The Daily White Male Reaches for the Stars

You may remember from some months ago, outrage about the way the Daily Mail covered the appearance of two eminent scientists on Newsnight:

Newsnight's Guardian-trained editor, Ian Katz, is keen on diversity.
So, two women were invited to comment on the report about (white, male) American scientists who’ve detected the origins of the universe – giggling Sky at Night pre-senter Maggie Aderin-Pocock and Sri Lanka-born astronomer Hiranya Peiris.

Obviously only people indoctrinated by those Commie Feminists at the Guardian care about diversity. Thus he deliberately searched the astronomy and astrophysics worlds until he found 'two women' – we'll just have to live with the 'giggling', just as the Mail's (white, male) editor has to cope with constantly being referred to as 'simpering' whenever he flaunts his luscious curves on the comment pages. And what women he found: a giggling TV presenter and a foreigner.

Or as we know them, Dr Maggie Aderin Pocock, research fellow at UCL's Department of Science and Technology Studies, inventor, managing director of Science Innovation Ltd and James Webb Telescope instrument designer, and Dr Hiranya Peiris,  

Reader in Astronomy in the Astrophysics Group in the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy at UCL. I am also the coordinator of the CosmicDawn project, funded by theEuropean Research Council under the FP7 Ideas programme.

Prior to becoming a Lecturer in Cosmology at UCL in 2009, I was an STFC Advanced Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy,University of Cambridge and a Junior Research Fellow at King's College Cambridge. Previously, I was a Hubble Fellowin the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at theUniversity of Chicago. I did my postgraduate research at theDepartment of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University.

Clearly these two were just plucked from a list for their looks, and not at all for their incredible knowledge of the subject.

And talking of incredible knowledge, what about this 'white, male' bit? I looked up the authors of the research they talked about. It took literally seconds. Turns out that this international BICEP2 partnership consisted of men and women of almost every ethnic grouping. The Mail journalist simply assumed that clever science can only have been the product of 'white, male' minds.

So I complained to the Press Complaints Commission, and on Friday, 2 days before it was replaced by IPSO, I got a reply. Guess how apologetic the Mail is feeling!

The newspaper explained that its columnist’s focus on gender and ethnicity was designed to be nothing more than a “cheeky reference” to the BBC’s alleged political correctness. In the columnist’s view, the selection of Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock and Dr Hiranya Peiris to comment on the BICEP2 (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarisation) study was another such example of this institutional approach.

I see. So you can print untruths as long as they're 'cheeky'. And obviously a professional journalist lacks both the skills and the motivation to quickly Google the scientists' names to see if they are actually fully qualified to comment on a subject, in pursuit of his job.

The resulting outrage did push the Mail to publish a partial retraction of the factual errors it hadn't bothered to check before publication

The newspaper took a number of measures to address the situation: the managing editor wrote to both Dr Aderin-Pocock and Dr Peiris; a letter criticising the columnist’s argument was published the following day; its columnist later explicitly noted both scientists expertise, and competence to comment on the study; and, a correction was published promptly in the newspaper Corrections & clarifications column which acknowledged that the BICEP2 study was “conducted by a diverse team of astronomers from around the world”, and which “apologis[ed] for any suggestion to the contrary”. The latter measure was sufficient to meet the newspaper’s obligation under Clause 1 (ii) of the Code, to correct significantly misleading information.

but isn't really sorry:

The columnist’s suggestion that Dr Aderin-Pocock and Dr Peiris were specifically selected for the Newsnight programme because of “political correctness” was clearly presented as his own comment and conjecture which, under Clause 1 (iii) and the principle of freedom of expression, he was entitled to share with readers. There was, therefore, no breach of the Code in publishing that suggestion. However, the subsequent correction of the factual inaccuracy regarding the BICEP2 team and the acknowledgment of both experts’ expertise will have allowed readers to assess the suggestion in a new light.

Who needs evidence when conjecture will do? On the main point of my complaint, they've got away scot-free:

Under Clause 12 (Discrimination) (ii) of the Code, “details of an individual’s race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story”.  

I suggested that coverage of a scientific discovery did not require discussion of the scientists' (or scientific commentators') sexes or ethnicities. The Press Complaints Commission said:

While the terms of Clause 12 (ii) do not cover irrelevant references to gender, the Commission would need to have received a complaint from a member, or members of the BICEP2 team, or Dr Aderin-Pocock or Dr Peiris in order to consider the complaint about [word omitted: race or colour?] under this Clause. In the absence of any such complaints, the Commission could not comment further. 

So according to the PCC, you can lie and fantasise to your heart's content as long as the specific individuals are too depressed, worn-out or distant to personally complain about your disgusting behaviour. The rest of us just have to let them get on with it. In essence, the Daily Mail's defence is that their reportage is just 'banter'.

Can IPSO be any worse?

Student Grant

I knew last night's edition of Question Time would be a humdinger. Left-leaning Medhi Hasan versus the Daily Mail's Quentin Letts days after that paper called Miliband Sr. 'evil' promised fireworks, and we got them.



