Holidays

I've done my usual of buggering off on holiday and not mentioning it here again, leaving people wondering why I haven't been ranting about cacky papers.* Sorry.

For those of you dying for stuff about crap tabloids who don't read Obsolete (and why bloody not, you bloody slackers?) there's this "Express-watch: MUSLIMS OFFEND EXPRESS JOURNALISTS"

I'll be back soon, doing my thing. Or at least the thing I do here, which is different to the things I do in other places.

*Cacky papers. Reminds me of Puff the Magic dragon for some reason, but with more poo.

Clamp down on who exactly?

This isn't exactly in the league of the Star and the pictures of Charlotte Chruch with comments perving over her breasts appearing next to outrage at the paedo special Brass Eye, but it's up there.



'CLAMP DOWN ON SEX OFFENDERS' shouts a banner on the front of the Sun's news page, inviting readers to clamp down on people who...er...might not actually be sex offenders.

A few inches down is a link to, 'Hula web girl is a Wii Fit hit', about a man who apparently secretly filmed his girlfriend using the hula hoop feature on her Wii Fit in her pants.



Strangely though, the Sun seems to be sceptical of the video's origins, saying:

But internet forum users speculated that the footage was an advertising stunt - but still appreciated Lauren's moves.

And sticking 'secretly' in scare quotes on the link. So is this a sign that the Sun is becoming a bit more sceptical and careful not to be cought out churning PR stuff as news?

Is it heck as like! Also in today's edition is 'Spot the dog - from space', which says:

BORIS the dog is so big he can be seen from SPACE.

EXCEPT he CAN'T be seen from SPACE. He can be seen on GOOGLE MAPS, the lowest images of which are taken from aeroplanes. So BORIS can be seen from a PLANE.

Why does that make the paper? Ask the Bournemouth Grange Hotel in Dorset, which gets a nice little plug for its trouble.

Is the scepticism in the first article just to avoid accusations of publishing dodgy material of women in their pants that has been taken withour their consent? The answer comes from Elliottx, quoted by the Sun:

Elliottx wrote, "Who cares? She had a nice bumbum and that's all we watched it for. Thank you, guy-who-exploited-his-girlfriend, we salute you."

Also on the front page of the news today - 'Loo-ney perv gets phone ban' in which a man taking pictures of women in a state of undress without consent is now a crazy pervert. Whether that's because the images weren't available to the paper for publication is anyone's guess.

Truth and knives

The press is in the grip of a moral panic at the moment. If you believe the papers, especially the tabloids, you can expect to be stabbed if you dare to leave your house. Try to get up the street and you'll have to dodge marching hordes of brainless hoodies relentlessly plodding towards you thrusting kitchen knives back and forward, like in some weird 80s videogame.

Of course, as unacceptable as any level of stabbings and murders is, the truth isn't exactly as worthy of panic as we're led to believe. The number of homicides by sharp instrument has been at roughly the same level for five years, and violent crime resulting in injury has decreased by 49% since 1995. Crimes involving knives make up only 7% of violent crime.

Still, it's difficult to open a paper without having the shit scared out of you about the danger and lawlessness of it all. The front page of yesterday's Mail screamed 'SCHOOLGIRL STABBED TO DEATH ON HER WAY HOME'. Today's has the first picture of the schoolgirl and the promise of a two page spread inside. That's where this particular moral panic gets merged with another more familiar one.

The big splash headline yells 'Stab girl 'failed by police''. That headline stretches across the story and past it, covering another story given the same billing. It's the story I looked at yesterday, with a different headline.



'The migrant knife culture, by police chief' it says, above a nice picture and an article that isn't actually by the police chief. Nice to see that the alternative headline is as misleading as yesterday's. There's also a cached version with 'mailonsunday' in the URL, suggesting a version has been sitting around on the website for four days, waiting for a good stabbing story to tie it in with.

The intent of this is clear. Chief constable Julie Spence's comments are supposed to prove a connection with 'mass migration' and the stabbings we see most days in the paper, the coverage relentlessly repeated and rehashed until the next stabbing.

