How tabloids work part 945

This is the last paragraph in a Sun story about sharks being spotted off Cornwall (they just change the date each year and reprint):

A spokesman for the harbour master in St Ives said they were not "100 per cent" sure yet if the sharks spotted were oceanic white tips and stressed that people should not blow the reports "out of all proportion".

And here's how they proportionately introduced the story:

(Photo NOT taken anywhere near Cornwall, or indeed recently).

Another triumph for the Soaraway Sun and the Daily Hate Mail

Pretty much the worst thing you can do to a committed political protestor is accuse them of hypocrisy or fraud. Their credibility's out of the window. They lose supporters and all hope of convincing people of the justice of their cause.

Parameswaran Subramanyam is a young Tamil who went on hunger strike in London, accusing the British authorities of ignoring the Sri Lankan government's heavily-documented human rights abuses. 

Obviously, the Mail and the Sun hate brown people, refugees and troublemakers, and Subramanyam is all three of these. So they concocted articles claiming that he was actually filmed by the police scoffing burgers when people weren't looking. He lost all credibility and was treated as a traitor by the Tamil people (though why they trusted these papers is beyond me). He even received death threats


Where did the story come from? It's hard to imagine that a journalist - even on these newspapers - would just make it up, so I assume they simply took dictation from a Sri Lankan government spin doctor. 


Both newspapers have just had to admit that the stories were entirely untrue and pay up in court. He wasn't guzzling burgers and the police didn't film him doing anything - there wasn't any surveillance. 


I'm just stunned that they would commit such nakedly ideological breaches of journalistic integrity, even now. Sure, lazy mistakes and biased articles are their specialities, but to make up something this serious, something pandering to the racist fantasies of their readers is a disgrace.

Sun burned

This is from the Guardian's live election blog. It's worth repeating as a demonstration of the way certain elements of the media have deliberately discarded the notion of reporting new in favour of trying to distort the public sphere:

The Sun is looking a bit daft this morning. Alongside the headline "Fears for £ as Gord hijacks Lib talks" (on the print edition), its frontpage splash says markets are expected to dump the pound today following Gordon Brown's attempt to stop David Cameron forming a government.

DEFEATED Gordon Brown yesterday sparked fears of a City meltdown after trying to hijack a Tory-Lib Dem deal for a unity government.

His bid to rise from the dead by persuading the Lib Dems to prop him up raised the prospect of a stock market "Brown Monday".

If this is a Brown Monday, let's have more of them. As I write, the stock market is up 5%. And sterling is up 1.2% against the dollar.

Place your X (-Factor) here

Today's newspapers are depressing: moronic, manipulative and arrogant (The Express: 'Only David Cameron Can Save Britain' FFS). The worst is The Sun, that racist, reactionary mouthpiece of Rupert Murdoch. Bored with mindlessly cheerleading for David Cameron and worried that it won't scare voters away from Brown and Clegg enough, they've turned to… reality TV.

Most depressingly of all: Cowell's on record claiming never to have voted. But in the minds of Murdoch and his executives, that doesn't matter. He's famous, and Sun readers know who he is. Therefore they should do what he says.

I give up. I'm also ashamed that I, and you, know who he is.

What makes a good breakfast?

I don't usually bother. I'll have a fry-up with the Map Twats on Saturday mornings, or sometimes make myself a bowl of porridge (salted, of course).

I never start the day with a four-pack of Skol Super-Strength Lager, unlike two chaps I bumped into on the way to work at 9.00 a.m. Perhaps when I get the sack I'll have that kind of leisure…

I'm marking essays and presentations today, and running a poetry workshop. Neal's off to a stag weekend, involving paintballing. As one of the guests is a 'journalist' for The Sun, we've commissioned him to shoot the guy repeatedly at close range. Media Studies in action!

The Sun scuttles back to the Tories - good

As the other media outlets have trumpeted today, The Sun has, after 12 years, returned to the Conservative Party fold, with a front page declaration festooned with a Union Flag (are they suggesting that Labour isn't British?).

All this is very self-important. The Sun likes to think and say that it wins elections for whichever party it supports - it's an equally convincing argument that The Sun supports whoever it thinks its readers support. Lots of data here

The Sun recommended that its readers vote Labour for the past three elections, but it never supported Labour. Its reasons were always hedged and reluctant, and often negative - based on the disarray in which the Conservative Party found itself. Essentially, The Sun supported Tony Blair and his clique, rather than Labour values. The Sun was and is racist, selfish, consumerist, nationalist, anti-green, homophobic, militaristic and misogynistic. For a few years, New Labour captured the Labour Party and catered, shamefully, for these positions. The Sun didn't change - Labour did, and deserves opprobrium for its shameful capitulation to the worst aspects of British culture.

Will readers of The Sun be better off under the Tories? I wouldn't think so. They're working class individualists - not natural supporters of the Etonian land-and-inherited-wealth toffs who really, really don't give a fuck about the poor. Sure, they'll toss some selfish, racist red meat to white van man, but they don't have the interests of the working class at heart. Sun readers like the NHS for instance - the Tories hate and fear it.