So that was fun. But for me, the presence of Grant Shapps, MP, Conservative Party Chairman and possible money-launderer, was equally attractive. You see, Grant and I have history. It was me who complained to the Advertising Standards about his shady company's practice of putting together crappy little money-making documents, selling them under the names of 'Michael Green MP' and other pseudonyms, and proclaiming endorsements from large numbers of people who don't exist. As a result, Shapps agreed to withdraw the adverts rather than face an ASA ruling. His companies were also banned from Google's rankings for 'scraping': stealing other sites' copy to attract clicks.

The most amusing bit was when Shapps was asked by the media about my complaint: he dismissed it as 'politically motivated', which seems a bit strange coming from a man who has devoted at least one of his personalities to being an MP and Chairman of Britain's oldest political parties.

So as you can imagine, I look forward to Grant's appearances on shows like QT with considerable relish. For me, the English language developed solely to provide the word 'glib' for application to Mr Shapps. Last night's episode was a true vintage. Smug, sneering, evasive, patronising, facetious and mendacious, good old Grant gave a master-class in modern Conservative manners.

But amongst all the other fun, one sentence Grant uttered caught my attention. While evading any discussion of the economy in favour of another unfounded attack on Keynesianism, he said to Yvette Cooper of the Labour Party 'You can't just magic money from nowhere' (around the 50 minute mark). 'That's funny', I thought. I have a dim memory of Grant Shapps' alter ego Michael Green insisting (for money) that you really can. In fact, isn't that his entire business model?

Two minutes later, I find this delightful document from the Shapps family firm, HowToCorp.

And what a magnificent opus it is:

Michael Green spent 12 years building his conventional offline business before turning his hand to online marketing on a strictly part-time basis.
And from a standing start – as recently as February 2002 – Michael has created his online How To Corp business empire! 

Part-time is right!

And how does one make all this money?

you can make money overnight, you can have success, you can earn a 6 figure income, you can do all of these things 

Easy: sack your staff:

I have been in the printing business for 12 years, you could not find a more traditional, conventional business than printing, you have stock, you have paper, people and management, all those personnel issues and so on....
What attracted me to the internet business model is that I can do away with all of those things and I can make as much money or more money, but it goes directly into my pocket, it doesn't go to anyone else, I don't need staff, I don't need premises. 

The rest of this dismal document is blindingly obvious business tips of the kind you get from 5 minutes' Googling, although I was amused by the suggestion that other internet marketers can't be trusted:

very well known names in internet marketing…sell similar 'How To' products and I think they are very dishonest 

Not like Grant/Michael at all. Interestingly, he also plugs 'Costly Internet Blunders' by one 'Rick Adams', also published by the Shapps company. Is Rick actually Grant? Who can tell? But that particular volume is no longer available. Perhaps it's being updated to include the sorry tale of Grant Shapps.

'Michael Green' is a very honest man. It says so here:

Protect your own success by preventing others from stealing what’s rightfully yours.

I am seeing people in real time trying to steal my products 

And yet here's the Daily Telegraph reporting that his company has been caught plagiarising software. I hope Grant's having a serious word with…himself.

But having read all 24 pages of Michael Green's guide to making a mint, what actually is the secret? Well, here we go! All you need to do is

Click Here And Discover How To Make 'Real' Money Online By Developing & Selling Your Very Own Products.
Find Out About Michael Green's Private System For Creating Wealth - Now Revealed For The First Time In His Amazing New Easy-To-Follow Toolkit. 

That's right. The big secret is that you need to buy another Michael Green business guide.

Ironically, given that 'Michael Green' is actually a senior government politician, you can still get 'How To Bounce Back From Recession', which I presume the rest of the Conservative Party hasn't read, or we'd all be rich again.

Remember, folks: there's an election in 2015.

We get Mail

Well after yesterday's relaxing and non-political blog-post, I'm sorry to say that we have to return to bitter and impotent ranting, because everything's gone wrong.

Firstly over the pond our American cousins – or the Republican half – have decided that they don't need democracy any more. Instead they've shut down the government (except for the NSA spying, the drone strikes and Guantanamo: just the good bits like paying employees and opening the Statue of Liberty).

Why? Because the Republicans won't pass a budget unless Obama suspends his health insurance laws. You know, the laws that were passed four years ago by a democratically elected government, then upheld by the Supreme Court, then endorsed by the electorate when Obama was re-elected. That looks like the will of the people to me, but the Republican Party has decided that it would rather suspend an entire country's normal operations than allow people to have a weak and (from our perspective) rather poor mode of health provision. It's a matter of principle, that principle being your right as an American to sicken and die on the street without Big Guvmint interfering with their communist dialysis machines and defibrillators.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has finally gone off the deep end. It's always been evil, but now it's added wild and vicious idiocy to the mix. On Sunday, it published an article (The Man Who Hated Britain) about Ed Miliband's father, who died in 1994. Ralph Miliband was a Belgian who in 1940 at the age of 16 fled the Nazi invasion by the skin of his teeth, thus avoiding the fate of many of his Jewish family, murdered in the concentration camps. He ended up in London, working hard, pursuing an education and trying to come to terms with a world war and personal tragedy. The Mail has a single diary entry, four lines long, from when he was 17, in which he records a few caustic thoughts about British isolationism and imperialism.

