I knew there'd be something up when I saw this article in the Hate - "'Hitler' Bush, by Whitehall's jogging blogger", but I have to confess that I'm not familiar with Owen Barder's blog. I mean, even reading the Hate's claims didn't give the impression that it'd be that controversial, but since the blog's been taken down I couldn't really check for myself.
Turns out my gut instinct was right. Unity has a couple of posts on how much of a bunch of lies this article is, and there's more at Chicken Yoghurt, Our Word is Our Weapon, The Yorkshire Ranter and, definitely not least, from Tim Worstall. Read all of them. Plus Bloggerheads and Stumbling and Mumbling.
Truly, truly despicable. It'd be nice for Simon Walters, the journalist in question, to answer Unity's challenge and try to defend himself, but that won't be happening since there really is no defence. Makes me worry about only half heartedly trying to remain anonymous, given Tim's comment:
Which is really something that all of us other bloggers might want to start thinking about. If they hound Owen out of his job on the basis of the above farrago and tissue of innuendo and misquotation then that's rather going to be the end of this enjoyable pastime for most of us, isn't it? Anyone writing tens of thousands of words over the years is open to such an assassination of the character.Maybe I'm lucky I don't have many readers, eh?
Elsewhere, the Mail are trying to show they're hip, baby - and down with the kids. Makes you wonder how many people had to be edited out for saying they associate the paper with lying, bullying, vindictive hatred.
1 comment:
They've not changed over 50 years, which was when they did something similar to my late mother for a phrase she used in an article for a profession journal about something completely different from what they were ranting on about.
The Mail journalist obviously thought that, had my mother been writing about what he was deploring, then it would have been an exemplarily stupid thing to say. Since the Mail readers wouldn't have read the article and would neither have heard of my mother nor known the article was about something completely different, it was obviously too good an opportunity to miss. In consequence, he was able to write something about 'As an example of what I'm talking about, a teacher called .... wrote in [whatever journal it was] "....".
My mother wouldn't have minded, but my grandmother read the Mail and was quite upset by it.
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