2 days left: Too subtle up till now
As David Cameron dashes around our septic isle in one last push for votes, he'll be delighted if one of his skivvies brings in a few newspapers for him to read. Up until now, the papers have all been pushing him and his agenda, but they've been just that little bit too subtle. Headlines such as "DAVID CAMERWON" or "CAM THE MAN" or "YES WE CAM" or "DAVID CAMERON IS ACTUALLY THE BLOODY MESSIAH"* might have led readers to think that their paper of choice might have backed the Conservative Party, but apparently that wasn't enough. So today's leave us in no doubt at all.
The Telegraph are, with others, going for the 'bandwagon effect' - the idea that if you present someone as a winner, or the winner-in-waiting, people will want to pile on to associate themselves with success and victory, to pick fleas out of the silverback's fur. Their endorsement is inside, but we've seen this kind of thing throughout the election - presenting the Tory win as a likelihood if not an inevitability, but constantly pushing the idea of a victory. You can see that pretty clearly in this kind of thing:
where the 'Tory win' is taken for granted, and Cameron is presented as the fit, athletic, dynamic personality that he's desperately trying to portray himself as as I write this with his 36-hour publicity stunt so he can avoid tough questions from Radio 5 listeners and Channel 4 News brilliant campaigning marathon that shows what a good egg he really is. Is it coincidence that the Tory presentation dovetails so nicely with the Telegraph's? I don't really think so.
But then that's the most subtle example today. The others have thrown it right out of the window.
I'm pretty sure the Express has used almost exactly this front page before. Let me have a look... ah yes.
So now it's just a question of reinforcement. The Express has told you again, and again, and again, and now it wants you to know that it's telling you the same thing again. While the Telegraph just gives you a wink and a nudge, and points you in what it thinks is the right direction, the Express doesn't trust you. It needs to shout at you and order you to do the right thing; it needs to tell you that Britain needs to be SAVED and that only THIS MAN WITH THE BIG FACE can do it. And it needs to tell you again and again.
The Mail are even less subtle, mind.
Vote DECISIVELY. As if we go into the polling booth and put half a cross because we're not sure. Again, it's that didactic attitude. Readers are juveniles and need to be told what to do IN CAPITAL LETTERS because otherwise they'll just do something stupid like think for themselves, and that would never do. If you don't do what we tell you, Britannia herself will WALK OFF A CLIFF and we're all DOOMED. It's classic Mail territory, but it takes something to be even less subtle than the Express. At least they assumed that their readers might understand 'save Britain' - the Mail has to draw you a picture because it thinks you're too fucking stupid to get even a blunt instrument in the face like that.
I'll do more on the Sun later, because it's dredged up one of its hoariest old chestnuts today, but for now, here's their celebrity endorsement. Sun supremo Rebekah Brookes's ex-husband Ross Kemp was on telly the other night promoting Labour - another one of the awful celeb attachments we've seen during this campaign, which have added nothing and persuaded me of nothing - so today they've wheeled out their own national treasure: Simon Cowell.
I don't know about you, but Simon Cowell wouldn't convince me to do anything. Here's a man who's been on a one-man mission to destroy popular music and turn it into McDonald's; here's a preening fake-toothed smarmer in an overly tight t-shirt manipulating people on TV every Saturday night for the forseeable future. Do I want the creator of Robson & Jerome telling me how to vote? Maybe I'm wrong though, and maybe he's hugely admired and loved by everyone in Britain - maybe Ross Kemp is equally seen as not "that spamheaded bloke off the telly who goes around pretending he's a soldier" but a dignified and respected figure. Maybe I've got this whole thing wrong.
Anyway, it's not just the right-wing papers who've abandoned all subtlety in these final hours, as you can see from the Indy
and the Mirror
It's getting less and less subtle.
There's a myth going around at the moment that goes like this: "We were all told this campaign would be won on the internet, but actually it's the mainstream media who are shining." Which is drivel. No-one seriously said this campaign would be won on the web, and if they did, they were insane; this is the first campaign where social media and the web have played a significant minor role, but no-one ever thought it would be the web wot won it. And besides, while the leaders' debates have been a touchstone for the campaign, they've only served to make the dead-tree papers even more obsolete, reduced to a level of telling you that what you saw wasn't what you saw and looking more ridiculous than ever.