'The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world . . . you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent . . . To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.'

I don't know about you, but I go red and wish the ground would swallow me up whenever I think about anything I said or did at that age. And I don't have a body of beautifully-argued political science to form my adult oeuvre, as Ralph did.

What happened to Ralph Miliband? By the time he was 20, he'd decided that whatever Britain's faults were, it represented Europe's best hope for freedom and he joined the Royal Navy, serving with distinction. Afterwards, he became a leading socialist thinker (I strongly recommend his Parliamentary Socialism). Despite the Mail's best efforts to claim, Ralph utterly failed to convince his sons that the Labour Party was no longer a useful tool in the struggle for socialism. Ralph wasn't a communist, let alone the Stalinist monster the Mail claims: but he was a proper socialist, unlike David and Ed.

What was the Mail doing around the time Ralph Miliband arrived on these shores as one of the millions suffering at the hands of one of the world's most evil regimes?

Er… supporting the Nazis, both German and British. Here's it's owner proclaiming his support for Oswald Mosley's anti-semitic, pro-Nazi British Union of Fascists.

And here he is having a cozy chat with Adolf Hitler:

And here he is in another newspaper again calling for fascism in the UK. Had he succeeded, Ralph Miliband would no doubt have been gassed in a concentration camp on Salisbury Plain or the Yorkshire Moors and the camp guards would all have been Mail readers only to eager to help.

Today, the Mail grudgingly gave space to a rebuttal by Ed Miliband, and surrounded it by an editorial on Ralph's 'Evil Legacy' and a re-run of the original hatchet job, with the added detail that Ralph is buried only a few yards from Karl Marx, the traitorous bastard. Apparently the man lampooned last week as Wallace (of Gromit fame) is 'menacing' and determined to 'drive a hammer and sickle through the heart of the nation'. In Mail land, you're a traitor if your father is a) a foreigner and b) dreams of a different political philosophy. I detect a clear line of inheritance from the 30s Mail fascism to the smearing articles they're publishing today. Their problem with Ralph Miliband is that he was foreign and intellectual: terms repeatedly used to cover anti-semitism. The phrase used in the 30s was 'rootless cosmopolitans': men and women with no national allegiance and a set of ideas opposed to 

the values, traditions and institutions — including our great schools, the Church, the Army and even the Sunday papers — that made Britain the safe and free nation in which he and his family flourished

Except that – oops, easily done – that list of Great British Institutions is taken from today's attack on Milibands Senior and Junior. Personally, I too oppose the 'great' (i.e. fee-paying) schools, the Established Church, the army which tortures and bombs its way round Ireland, the Empire, Iraq and Afghanistan, and I especially despise the tabloid newspapers which spent the last decade bribing, bugging and stealing. Today's Mail is still, at heart, a nasty-minded, anti-semitic toad. 

But I can think of one foreigner at the heart of the Daily Mail, a man who has done more damage to this country than any forgotten and unregarded political scientist. A man who, rather than pay his taxes to keep this great country on the road, claims to be French… for tax purposes. That man is Viscount Rothermere. Yes, he has a British title and yes, his main residence is a massive mansion in Wiltshire, but for legal purposes, he's discovered that he's French. How very patriotic. 

And that's not all. You'd think that the Mail, which has always wrapped itself in the Union Flag, would be horrified by its owner avoiding his responsibilities. See, for example, this campaign from the 1920s:

Sadly, racism and consistency don't go together. Whisper it, but the Daily Mail isn't a British paper. It's owned by a series of tax-avoiding Bermudan and Jersey shell companies to ensure that while it robustly lobbies on a range of political perspectives, it's never going to be subject to the same laws as the rest of us - and yet it calls Ralph Miliband The Man Who Hated Britain. Very patriotic!

There is a positive side to this story. Ed Miliband, while not my kind of socialist (i.e. not a socialist) has repeatedly displayed considerable backbone in standing up to this kind of bile. He demanded rebuttal space in the rag to demonstrate that his father did in fact love the UK for which he fought with distinction, and goes on to identify the true poison in British politics: overmighty press barons and their vicious, ad hominem attacks. I'm of course disappointed that Ed feels the need to adopt the language of kneejerk patriotism, and most especially by the (not entirely surprising) assertion that:

I want to make capitalism work for working people, not destroy it.

but that's because I'd rather Ralph had led the country than most other people. But I'm impressed with Ed here, and rather less impressed with David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt and the other Tories who've been sniggered and quietly applauding the Mail's piece.

