How To Report For The Guardian.

A row has broken out between the Daily Mail- which supported Hitler in the 1930s- and Darth Vader after the paper claimed that he was involved in the destruction of Alderaan. Mr Vader demanded an apology from the Daily Mail for what he describes as "an orchestrated campaign" against him.

Friends of Mr Vader have dismissed the newspaper's claims as being part of a concerted effort to discredit the Empire. This is not the first time that The Daily Mail- which supported Hitler in the 1930s- has been hit by controversy, with many of it's practices under scrutiny by the Leveson inquiry.

The Daily Mail- which supported Hitler in the 1930s- caused controversy earlier this year with a deeply personal attack on Palpatine's father provoking a reader backlash. .....

Mentally Ill Let Progressives Down.

Very good news to see that the suicide rate has fallen. I can only hope this becomes a trend.

 Of course it is a bit surprising, because as a regular Guardian reader I was under the impression that the government was driving people to kill themselves with cuts. For example this piece quotes irresponsible demagogues impartial experts about the impact of cuts warning that they will hurt the vulnerable. Which is why the very generous welfare states of Scandinavia have such low..... oh never mind.

Other hand wringing articles warn of the:

• Suicide and the unspoken side of welfare 'reform' 

Or ask:

• How can rising suicide rates be reversed in the face of cuts to mental health services?  

The Independent's Owen "the people's tribune whether they like it or not" Jones inevitably jumped on the ghoulish bandwagon:

But even as mental distress and the risk of suicide soar because of austerity, the support is being slashed back.

In fact this kind of voyeuristic exploitation of desperate people who had ended their lives has been very widespread on the left. There was even a website "Calum's List" devoted to them as detailed by Brendan O'Neill here.

No doubt all these people will now be revising their opinions in the face of new evidence....

Any.
Minute.
Now.

Sometimes It's Hard To Be A Woman.

Take a look at the Guardian's page of columnists, which features all the regular writers along with their latest columns.

If you break down the demographics there are 12 males and 8 females.

Of the dozen males the topics covered varies from sport to conspiracy theories to the economy. There is quite a substantial range of topics. In contrast the eight female writers cover a slightly different range of subjects:

• Hadley Freeman complains about the unfair burdens women in show business have to put up with.
• Barbara Ellen says about the sexist treatment of Andy Murray's mum and the unfair burdens that women in sport endure.
•  Zoe Williams writes about the royal family- while noting that "that squeamishness around discussing the female pudenda is rooted in a deeper hatred of women"

So three of the eight writing about how hard it is to be a woman.

On the front page of the Guardian's Comment Is Free section there are ten articles by women, including the one by Hadley Freeman. Others include:

•  Rhiannon Cosslett on the unfair burdens of a female royal.
• Ellie Cosgrave on sexual assault (an admittedly more serious issue than the other).
•  Nancy Cohen on women voters and the "Tsunami of anti-woman legislation".

Two of the other pieces are by ethnic minority women talking about the unfair burdens of being black.

So out of 17 different female writers, 6 are writing about sexism and 2 about racism. It seems that almost half the output of female columnists is self obsessed identity politics.

Mugabe-Phobia

Yes, that phrase has actually been used.

"Cannot Be Underestimated".

Surely they mean "over estimated" here.

A poll by the Belfast Telegraph at Sinn Féin's annual meeting last month uncovered majority backing for a handshake – and near-unanimous support for Mr McGuinness to offer regret for the suffering caused by the IRA campaign. The simple clutching together of those hands on Wednesday – hopefully in public – cannot be underestimated in its symbolism and significance.

It's a Guardian leader column as wellm so it is not just a rogue sub editor at work.

Why Not Just Go And Talk To Them?

Polly Toynbee writes:

No, said the Department for Work and Pensions, you can't visit a jobcentre to talk to social fund claimants. That's the first no I've ever had from the DWP's press officers, always helpful under both Labour and Tory governments.

Coincidentally I was picking up a friend from the Jobcentre yesterday, I managed to get inside and speak to people. I wasn't interviewing anyone obviously but I didn't get the impression I'd be told to get lost if I had. It's not like a prison or a Tuscan villa where you need a permit to get over the wall.

I'm told some inner city Jobcentres have guards on site but even then surely she could wait outside- or get some Guardian intern to wait outside- and speak to people going in or out.

Give Us Money- Says Guardian

The Guardian is droning on about equality in an editorial today.

It's full of all the usual intellectual fallacies that characterises the diversity industry concerning supposed pay gaps, role models, questionable ideas asserted as facts and things like that.