Yesterday's paper edition had news of a man being arrested for the last murder splashed across the papers, of an anti-violence campaigner. Unfortunately for the Mail, the suspect is the victim's grandson and not an immigrant. Which might explain why the coverage was tucked away on page 31.

In any case, the link the Mail's trying to make between Spence's comments and the compassionately renamed 'stab girl', as well as the many other stabbings we've been hearing about, is complete rubbish. Here's what she actually said:

'We have had the Iraqi Kurds who carry knives and the Poles and the Lithuanians who carry knives. If it is normal to carry them where you come from, you need to educate them pretty quickly. We have done a lot of work to tell them not to, and we have seen it go down.'

She was talking about people carrying knives because they don't realise they're not supposed to. She was, quite clearly, not talking about anyone being stabbed.

There's a direct connection between this kind of reporting and the BNP knowing it can capitalise on it with things like Barnbrook's 'Blame the Immigrants'. Sure, it's not this exact story, but it isn't as if this was the first time the Mail or other papers like the Express has tried to exaggerate the amount of crime committed by immigrants. And it won't be the last.

It's dog whistle stuff. The reader is encouraged to make a connection without the paper actually making a definite claim. Complain to the PCC and the Commission will only look at the content of the Spence story - but readers can be relied on to get the paper's message.

And the whistle will make some readers hear 'black and Asian people' in place of 'immigrant'. Barnbrook makes a rather more heavy-handed connection with his 'immigrants and the sons of immigrants' schtick, but it's not long before commenters on his post are talking about the number of black people in prison and the genetic differences between black people and the 'indigenous British'.

It's no wonder the BNP like the Mail, and it's no wonder that the party's members are bewildered about the paper not going far enough. Which reminds me of the scene in 'Bad News' where Adrian Edmonson pretentiously tells his interviewer that the band aren't really heavy metal, and Nigel Planer storms off almost in tears, sobbing 'I only joined because you said it was heavy metal'. The paper doesn't have to explicitly say the things the BNP wants it to in order to give us that message.

Which makes it's recent coverage of the BNP more curious. Why, if the paper hates the BNP so much, does it carry on pulling this kind of stunt? We know one thing - the editor interprets his job as being to sell as many copies as possible by voicing his readers' concerns. Some of those readers are the 'I'm not racist, but...' crowd, who can convince themselve's they're not racist or xenophobic because they don't like the BNP. Others are actually the BNP. And when it comes to xenophobia and borderline racism with a veneer of phoney concern and respectability, there's no other game in town. They'll keep slavishly buying the paper no matter how much it attacks them.

The proof is Barnbrook's blog. Despite two big hatchet jobs about Barnbrook himself, one of his three blog posts is based mainly on stories he's read in the Mail. One of the others is making the exact same claim as the Mail is here, but without the finesse.

James Slack and the truth

Jame's Slack's relationship to the truth is revealed today in 'Mass immigration to blame for series of crime 'spikes', chief constable warns'

See how the headline says that a Chief Constable says that immigration is to blame for crime spikes?

Here's what the actual article tells us, after a series of partial (and probably very selective) quotes from Chief Constable Julie Spence:

In the same evidence session, Local Government Association chairman Sir Simon Milton warned a series of 'spikes' in crime have taken place as a result of mass immigration .

He told the Home Affairs Select Committee there had been an issue with largely Romanian pick-pocketing gangs in the Westminster area.

Sir Simon added: 'Nationally there has been no crime wave but there are instances where there have been spikes in certain types of criminal activity.

'Much of it is low-level driving offences, and so on.'

Ah - so a Chief Constable didn't mention spikes at all. And the person who did said something a bit less alarming than the rest of the article implies.

The article then goes on to quote Spence extensively some more. The mention that it was actually someone else who talked about spikes is buried in a flurry of quotes to make it difficult to spot.

So Slack's relationship to the truth is a bit like my relationship with Jim Davidson. I've seen him on telly a few times, but didn't like it at all and hope I never see it again.

*UPDATE* Since posting this, the paper has changed the headline, removing the dodgy quote attribution. There's a cached version with the old headline here.

See also 'Truth and knives'