But that's irrelevant - The Sun and all the News International papers don't care about their readers either: their writers care about the opinions and commercial interests of Rupert Murdoch, who wants to run the world and wants to run it as a capitalist oligarchy free from competition by boring old state-funded, objective BBC - exactly what the Tories will give him. That's why the declaration was today, and not during the election campaign, as usually happens. It came out the day after Brown and Mandelson made good, fighting speeches. Rather than reporting news, The Sun decided to ruin the Labour conference and help the Tories by intervening in the political process. Mmm…ethical.

Fuck The Sun (sorry, I'm quite angry). It's too stupid to be as evil as the Daily Mail, but it's still a cancer on the public sphere.

Never trust a copper, never read The Sun

Do the police lie to us? Of course they do. But most of the time, they merely mislead, dissemble and distort. Why? Because every branch of public service has been encouraged to see itself as a 'player' in the information game. Each agency has an internal PR team - which isn't the same as a communications team - trained to play offence/defence spin rather than to provide accurate, cautious, checkable and honest information. The police have their friendly media contacts and they know which papers (I'm looking at you, The Sun - 'G20 anarchy' indeed, and you Daily Mail) will print whatever they say without bothering to check using boring old journalism - and in the case of Tomlinson, may have added further imaginary details simply to suit their pre-mixed 'story', as Nick Davies points out:

There were six days of substantially false coverage about a man who apparently died of a heart attack as he walked home while a screaming mob of anarchists hurled missiles at the police officers who tried to help him. Any inquiry into this media misinformation will want to find out whether that was simply the hyperbole of ignorant reporters or the product of bad practice at the Metropolitan police, the City of London police or the IPCC.

They got caught this time thanks to citizens ignoring threats to treat filming cops as 'aiding terrorism', but it must make you distrust pretty much every account of any major event prior to this. Nick Davies has a good piece in today's Media Guardian. How's this gem?

when an IPCC investigator came to the Guardian, with a City of London police exhibits officer, he asked for the video to be removed from the website on the grounds that it could prejudice the police inquiry and would upset the family. The deputy editor-in-chief who met him declined and pointed out that the Tomlinson family at that moment were in another part of the building, talking to Paul Lewis, the reporter who had driven the story, and publicly thanking the paper for its help.

But this isn't simply a problem for the rozzers. It's a fundamental journalistic failure brought about by financial concerns (investigative journalism is expensive: transcribing 'sources' and press releases can be done by the office monkey) and by the collapse of a public sphere independent of hegemonic forces: papers have grown dependent on 'authority' and close to power - they'll automatically cite established, discrete power blocs such as police forces and governments rather than test their claims (except for climate stories, in which case they'll print the ravings of any mad liar (Johnny Ball, Bellamy, Lawson, Monckton) rather than the 99% of actual climate scientists who know we're screwed).

Football - and more important things

Well, it's a big day for football - in serious as well as lighthearted ways. Firstly, Liverpool are playing Blackburn on the nearest day to the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster: poor stadium design coupled with aggressive, thoughtless policing led to the deaths of 94 people. The BBC broadcast a rightfully passionate, pointed program this morning which moved me to tears. It ended with a radio broadcaster (I didn't catch his name) ending his analysis later on that day with 'The gymnasium is today being used as a mortuary. And the sun shines'. That's top quality broadcasting.

The other wonderful part of the show was the section which reminded us why Rupert Murdoch, News International and The Sun are so utterly evil. While others mourned, the paper's front-page stories accused Liverpool fans of urinating on the police and robbing the bodies of the fans - complete lies from start to finish, but great for newspaper sales. It took 20 years to admit that the stories were untrue, and to this day Liverpudlians who support any of the local teams won't buy The Sun. I urge you to join in. It's too late for some of those fans, but the business model continues. Lies, slander and poison are the meat and drink of tabloid journalism, and none are quite so greedy as The Sun and its Sunday version, The News of the World. Liverpudlians are accused of being over-sentimental (they are a mix of Welsh and Irish), but in this case, staying bitter is absolutely the right thing to do. A proper inquiry was never held into Hillsborough and The Sun remains evil.

It reminded me of a period in which football was a matter of huge, mass emotion - sometimes violent, sometimes sentimental. Footage of the Liverpool team of the time reminded me of how much we've missed - so many Liverpool players spoke with Liverpool accents, shared surnames with the victims and some lost neighbours and friends - how many of the current Premiership players live anywhere near the average fan (who is more likely to be a middle-class high-earner anyway)? Hearing John Aldridge describe attending the funerals of fathers and their sons, of two sisters, was heartbreaking. On another level, these men remind me of a vanished (and probably quite unpleasant) time in other ways. Many of them speak the language of the fans, they don't have advisers, agents, lawyers and PR employees polishing every word, weighing every statement, looking out for themselves, or beating people up in nightclubs. These men were fans and from the people. On the other hand, safe stadia require massive amounts of money, and ticket prices are going to do it, so perhaps hugely expensive days out are the price we have to pay for safety.

On a lighter note, Stoke has the chance to strike a blow for honest football and the past today, by beating the arrogant, pseudo-galactico chancers of Newcastle United. If only it were MUFC we were sending down (as we did once in the 1970s), but anyone will do. One more win - or even a couple of draws - will do nicely.