There is an implied threat that quotas may be needed if things don't become more diverse in Britain's biggest companies. Which is what made me realise that the piece isn't mere liberal hand wringing but a shakedown by Guardian PLC::

The McKinsey work found it wasn't lack of ambition that stops women, more a lack of confidence in being able to fulfil that ambition, and not enough role models showing them the way. Mentoring, coaching and sponsorship are all important to stop women taking another job, or going in another direction. So is dealing with embedded prejudices among senior managers about the risk of employing women.

Who would be doing this much needed mentoring and coaching. Who can challenge the embedded prejudices of senior managers?

Why diversity managers of course!

And where do you find diversity officers? The famous Guardian Jobs Section!

Only In The Guardian

A letter condemning all male discussion panels with an all female signitory list.

I Got Trolled

A lot of newpaper columns are actually examples of trolling- coming out with things that leave readers incredulous and fuming- which generates page views and comments that keeps the advertisers happy.

This is an example, the troll in question Ellie Mae O'Hagan is good. Writing on the subject of Charlie Gilmour's 16 month prison sentence she lays it on thick:

He simply should not be imprisoned for crimes that hurt nobody. 

Outrage level-Tut tutting loudly.

certainly Gilmour did wrong although, having admitted that he had taken LSD and Valium prior to the protests, it's arguable whether he was wholly responsible for some of his more extreme idiocy.

Outrage level- Simmering in silence.

Perhaps, given this background, it was inevitable that Gilmour would be made an example of: living evidence that one does not question the order of things. During the protests he was filmed shouting "they've broken the moral laws, so we must break all the laws!" and this desire to question has cost him, unfairly to my mind, his liberty.

Outrage level- Explosive Rage. He actually says "we must break all the laws" yet she twists that into "a desire to question" IN THE SAME F***ING SENTENCE!!!!!

And as more and more people are criminalised, what is this all for? If the public sincerely feels safer knowing an LSD-riddled student is behind bars for the next year, we have become a paranoid nation indeed. And nobody benefits from a society where lack of dissent is the result of fear, not happiness.

Outrage level- Fist through monitor!

The Guardian's Double Standard On Bribing Law Enforcement Agents.

As I've already said the Guardian's work in the News of the World scandal has been exemplary and they should be rightly proud of their achievements.

They rightly slam the payments that the NOTW made to police officers in order to facilitie their criminal reporting (did you spot the pun there?).

This isn't the first time they've discussed payments made by News International reporters to law enforcement officials. Yet on a previous occasion the Guardian didn't make a fuss about it and indeed described the eventual prosecution of the leaker as having:

worrying implications for investigative journalism

In fact they quoted the subject's lawyer with seeming approval when he described the prosecution as:

making a mountain out of a molehill by choosing to prosecute a former agent for conduct which is fairly run of the mill." 

What could be the difference between then and now?

In 2002 they were describing an agent of the USA's "Drug Enforcement Agency" who leaked files about the Conservative Party treasurer Michael Ashcroft- that falsely implied that he was involved in drug smuggling and money laundering- to the Times..

So bribing law enforcement agencies is wrong unless the aim is to smear a Tory.

Incidentally the journalist who led the Times smear campaign- and presumably knew about paying a DEA agent- is Tom Baldwin who is currently Ed Miliband's press secretary.

In Praise Of Newspaper Lawlessness

The News of the World phone hacking scandal is probably the biggest media scandal of my lifetime and the Guardian's* exposing of the case is one of the two the most significant  newspaper scoops of the last decade. The mentality of the people who hacked Milly Dowler's phone is difficult even to comprehend.

However some of the responses to the scandal have been misplaced- with calls on radio phone ins and Question Time to beef up regulation of the press and expressions of disgust that the newspaper broke the law with such impunity.

However it isn't that law breaking to get a story is always wrong, consider the other great newspaper revelation of recent years- the MPs' expenses scandal as revealed in all it's murky glory by the Daily Telegraph. There were widespread accusations, which seem plausible to me, that the law was probably broken somewhere along the line in order for the documents to have gotten into the hands of Telegraph. Yet with revelations of greed, fraud and lawbreaking on a scale that vastly exceeded that of the general public, few people would argue that any criminal behaviour that may have occurred in obtaining the documents was morally wrong.

Tighter regulation of the newspapers to prevent a repeat of the phone hacking scandal would have been welcomed greatly by Elliot Morley, David Chaytor, Lord Taylor et al. It isn't the legality of what the News of the World did that was reprehensible but the nature of their targets- members of the public who had suffered tragic losses and unimportant actors and sportspeople- and it would have been wrong even if they had stayed inside the law by restricting themselves to rummaging through bins.


* Although according to Sunny Hundal the credit belongs to Sunny Hundal.

The Hardest Hit?

