08/12/2006

More baubles from the Sun

Sorry, I just couldn't keep including the word 'arsepaper' in caps in loads of headlines, but there's a further development in the Sun's moronic 'Kick 'em in the baubles campaign' (to give it its full title). This one's called 'Baubles banned in Job Centre'.

Does it include a list of companies who have banned Christmas decorations so as not to offend people of other faiths? With quotes?

Does it include just one?

Do me a favour.

Sorry, slipped into the Sun's 'partial sentence as paragraph' style without actually meaning to. I'll have to go off to read something for grownups after this. Anyway, the story is about one Job Centre that has disallowed Christmas decorations (and it's not because of offending people of other faiths, but because poor people who can't afford decorations might feel bad) and mentions Greggs not having decorations for health and safety reasons and a museum not allowing cotton wool snow to be stuck on the wall so as not to damage paintwork.

There's not much to say about this other than to point out that the paper don't have a single example of a company banning Christmas decorations so as not to offend people of other faiths. Even though they offer cash to people who own up, and there ought to be thousands of companies who have done just that. Just one wouldn't prove there are thousands, but it would be a start.

Beyond that, the Sun asserts that the reasons behind the Job Centre ban is so that poor people are not 'offended', which is a stretch of the meaning of the word to try to crowbar in at least a bit of the confected reasoning.

Bartlett's Bizarre Bazaar has more about a columnist from a supposedly quality paper picking up on the Sun's earlier article and pretty much reproducing it. Surely, the Independent should be rebutting this rubbish, not regurgitating it.

*UPDATE* Thanks to Andrew Bartlett of the Bizarre Bazaar - there's a cracking story about the War on Christmas in the Guardian today, in which Oliver Burkeman demonstrates why he's a proper journalist and I'm just some bloke with a blog. My favourite quote - don't read it if you don't want to spoil the ending - says:
He [guy from the Christan Muslim Forum] goes on: "You know, we were in Birmingham for a meeting the other day, and there's a big Merry Christmas banner in the middle of New Street." So is anybody at all trying to abolish Christmas this year? "I haven't come across any examples of anyone doing it this year," he replies. "No".
Class.

3 comments:

Andrew Bartlett said...

Mind you, The Sun also has a peice condemning the poor living conditions of soldiers. Fine. And then compares it to the living conditions in a detention centre, asking its readers to blame the former on the latter.

The Guardian has a good peice today picking up on the emptiness behind the 'ethnic minorities steal Christmas stories'.

Five Chinese Crackers said...

That's an excellent article. I hadn't realised that the Winterval stuff was so thoroughly invented. Shows that some of the tabloids' evil magic even works on sceptics like me.

Not Saussure said...

That would be the piece on The phoney war on Christmas, would it? A very good article, well worth spending several minutes looking for on the Guardian site, but nevertheless....