a major international film star, and it worries me that you can't understand this. 

Somehow, I don't think this works with a young child leaving a gym. Her birth might be noted if that kind of thing matters to you, but 'phwoar look at the body of this kid doing something normal' isn't quite the same thing.

Perhaps Mr Dacre would like to distance himself from the Mail Online, which is the world's most popular repository of celebrity nonsense, vicious smears and judgements, and of course pictures of interest only to paedophiles:

I'm very proud of the Mail Online… we employed legitimate and correct journalistic procedures

So let's turn to the testimony of one Martin Clarke, publisher of Mail Online. Did he run these paedophilic pictures as some kind of rogue operator?

Editorially I report to Paul Dacre, the editor-in-chief. I speak to Mr Dacre most times -- most days of the week

So it seems unlikely that he'd run stuff like this knowing it would offend the powerful Editor-in-Chief. But it seems that he does think very carefully about how to present stories. 

if there's a story that I as a journalist and an editor think is really important that people should be reading but aren't reading, then it gives me the opportunity to recraft the headline orthe intro or the picture to make sure that people do read it.

Imagine you've paid for pictures of a young girl leaving a gym. It's not a great story really. So you add the detail that her mother is famous. Still no joy: the linkbait isn't working. So you add a classic Mail phrase. Perhaps 'all grown up' (which means 'underage but acquiring secondary sexual characteristics like breasts - it's never applied to males) or 'flaunting her curves' ('look at her breasts') or in this instance, 'leggy beauty'. Bingo. All the paedophile have hit your webpage and might even click on the ads you're running. 

Maybe Miss Klum deserves what she gets for being American and common. After all, Mr Clarke says Mail Online wouldn't run pictures of other people in similar circumstances:

If I can give you a specific example, Pippa Middleton, for instance, British newspapers have a voluntary embargo on pictures of her taken going about her daily business on the basis that she's a private individual, so we don't use pictures of her going to the shops or going to work. 

Everyone's entitled -- everyone is entitled to a degree of privacy, no question. 

If (at the time) the adult partner of a royal is a 'private individual', then surely the 8 year old daughter of a model, 'going about her daily business' is one too? No?

But the real reason for publishing lewd commentary with pictures of a child is simply commercial.

I have to produce a website which makes a profit because profit is the only real way of having any freedom in journalism. The only journalism that's truly free is profitable journalism

The Mail isn't run and written by paedophiles. It just wants to attract paedophiles and their money:

I've worked for the Mail, as you pointed out, on and off for 20 years. It's an ethical decent newspaper run by decent people 

The point I was making is that would be very difficult, a very difficult position to sustain if the highest standard was significantly higher, is what I'm saying. We're already at a competitive disadvantage.

If we stopped the Mail from publishing paedopholic articles about private individuals aged 8, someone else would and we'd lose the Daily Mail for ever. 

if you asked people, "Would you rather have a free Internet and  accept that every now and again somebody's going to behave badly on it, or would you rather live in North Korea where they don't have any Internet?", they would rather live in a free society and I think we have to balance the restrictions that regulation places on individual freedom

And we couldn't have that. 

Kids with no books tend to be less good at reading!

I know, what a shocking conclusion to this report. Four in ten 11-13 year old boys own no books, and 3 in 10 girls. Poor kids and those from ethnic minorities tend to own fewer books and have lower literacy rates.

I wouldn't be too bothered about the ownership figures if it wasn't that the government's closing libraries to pay for the bank bailout. I read my first school's entire library in two years, then they had to buy more just for me. That still makes me proud. I was also taking out the maximum number of books from the local library each week. Having exhausted the kids' section, I started on the adult collection, only to find my mother interfering constantly (anything secular was a point of contention). Libraries are brilliant and every kid should be marched down there once a week. If parents won't do it, schools should, like the weekly trip to the swimming pool.