Over at the Guardian, Rachel Reeves MP claims that:

Beyond the labour market, women are also being hit hardest by changes to taxes and benefits.

To which I have left a comment:

I'm confused, as an avid Guardian reader I thought that he hardest hit were the disabled..... er the poor..... no wait the old..... and the young... no wait, the middle aged and of course Liverpool.

Crossing The Parody Horizon*

January 2011- Dim posh former intern illegally advertises for a (below minumum wage) intern.

April 2011- Dim posh former intern denounces system of internships.

Dim posh former intern is of course a beneficiary of internships.



* The parody horizon is when a piece is impossible to parody because the parody would be indistinguishable from the original.

The Horror!

Students are protesting against the abolition of the EMA grant:

"I would have had to get a part-time job if I hadn't had the EMA,"

Oddly enough the Guardian now seem to have removed this quote from the article.

A Guide To Guardian Pundits.

Most pundits in the MSM or blogs with MSM pretensions are fairly interchangeable. I'm thinking of working out ways to categorise them so as to save time.For instance at the Guardian most of the regular columnists  come into one of these categories:

• Identity pundit: someone like Gary Younge or Julie Bindel for whom every issue is addressed through the prism of identity politics. This has the great advantage of rendering much of the criticism directed against them as invalid because it is from people who are the wrong colour, have the wrong genitals or want to sleep with the wrong people.
• Trustafarian Radical: Someone who is from an absurdly privileged background who compensates by taking radical stances to an extreme level presumably due to unresolved Daddy issues. They can be nice (George Monbiot) or nasty (Seamus Milne) but one thing they will always be, is extremely silly.
• Party Harpy- Middle aged women with an iron clad loyalty to the Labour Party, fond of making bold predictions and wish fulfilment fantasies. Usually insert calls to action which are widely ignored. Polly Toynbee and Jackie Ashley fill this slot.
• Olympian God- Someone who is so assured at their own righteousness and sensible outlook that they issue columns like Delphic prophecies that aren't meant to be questioned by lesser mortals. The late Hugo Young is the best example of this although Michael White and Timothy Garton Ash also fit the bill.
• The Hitchens- Someone who makes a living being a professional martyr to the the rest of the left by criticising other elements of the left. Ususally denounces everyone else for selling out the principles of pure liberalism. Nick Cohen is the Observer's resident Hitchens at present.
• Will This Do?- Someone whose job it is to write about anything that pops through their head, preferably tying it to some event in the news. Has nothing to say but insists on saying it anyway. Often convinced of how terribly witty they are but have usually only got the gig through nepotism or sleeping with the editor. Examples include Marina Hyde and anyone whose name is "Coren".
• The Celebrity- Similar to the "Will this do?" merchant but the column is usually even worse unless it's ghost written. Think David Mitchell or Maureen Lipman.
• The Specialist- Someone who knows what they're talking about and who even people like me have to acknowledge are worth reading. Ben Goldacre and the occasional foreign correspondent are the main examples of this.

Next time- a guide to Daily Mail columnists.

Not Sure I Follow This Line Of Reasoning.

I'm not entirely sure that I follow this argument- there has always been a rich, vibrant and common European culture regardless of political divisions. However people who oppose the political unity of Europe are against a common European culture.

The periods of innovation and cultural exchange within Europe came during an era where political repression was common but political disunity allowed those being persecuted in one juristiction to seek sanctuary in other places. So to use that common history as an argument for a political union (complete with a pan-European arrest warrant) is not much of an argument.

Questions To Which The Answer Is Always No

Andrew Rawnsley asks "Is there a question that you've always wanted Paddy Ashdown to answer, but have never seen him asked?".

Quote Of The Day

Henry Porter in the Guardian:

One of the great pleasures of last week was hearing Jack Straw speaking on the Today programme in that patient, reasonable way of the true autocrat, and suddenly realising that I never have to pay attention to him again.

Classic Sentences From The Guardian

I don't know whether David Thompson's series of Classic Sentences From the Guardian is still going but here is an entry:

Feminism is the form of women's organisation that is prioritised both in the media and academia, but many black women have turned to womanism in an attempt to counter the ways in which the combined oppressions of race and gender affect our lives.

Of course. There are several other sentences in the same article that I could have chosen instead.

Guardianism Of The Day

Years of neglect or heavy-handed western 'aid' have left Yemen destitute and unstable. We must share the blame.

There's a "head we win, tails you lose" quality to this. Neglect and heavy handedness are almost mutually exclusive so it's difficult to see how we could avoid either .being one or the other but equally difficult to see how we have committed both sins.

I'm pretty sure this is a cookie cutter Guardianism that can be applied to any poor country that is in the news, in fact the article may well have been about Haiti when the writer began it.