The other bright side is that this vile, unsubtle, bilious and incoherent attack, clearly carried out in connivance with the Conservative Party, shows that the right is genuinely scared of Ed Miliband and the Labour Party. They've dropped all pretence of principled opposition, fighting on the battleground of ideas, contrasting policies: they've gone right back to the days of the Zinoviev letter and the hysterical scaremongering of a class which knows things are falling apart at the seams. This is panic, but it's a panic which reveals the festering insecurities of a party and a newspaper which have happily hacked, bugged and burgled their way around Britain for too long and now spies Nemesis approaching in the form of a mild-mannered Miliband who has rather admirably decided that he's going to take them on. Once you've decided that the only line of attack is to assert that a dead man was once a) foreign and b) opposed jingoism, you've pretty much given up on any positive vision and turned back to spreading fear and lies.

What links the US government shutdown and the Mail? Simply that their political strategies are identical. Having failed ideologically, they have to invent boogeymen to scare the children. They have no ideas, only the power to spread fear and loathing. It's poisonous, and it will subvert even the lily-livered democracy we have left. What happens if the Tea Party and the Mail get their way? It won't be back to an imagined paradise of Mom'n'Pop niceness and Neighbourhood Watch: it'll be corporate terrorism, joblessness, mistrust and social decay. Have we learned nothing from the 80s Culture Wars?

Update: I gather that Peter Rhodes has used this blog as a source for snide comment in his awful little column in the local rag. Just to be clear Peter: I'm glad you're a reader, because you really, really need the education provided here, but I'm entirely unimpressed with this, and with everything you write. You are a hate-fuelled bigot with the emotional and cultural range of a slug. 

History Corner: a satire special for the Daily Mail.

For what seems like (but can't be) the fifth week running, the Mail is criticising the breasts and/or employment of people who celebrated Margaret Thatcher's demise. Some of these headlines are hard to make up.






It's also running a campaign to force the BBC to censor the Pop Charts because some people are marking the event by purchasing Judy Garland's 'Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead'. I don't want to add to their mental stress, but it was written by a lefty!

Personally, I prefer the Klaus Nomi version:

Now, there's a certain irony in the Mail (and the Telegraph, amongst others) calling for censorship. Why? Because these are the newspapers leading the charge against any kind of statutory regulation of the press. The Mail also got very, very angry when the BBC edited out a couple of racial epithets from a (1970s) Fawlty Towers episode and from an old Elvis Costello song: "If we let the BBC wield censor’s scissors whenever they like they will get away with being as imperious, bossy & bullying as Sybil Fawlty" it said. 'Censorship that shames the BBC', it said. 'A grim day for all those who value freedom', it said. What else? 'For centuries men and women fought and died for freedom of expression. Who are Miliband and Clegg to throw it away?' It also gave space to Peter Hitchens to announce that 'David Cameron ... will be remembered mainly as the man who brought censorship back to Britain'. Melanie Phillips rounded on Hacked Off and its influence: 'unelected campaigners' trying to hijack the public sphere in piece titled, with absolutely no irony at all, 'The Press is the last bastion of free thinking that the Left has not managed to conquer. Until now'.

And now for a little perspective. Firstly, the British have a long tradition of apparently tasteless public celebrations of deaths. I'm not sure if you know, but every year on November 5th, British people burn effigies of Guy Fawkes, who was tortured and murdered by the state after his failed attempt to blow up Parliament. Similar street parties were held when Mary Queen of Scots died, and usually followed the demise of unpopular rulers and regimes. A large number of traitors celebrated the American victory in the War of Independence in 1783, which they saw as a blow against imperialism and oppression shortly to be imported to Britain: imagine the Mail's reaction if it had existed then. Also, when George VI toured the Blitzed East End during WW2, it was presented as a triumphant bonding moment: in actuality, large numbers of ungrateful Cockneys roundly booed the monarch. A generation or two before, Queen Victoria was so unpopular that her advisors genuinely feared revolution.

And that's just the common herd. If the Mail is so upset by a song from a musical, imagine their shock if they'd ever seen any eighteenth-century satirical cartoons, or read poetry, from Byron to Pope. Here, for example, is Hogarth's Sir Francis Dashwood At His Devotions: Dashwood was a notorious sexual libertine, member of the Hellfire Club, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. You may notice that his Bible has been replaced with a naked woman and an erotic volume:



Here's another Hogarth, from the Times of 7th September 1763, in which he attacks the recently fired prime minister William Pitt, the man on stilts trying to 'fan the flames' of war. The heroic fireman is meant to be either his successor Bute, or the King, desperately trying to prevent war from spreading throughout Europe, while those firing on him are Pitt's political and media supporters:



Here's Gillray's attack on the Prince Regent, whom he considered a greedy, dissolute scoundrel (later immortalised in Blackadder the Third. This one is A Voluptuary Under The Horrors of Digestion:



Here's another one of the Prince Regent, by arch-conservative George Cruikshank:




And then we move on to literary satire. How about Byron's lines on the hated and arch-reactionary PM Viscount Castlereagh, who killed himself?

Epigram

So Castlereagh has cut his throat! - the worst
of this is, that his own was not the first.
So he has cut his throat at last! He? Who?
The man who cut his country's long ago.

Dedication to 'Don Juan'.

Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant
Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin's gore,
And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,
Transferred to gorge upon a sister shore
The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want,
With just enough of talent, and no more,
To lengthen fetters by another fixed,
And offer poison long already mixed.


Posterity will ne'er survey
a Nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss!

And of course Shelley's lines on Castlereagh in 'The Mask of Anarchy', about the Peterloo Massacre:

I met Murder on the way –
He had a mask like Castlereagh –
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew…

There was also an outpouring of joy at the assassination of Villiers, Duke of Buckingham - lots more here.

'A Satire on the D of B'

For all thy quondam power, thy name shall bee
For ever hateful to posteritie.
Yet I could wish one thing for thee, belowe,
In those infernall shades where thou do'st goe,
Thou might'st a purgatorie finde, wherein
A thousand yeares mighte expiate thy sinne,
By purging those deepe staines, and vices fowle,
Which in thy life-time did infect thy soule,
That soe, at last, thou might'st enjoy that blisse,
Where our Creator and Redeemer is.

'Prosopopeia':

I that my countrey did betray,
Undid that king that let mee sway
His sceptre as I pleas'd; brought downe
The glorie of the English crowne
The courtiers' bane, the countries' hate,
An agent for the Spanish state;
The Romists' frend, the gospells' foe,
The Church and kingdomes overthrowe;
Heere a damned carcase dwell,
'Till my soule returne from hell.
With Judas then I shall inherit,
Such portion as all traytors meritt.
If heaven admitt of treason, pride, and lust,
Expect my spotted soule among the iust.

Here's a poem in praise of Mr Felton, the assassin:

Awake, sad Brittaine, and advance at last
Thy drooping head: let all thy sorrowes past
Bee drown'd, and sunke with their owne teares; and now
O're-looke thy foes with a triumphant brow.
Thy foe, Spaine's agent, Holland's bane, Rome's freind,
By one victorious hand receiv'd his end.
Live ever, Felton: thou hast turn'd to dust,
Treason, ambition, murther, pride and lust.

I could also point you in the direction of Alexander Pope, but I think instead I'll drop the nuclear bomb of satire: the Earl of Rochester's 1673 'Satyre on Charles II', which he supposedly accidentally handed to the king himself… before fleeing the country.

Warning: this contains words not normally seen in the Daily Mail.

I' th' isle of Britain, long since famous grown
For breeding the best cunts in Christendom,
There reigns, and oh! long may he reign and thrive,
The easiest King and best-bred man alive.
Him no ambition moves to get renown
Like the French fool, that wanders up and down
Starving his people, hazarding his crown.
Peace is his aim, his gentleness is such,
And love he loves, for he loves fucking much.
---Nor are his high desires above his strength:
His scepter and his prick are of a length;
And she may sway the one who plays with th' other,
And make him little wiser than his brother.
Poor prince! thy prick, like thy buffoons at Court,
Will govern thee because it makes thee sport.
'Tis sure the sauciest prick that e'er did swive,
The proudest, peremptoriest prick alive.
Though safety, law, religion, life lay on 't,
'Twould break through all to make its way to cunt.
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
---To Carwell, the most dear of all his dears,
The best relief of his declining years,
Oft he bewails his fortune, and her fate:
To love so well, and be beloved so late.
For though in her he settles well his tarse,
Yet his dull, graceless ballocks hang an arse.
This you'd believe, had I but time to tell ye
The pains it costs to poor, laborious Nelly,
Whilst she employs hands, fingers, mouth, and thighs,
Ere she can raise the member she enjoys.
---All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,
---From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.

So on balance, I think the right is rather over-reacting to some people spending 79p on a song from a musical.

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. 

'All Grown Up': the politics edition

A while back, I joked on Twitter that the Daily Mail's paedophilic tendencies (look out for 'all grown up', which means 'everybody look at this child's breasts') meant that its coverage of Obama's election victory would major on lubricious references to his underage daughters' appearances. LULZ all round from my Twitter massive (currently 1001 strong).

In an idle moment, I decided to test my thesis.

Mommy's girl grown up: How Malia Obama has blossomed from an awkward teen to America's next  icon as she follows in the First Lady's footsteps

Oh dear. I won't reproduce the images partly because that's how the Mail fills its pages, and because I know my readers aren't the type to leer over little girls.

Looking every bit as poised and elegant as her mother, the long-limbed first daughter has taken the awkward out of adolescence with ease.

That's right. Mommy's legal. And Malia looks just like her. So it's OK to lick your screen in a frenzy of lust. Get a load of those legs!

the 14-year-old blossoming from the President's wide-eyed 'baby' into a self-assured young woman

Oh yeah. You know what they're saying. 'Blossoming'. She's open for business, ladies and gentlemen.

'The torch has been passed,' said the designer Gregory Parkinson, who sent out a press release after a recent sighting of the White House's resident teenager

'I have every right to alert the nation to the sexual development of a 14 year-old girl' said paedophile-enabling attention-seeker Gregory Parkinson as though he had any connection to the total stranger at all, 'and rags like the Daily Mail will lap it up'.

