Interlude
I’m off for a short holiday. I will be back in a week or so. Enjoy the peace.
Monthly Archives: April 2011
Dear Peter Hitchens: It does not follow
Peter Hitchens in an small aside in his Mail on Sunday column again linked rampage killings to antidepressants: Tristan van der Vlis, the Dutch rampage killer who murdered six people last week, is said to have spent time in a psychiatric institution. Was he prescribed antidepressants? The trouble with this suggested link is that it […]
Double Standards
Ordinarily – when a man has a history of convictions for public order offences (6 between 2002 and 2010) and is finally sentenced for a miserly 70 days after stealing a library book and setting fire to it in the street before bragging about the incident on Facebook – the Daily Mail would be outraged […]
Daily Mail: the letters
Today David Cameron made a speech about immigration designed to specifically generate glowing tabloid headlines and appeal to the readers who have been systematically lied to about immigration for years. Here are two letters printed in the Daily Mail – one yesterday, one today – that demonstrate the sort of person David Cameron is shaping […]
Responsible coverage
Richard Littlejohn has the usual thoughtless throwaway segment at the end of his column today [istyosty.com link], this time he wonders why there has been so little coverage of the shootings in the Netherlands. Richard suspects that it is evidence that the world is anti-American whilst remaining unquestioning of ‘liberal’ democracies such as the Netherlands. […]
How modern editors define ‘in the public interest’
For those of you not familiar with the Press Complaints Commission’s Editors’ Code of Practice, here is what it says about privacy: *Privacy i) Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life, home, health and correspondence, including digital communications. ii) Editors will be expected to justify intrusions into any individual’s […]
Mail on Sunday apologises to Gordon Brown
The Mail on Sunday apologised last week for its front page story on how Gordon Brown stole the seat of a 7-month pregnant passenger – a headline that bore no relation to the content of the article. You would need to have fairly sharp eyes to spot the apology which appeared in print and online […]
The Daily Mail obsession with Nazis
This month so far: ‘Karen Gillan has a Steve McQueen moment fleeing the Nazis on the set of Doctor Who’ ‘The ‘perfect, pitiless, Nazi’: German soldiers’ confessions reveal how troops driven by bloodlust killed innocent civilians for fun’ ‘Hitler sent German U-boat carrying secret agents to terrorise New York during World War Two (but it […]
The unimaginable horror of being Liz Jones
Liz Jones wallows in more self-pity today with an article that is an insult to anyone who actually works for a living (and no, Liz, scribbling a few inanities a few times a week is not work): ‘Seeking a cosy hostel, for 17 cats, four collies… and me‘ [istyosty.com link]. She writes: I don’t think […]
Bad local journalism becomes terrible national journalism
Sometimes a story is covered accurately by the regional press, only for the national media to step in and distort it to suit a particular media narrative. However, on other occasions the local press are just of guilty of terrible journalism as their national rivals. Today’s example is this story in the Daily Mail: ‘Royal […]