How media works, pt. 94

I'm still reeling from Richard Desmond's appearance yesterday at the Leveson Inquiry. Together with the editors of his newspapers, the Star and the Express, he painted a picture of the tabloid media as a sinkhole of greed, cynicism and incompetence. Only this last element truly surprised me: I've always assumed that the purveyors of this vicious, racist, cynical, misleading propaganda and filth knew exactly what they were doing. This is of course, even worse than being enthusiastic. I assume that Mail and Sun writers don't in fact vote for the BNP, leer over young women's breasts and endorse pogroms in their personal lives: they just advocate it for money to sell newspapers. Perhaps I'm wrong though.

Down at the level of the Express and Star though, things are very different. Richard Desmond's appearance was in a sense refreshing. The Mail claims to have some sort of reactionary mission: it's pompous, self-serving and hypocritical. This last charge can't be applied to Desmond and his henchmen. Their testimony was revoltingly honest: they say whatever sells newspapers (and take a cavalier approach to truth), whether that's accusing the royal family of murdering Diana (my two cents: drunk chauffeur, passengers too stupid to wear seat belts) or repeatedly accusing the McCanns of murdering their daughter without any evidence at all (and hearing Desmond add 'etc. etc. etc.' to his apology to the McCanns only added credibility to his opening statement: 'Ethics - I don't know what the word means'.

One of the most unpleasant elements of the Express's hypocrisy is its censorious approach to sexuality. Let's have a look at what was on its owners TV stations while he was giving evidence, shall we? Unfortunately, Portland TV's website is remarkably coy about what its '17 channels', but a little further digging finds Television X, the Fantasy Channel, and various Red Hot stations (showing such treats as 'Bathroom Bitches' during daytime hours) including Red Hot Only 18 and Red Hot Rears. Yesterday's treats included 'Indian Amateur 1', 'Lesbo Chicks Do Boy Girl 4' and 'Hot and Heavy 1'. Over on Television X, you could have watched the frankly baffling 'Cathy Barry Extreme Interracial 2', 'Jim Slip's [geddit?] Euro Matures 2', 'Ready Steady Chav 2' or 'Freddy's British Granny Hunt''.

Other highlights of Mr. Desmond's career include his ownership of a range of pornographic magazines such as Megaboobs, Asian Babes and Skinny and Wriggly, getting an executive tasered in the testicles during a violent confrontation with the Gambino mafia family and - my personal favourite - goose-stepping round a board room while singing 'Deutschland Über Alles' to Telegraph executives during a business dispute. Mr. Desmond is Jewish.

Now the salient point is this: Desmond explicitly sees newspapers as vehicles for selling advertising. He has no truck with high-flown notions of the public sphere. Newspaper content has no responsibility to the wider community: a position even the Mail, which has delusions of running the country, would find distasteful. To honest Dick, this is pompous nonsense put about by the Establishment which wants to freeze him out. In a sense, I agree with him: I wouldn't want to go back to a situation in which newspapers are solely owned by plutocratic peers of the realm who use their organs as vehicles for hegemonic continuity. Nor would I want a world in which only broadsheets are permitted. But is the media sphere - especially on the right - particularly independent now? They all hate the EU, foreigners, black people, women, socialists, the poor. To read the tabloids is to enter a world of fear, paranoia, hatred and easy bigotry. At least the Mail genuinely believes all these things: Desmond appears to promote them solely to sell advertising space.

The Daily Express: an apology*

You may recall our front page last year: 'Snow Chaos: And They Still Claim It's Global Warming', suggesting that January snow definitively disproves the mass of scientific evidence for global warming:

Given our predilection for confusing weather with climate, readers may have been expecting Saturday's front page to read 'October Heatwave: 29.9C PROVES Global Warming'. We apologise to readers for our failure to produce this headline: unfortunately we only print claims which reflect our corporate ignorance and cynicism.

*This blog entry is fictional.

Hysterical liars of the week

Check out this front page, from the Daily Express (the paper that even the Daily Mail thinks is barking mad):

Is it true? No, of course it isn't.

FURY erupted last night after a European Union plot to “carve up Britain” by setting up a cross-Channel region was exposed. 

Senior Tories condemned plans to merge southern England and northern France into a territory called “Arc Manche” complete with its own flag. 

Brussels chiefs have already earmarked millions of pounds for lavish projects designed to give the zone its own “identity”.

It's simply an hysterical bit of utter rubbish which - shamefully - appears to be dictated by a Conservative Government minister in the run-up to the local government elections. Propaganda of the very worst sort - ruined only by a) being lies and b) the Express's plummeting readership. This sort of stuff is why the British press has such an awful reputation.

Tory Cabinet Minister Eric Pickles yesterday revealed details of the plan inherited by his Whitehall department from the previous Labour government.

The Communities Secretary said: “Labour ministers have been caught red-handed conspiring with European bureaucrats to wipe England off the map and replace our historic boroughs, counties and cities with transnational Euro-regions.

It's an infrastructure and tourism idea - the EU hasn't got the right to merge countries! I notice too that in the 'minds' of Pickles and the Express, 'southern England' and the UK are the same thing - as I've long suspected. As is traditional with this kind of 'journalism', we get several paragraphs of confected outrage from weirdo extremists (Douglas Carswell, Nigel Farage, the Tax-Evaders Alliance), before we reach the shocking truth about this fiendish Euro-plot: far from being:

“a bid to subvert the St George’s flag and the Union Jack”

it's actually:

a series of cycle routes seeking to link northern France and southern England… a £2million travelling exhibition of “contemporary” artworks and even a bizarre international tour by circus clowns costing £5.5million

Those evil Euro-Clowns!

However, I have news for the Express and for the Conservative Party. There WAS a serious plan to merge the UK and France (again - let's not forget that under the Normans England and the bits of Britain it controlled were outposts of Normandy, and the Plantagenets claimed to be Kings of France and Britain).

The final "DECLARATION OF UNION" approved by the British War Cabinet stated that:

France and Great Britain shall no longer be two nations, but one Franco-British Union. The constitution of the Union will provide for joint organs of defence, foreign, financial and economic policies. Every citizen of France will enjoy immediately citizenship of Great Britain, every British subject will become a citizen of France.

So which traitorous nutter wanted to declare an Act of Union between Britain and France, in 1940? Why, it was that dangerous Europhile, winner of the Charlemagne Prize for his contribution to the European Ideal, advocate of a United States of Europe ("We Must Build A Kind of United States of Europe" - Zurich speech, 1946) and, er, Conservative Prime Minister and war hero, Winston Churchill!

And that's not all: another Conservative PM, Anthony Eden, considered it again, in 1956!

Let's see what Pickles and the Express have to say about that…