Lucky magazine's executive fashion director, Alexis Bryan Morgan, told USA Today: 'I'm hard pressed to think of anyone, period, who had such great style potential at 14.

'It's any hack's right to comment on the physique of a teenage girl whose father is politically important' said Alexis Bryan Morgan. 'Mindless speculation and ludicrous statements about a child's 'style potential' is what modern journalism is all about. Come round to my house: I've a child even younger and you're welcome to write what you want. Oil up, gents!'

In case your excitement is waning, back to the body:

she embraces her lean figure
'She's smart in that she seems to be aware so many eyes are on her

Wonder how that came about?

Since turning 14 on Independence Day, she has slowly started to tick off some age-appropriate milestones - like her first mobile phone

Ah yes. The 'milestones' are coming. And we know there's one particular milestone the Mail has in mind. Like the Sun's countdown to Charlotte Church's age of consent. Though from the text, the legal niceties don't seem so important to the paper or its writers.

In fact, it seems the only person struggling with Malia's coming-of-age is the President himself

In another piece about how the Obamas try to keep their children out of the public eye (illustrated with dozens more photos), the old grump is quoted as saying:

'I'm very keen on protecting her privacy'.

What an old fuddy-duddy he must be, getting all huffy when popular newspapers invite readers to linger over the 'long-limbed' child. After all, we all know that any adolescent's psychological health is aided by being leched over in the press. 

I wonder how all this (and the dozens of accompanying photographs) fit the PCC code section 6 clause 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.

On other pages: 'Outrage as more celebrity paedos outed'.

Welcome to the Daily Hate

Good morning everybody. Or it will be until you finish reading this. 

I don't normally draw your attention to the Daily Mail mostly because we all know what it's like: racist, bigoted, impervious to evidence yada yada yada. But sometimes it's good to be reminded what 4 million people think is a reasonable newspaper. I read these pieces so you don't have to. 

Two articles came to my attention this week. One was on the Leveson Report, which is released on Thursday. The Mail doesn't like it because the Mail and the Mail on Sunday were the biggest customers of Steve Whittamore, the go-to guy for illegal activities, and because the Mail's stock in trade is pictures of pubescent girls in bikinis with paedophilic straplines like 'all grown up'. 

This particular report was notable for its retro qualities. Yes, it's back to the Mail's 1930s heyday:

Mr Boles, who came under fire in the press earlier this year after he claimed expenses for lessons to learn his male partner’s native Hebrew. 

Brian Leveson PC [Privy Council] QC is a Liverpool-born, Oxford-educated Orthodox Jewish lawyer and judge

Poor Nick Boles. Yes, he's corrupt Tory scum, but the Mail's editor must have orgasmed at the chance to combine homophobia and anti-semitism. And of course Mr Leveson's religious identity is completely relevant to his report. 'Not one of us, don't you know'.

The second piece was today's effort by Roger Lewis, 'Tyranny of the Welsh Taliban… the Nutty Welsh Language Society'. Agreed, Wales is a hilly country and one that's been frequently invaded by the English, but most of us would think that there the similarity ends. Unlike Afghanistan under the Taliban, the Welsh women I know are rarely genitally mutilated and often enjoy a foaming pint of Brains (they're not zombies, overseas readers: it's a local beer). British helicopters are rarely shot down over the Brecon Beacons and Heddlu Cymraeg (the Welsh Police) tend not to shoot their English colleagues in 'blue-on-blue' attacks. 

No, Mr Lewis is upset that some Welsh people still speak Welsh, and that they finally have a limited legal right to access some services in Welsh. 

He's not big on consistency or logic, is Mr Lewis:

In South Wales, where I am from, there was never any tradition of Welsh speaking. And at the turn of the last century, though my great-grandparents spoke Welsh to each other.

So nobody spoke Welsh there ever. Except for his great-grandparents. 

English was seen as the language of the future, Welsh as the sign of regional backwardness. In some respects, I rather fancy knowing more Welsh. It would appeal to my hankering after lost things, like steam trains or gas chandeliers.

Ah yes. The Matthew Arnold Manoeuvre. He said this in 1867 in 'On the Study of Celtic Literature'. It should be a nice hobby, he said, but for the Welsh to get on in the world, they needed to speak English, like the rest of the world was being made to. At the point of a bayonet. It's a utilitarian position, and one enunciated usually by a dominant hegemony and its converts. It existed on the left too: socialists in Wales saw the language as dividing them from the global proletariat. Notions of cultural value and autonomy were not then - and in the Mail now - considered worthy of attention. 

Back to Mr Lewis:

Welsh has become a political and divisive weapon in the principality

He doesn't find time to mention the 400 years in which Welsh was banned in education, public service and the law. If any language was a 'political weapon', it was of course English. 

Now, we learn that at one school in  Ceredigion - which used to be quite happily  Cardiganshire when I was a lad - the children are not allowed to use  the toilet unless they ask the teacher in Welsh.