So (even though I obsessively buy books), I'm not too hung up about ownership. But without free access to libraries, we need to find ways of getting books into houses and persuading parents to communicate enthusiasm for them. There are plenty of charities, but I'd target the Sure Start Centres: literacy can be included in the parenting classes. We can prescribe reading like doctors prescribe exercise or medication. Free boxes of books can be presented to every child on his or her birthday for the first 5 or 10 years: it's bound to be cheaper than remedial classes and unemployment benefit.

So: what would you put into the Big Society Library? We live in a Golden Age of children's literature: what should they be reading? I'd try to avoid anything to obviously educational: enforced reading and 'improving' literature will only lead to a book-free, drug-fuelled adulthood. I'd shovel the most shocking, lefty propaganda available at them: Kenneth Grahame, Pullman, The Phantom Tollbooth, Trease… keep adding them. If you're into children's literature, you really need to read Alison Lurie's wonderful Don't Tell The Grown-Ups: The Subversive Power of Children's Literature.

What have I received today? Belloc's translation of Joseph Bédier's reconstruction of 10th-Century Tristan and Iseult, Gottfried von Strassburg's 13th-century Tristan and the version he based it on, Tristan by Thomas (in translation) because I'm on a European Arthurian kick at the moment. Also a collection of Paris 1968 Uprising posters (Beauty is in the Street) and 2 more volumes of the DMZ series (think Baghdad transplanted to New York).

By Grabthar's Hammer!

Last year, one of my excellent students did a very dissertation on representations of women and ethnic minorities in online gaming, and on what happened to people who chose such avatars in MMORPGs.

Sad to say, someone's just summarised her thesis one one sheet of paper (educational illustrations here). It's sad but true.

Meanwhile, if you have a female toddler, how about buying her a bikini-line shaving kit? You can't start them too young…

(Thanks to Sociological Images for these).

The little darlings

I'm not a parent, perhaps mercifully ("Shut up, and eat your Guardian"), but even a neutral observer like me is surely right to despair confronted with the kind of parenting that passes as acceptable;

item 1: little girl wearing a t-shirt bearing the legend 'born to be bored'. The poor child. She wasn't born to be bored - you earn that by getting a job, much later. In the meantime, why not try to amuse and educate your kids? Unless, of course, this was a subversive existentialist statement, and the pink colour referred to the inevitable gender-stereotyping which leaves girls to play with dolls and keep house.

item 2: the local paper declares that not only are kids going to a 'prom', as though this is somewhere in Nebraska, but that one child's parents are sending her there in a helicopter, because nothing spreads love like massively polluting your home town, scaring everyone's pets and deafening the neighbours in the pursuit of making your friends jealous. The child isn't to blame - she's a product of her disgusting, arrogant, selfish parents.

One disgusting peddler of pollution says this:

Your school prom is your last chance to make an impression on your classmates and one of your last chances to enjoy that magical feeling of being on top of the world with the rest of your life in front of you and endless possibilities open to you.

Yes, that's right kids. Rub your friends' and teachers' faces in this because let's face it, your parents are richer than they are, and life's shit from now on.

Not only will people have to look twice when you show them your pics

That's right. In twenty years' time when you've run out of conversation, you can show your golfing 'friends' pictures of your last day at school, and they'll be really, really impressed because you had rich selfish parents.

Not only that:

Plus, a helicopter does not seat upwards of ten or twenty people like many party bus limousines your friends will be hiring for their prom night. Therefore, you and your date have the chance to enjoy each other’s company and your special prom night flight without any interruptions. 

What they're really saying is: 'You're legal. Get pissed. Join the mile-high club. Not even your parents can stop you from way down there'.

Though there may be another option for your special prom night flight, another aspect of the American school experience is hinted at here:

So what better way to capture that feeling of being on top of the world, and go out on a high, than to arrive at your school prom in a helicopter?

you’ll also have the opportunity to take some shots of your home, your town and even your classmates, from on high.

Shades of Vietnam shot through with any one of a number of high school massacres… They've already explicitly said that this is the high point of your life. If school's been rubbish, why not approach the Prom Night with Death From Above in mind? You could play Ride of the Valkyries while taking 'some shots'.

It's enough to make me acquire ground-to-air missiles.