Obviously there's no link or evidence offered here, but my guess is that it's either a Welsh-language school, or a Welsh-language class. But at least these evil Welsh fascists aren't using the 'Welsh Not': the board hung round the neck of anyone caught using Welsh. The last one to wear it by the end of the day got an entirely utilitarian beating.

Some children are, it seems, too frightened to speak English, even at home. This sort of thing would have done the Warsaw Pact proud. It is despicable.

At least he's dropped the Afghanistan reference. Evidence? None. Warsaw Pact? Eh? Polish seems to be thriving. So are Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. In fact the Soviet Union seems to have more regard for its minority languages than the UK.

But what can be done about a place that now states, on job applications, 'Welsh speaker preferred'? Unless you are willing to go to classes and learn Welsh, what such xenophobia means in practice is that third-rate local people get the posts - as doctors, teachers, psychologists, architects, and so forth.

That's right. Anyone who speaks another language is third class in Mail world. Especially if it's Welsh. Because obviously speaking two languages (all Welsh-speakers can speak English as a second language) is a sign of mental imbecility. Even if you've managed to qualify as a doctor… in your second language because there are currently no Welsh-language medical degrees available: you're a loser. And obviously the same applies to all the other professions: being taught in Welsh makes them intrinsically inferior. 

But Roger's got academia on his side!

I asked a former colleague of mine at Oxford, whose speciality was changing speech habits in the United Kingdom from 1800 to 1914. He explained that an analysis of the late 19th-century census data revealed that Welsh-speaking was in steep decline and that, left to its own devices, the language would have 'died of inanition because Welsh people themselves were casting it off as a mark of backwardness'.  

Actually, he doesn't. Lewis doesn't exactly claim his friend is an Oxford University academic. He was 'at Oxford' with Roger and his 'speciality' may well have been an undergraduate one. He's wrong, anyway. Current scholarship says that industrialism saved the Welsh language. With plenty of jobs in the mines and steelworks, Welsh people could stay in Wales rather than emigrate to Anglophone places. The proportion of Welsh-speakers dropped until recent decades, but the number of Welsh-speakers has risen consistently since the mid-19th century. 

Welsh isn't dying of 'inanition'. It's struggled in the face of official censure, but in the streets it's thriving, especially in the North. A language survives when it's used to work and play: my last visit to Bangor certainly demonstrated that it's in – literally – rude health. Hordes of lads and ladettes were drinking, fighting and shagging in slangy Welsh. If you can do that, you've nothing to worry about. Where Welsh is struggling is those areas in which English second-home owners drive up property prices and drive out working-class Welsh-speakers. 'Twas always thus. 

But never mind that. We get to the heart of the matter: Roger Lewis's self-hating racism.

This is what those teachers in  Ceredigion - and those who support them - can't accept: what my friend at Oxford called 'the evident cultural superiority of English', i.e. that  English has, for example, a richer  literature, going right across  the world, from Irish writers such  as Shaw or Wilde to everyone  in America.

Firstly, English doesn't have a 'richer literature'. It has a bigger literature - as you'd expect from a larger English and English-speaking diaspora, one which colonised empty places and displaced or subjugated the populations of un-empty ones. Why did Wilde and Shaw speak English? Because the Irish language was banned and burned too. But Roger is desperate not to mention the link between culture and military or economic power. No, it's all about essential qualities. I wonder who else he thinks is 'inferior'? The French? Jews? Black people?

He makes the astonishing assertion. 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as of yet there isn't a Welsh Shakespeare.

This of course misunderstands Shakespeare as much as it displays his ignorance of Welsh culture. Shakespeare was largely unperformed for 200 years after his death, and the Victorians liked to tack happy endings onto the tragedies. Furthermore, while there are world-class Welsh authors, the literary culture was different: many of the greatest texts are accumulations of the work of anonymous writers because authorship is a function of a capitalist and individualist culture which didn't reach Wales until later. Drama wasn't a feature of Welsh literature until recently for religious reasons, and because Welsh economic and social development didn't provide space for the form. Poetry was the thing, and what magnificent poetry there was. 

I'd point him in the direction of the Mabinogion, Dafydd ap Gwilym, Kate Roberts, Williams Pantycelyn, Ann Griffiths, Ceiriog, Wiliam Owen Roberts (amazing, postmodern) amongst a host of others. 

So how did Welsh survive, according to Roger?

the Liberal Government in 1907 created a  Welsh Department of the Board of Education, which 'captured state resources' i.e. taxpayers' loot, and allowed Welsh to be taught in the schools and artificially revived.

Right. Because Welsh-speakers aren't taxpayers, are they (and never mind that Welsh? And what damage they did!

Tenby was always Tenby, for example, until a few years ago when it suddenly became  Dynbych-y-Pysgod - a bit of nonsense about 'bay of the little fishes'.

OK… so you'd rather have a misheard translation of a name with a specific meaning than the actual name? Let's all call London 'Londres', shall we Roger?

Most depressingly, Roger seems to place no value on any kind of cultural diversity. Let's get rid of Welsh, he says. Flemish next? Then Dutch? Perhaps we might then dispose of German and the Scandinavian languages. Who needs them? We can then get rid of Spanish and Russian, and before long, we're left with the Queen's English, proud medium of the Daily Mail and all who sail in her. 

Separating news from comment

I've blogged about this before, so I'll keep it brief. Various media luminaries are telling Leveson that it's hard to keep news and comment separate, and that newspapers haven't being doing so very well.

This reminded me of this story in the Daily Mail:

Which as you can see is in the 'News' section, and was written by no fewer than five reporters. It went on to claim that:

Which despite the use of emotive language ('police fled', 'rampage') and the total absence of evidence (many other newspapers said that the police van was unattended), is clearly written as fact, rather than comment. I complained about numerous aspects of this to the PCC. The response (read the link above), was written by… the editor of the Mail on Sunday and is a delightful example of Newspeak. Apparently leaving a van unattended and then it being subsequently vandalised is 'fleeing attackers'. 


Worse was this article, again filed under 'News':

Apart from the drooling neo-paedophilia of which the Mail is frequently guilty, I complained to the PCC that there was no evidence that these women were there because they 'just wanted a photo for Facebook', breaching the article on accuracy. 


No joy. Apparently even though it's under 'news', the reporter's unfounded claims and emotive language mean that 

 the Commission was satisfied that readers would be aware that the article was an account of this particular journalist’s experience of the protest and the views he had formed on it, rather than necessarily statements of fact. As such, the Commission could not establish a breach of Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Code of Practice.

So accuracy no longer matters at all under PCC rules. I'm eager to see how Leveson deals with this. 

A word in your shell-like, Mr Dacre

Over at the Leveson Inquiry, the Daily Mail editor sounded like one of his own rag's columns: ill-informed, splenetic, outraged, out of touch and blustering. He ended by accusing the inquiry of promoting a 'bleak' and negative view of British journalism.

Bleak? Negative? At least he knows what he's talking about: click the image for a bigger version. This is a random screen shot - wallow in the hatred here.

Return to the source

I took myself off to the People's History Museum last week, to see their exhibition of election posters. Not just because I'm a massive nerd, but because it's a wonderful, unapologetically leftwing place. Going back occasionally is a way to recharge my batteries and cheer myself up.

The exhibition was fascinating: a lesson in how we've returned to the same arguments, over and over again. The Tories are still the party of the selfish rich. The workers are permanently exploited. The Liberals are still untrustworthy turncoats. Only the Labour Party has changed. It used to believe in things. Now its job is to soften the edges of Conservative Capitalism.

I took some photos: they're not very good because the museum lighting is low to protect the textiles and there's so much material that a good angle isn't always possible. Still, see them here, or click on these highlights for larger versions:

They're STILL using this. They keep saying 'the Labour recession' and 'the recession we inherited' despite the facts: the country wasn't in recession in the quarter before the election.

Labour instituted tuition fees, the scum. The Tories and Lib Dems have tripled them, despite campaigning to abolish them!

Deeply ironic.

One of my ancestors fought in the Irish Brigade during the Boer War. The anti-British Irish Brigade, that is. Later on he was the Dublin Commandant of the IRA and one of Michael Collins' closest allies. 

This is a much more honest Tory poster about Ireland. The Union-Jack chaps are famous conservatives. The lad in the shamrock is an Irish nationalist getting a buffing.

What can I say? Has the Daily Mail changed at all? Although given that its owner, Lord Rothermere, claims to be French to avoid tax, perhaps it wouldn't support 'tax the foreigner' these days.

Finger on the pulse

I'm a little worried about the calibre of journalist employed by the Daily Mail. Here we are on Mumsnet, appealing to the denizens of that site to cough up stories of their marital difficulties for money. All in pursuit of a story about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is apparently fed up with 'her philandering husband'.

Marital Tipping Points

 (25 Posts)

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MEDIA: Katie Freelance Thu 17-Nov-11 10:51:26

I'm writing a feature for the Daily Mail about marital tipping points, for our Femail section. It comes in the wake of news that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is reported to be finally considering divorce from her philandering husband - she put up with years of affairs but then reports that he had been text messaging escort girls became the straw that broke the camel's back. We are looking for good stories where women have tolerated bad behaviour for a long time only for something to finally prompt then to say enough is enough and to look at why that was. Ideally we'd like you to be identified and provide a photo but we'd also consider strong anonymous stories. In the former instance we could pay a small fee. Please do get in touch if you think you can help or know anyone who might want to take part - we are looking to feature a number of different stories. You can contact me via mumsnet or via my personal email address www.kathrynknight.com. Many thanks, Katie

The only minor wrinkle is that Dominique is the philandering husband in question: he's married to Anne. Poor little Daily Mail journalist is a) too xenophobic to know that other nations have different naming conventions and b) too lazy to look up DSK's details.

The Mumsnetters have once again demonstrated their feeding-frenzy shark abilities in the comments section…

And if you're tempted to sell a story to the Mail, read this salutary and miserable tale.