No, this isn't the election where the MSM bravely fought off the internet and proved they'd be around forever. It's considerably more complicated than that, and probably for another time to analyse. But what you can say is that for the next day or two, our dead-tree inky friends are more shrill, more obvious and more blunt than they ever have been. They're telling us what to think and how to vote. It's come to that point - and we should bear it in mind in a few weeks' time, when all this is over, and they go back to pretending they don't have agendas, and they're just there to report the facts, and they're asking for our trust. Let's not forget days like this.
* Not all of these are exactly true.
Liddleballs
So, apparently Rod "goat curry" Liddle is not going to be the editor of the Independent.
And already people are queueing up to point fingers at the evil liberals whose screeching campaign against the world's most hilarious journalist stopped someone so brilliant from single-handedly rescuing the ailing Indy. One such person is Tim Luckhurst in today's Guardian.
Are we really supposed to believe that, despite the Jimmy Savile-a-like's apparent superior skills and the alleged fact he was the best man for the job, that everyone was just scared off from making the right decision by a bunch of shouty liberals? Come off it. No-one's ever been scared off by a bunch of shouty liberals, except other shouty liberals. Sunny claims victory over at Liberal Conspiracy, and it's certainly a decision to be pleased about in the context of there not being a total reactionary arse editing one of the two remaining supposedly liberal-left national newspapers. But I am not entirely sure that the campaign was the only thing that won the day.
More likely, I think, is another possibility: that the revelations about Liddle's fondness for posting stuff that was rather unpleasant on football message boards marked him out to be a bit of a loose cannon. Let's assume he didn't write any of the contentious posts, and his defence about having his computer hacked into by someone else is entirely true: even then, he still comes across as a bit of a loose cannon, and someone who, as Sarah Ditum pointed out, doesn't really understand technology tremendously well. Is that really the person you want running a national newspaper in the digital age, overseeing its web operations?
Secondly, I think it is worth considering the idea that the campaign didn't pluck Liddle's unpopularity among Indy readers out of the air - it actually existed, and exists. As a self-confessed bleeding heart, though a non-sandal-wearing non-yoghurt-weaving non-Islingtonite type of bleeding heart, I'm the kind of person who might buy the Independent - and indeed I have done many hundreds of times, largely for the news, world news and sport, as well as the Howard Jacobson column on a Saturday (I know, I know, you needn't point it out to me) or Robert Fisk, but I assume some of it's been down to the fact that I find it one of the least offensive options on the news-stand, and sometimes the thing that offends you the least is what you go with. (For example, the Guardian's politics might not offend me, but all that endless wall of sewage about buying really expensive stuff, the lifestyle flannel, makes me lose the will to live.)
Now, as a potential Independent reader, my emotional reaction to his possible editorship is that I don't really like it. I think he's a bit of a berk. Reading him tiptoeing over the racism tightrope in his Spectator articles is a thoroughly grim thing for me and I can only imagine a newspaper edited by him to make the same kind of inept judgements over stories as he does over his choice of words - possibly even being as unpleasantly provocative, as well. In which case, I don't really think I want to buy the thing any more. It's gone from being least offensive to possibly most offensive. Do I really want to waste my time with that?
Perhaps the reaction to Liddle's possible appointment, the Facebook group, and all of that stuff, wasn't a bunch of nasty liberal bastards bullying the Indy bigwigs into rejecting the stellar candidate. Maybe it really was the case that Liddle would have been a liability, and a business decision was taken, rather than a hysterical "hiding behind the settee because of those ghastly lefties and their supreme power" decision that we're supposed to imagine has taken place, if you believe what some are saying.
It's important to bear this in mind because there's a danger in all this that liberals inevitably end up getting painted as fascists by the kind of people who view them with nothing but contempt. Look at the censorship-happy liberals, they will say. First they tried to ban Jan Moir because she just spoke her mind - we didn't, but thanks anyway - and now they've banned a brilliant genius from being the best Indy editor ever - we didn't, but thanks anyway. The left only gets made to look powerful when it's being wrongly blamed for clamping down on freedom. The narrative is a familiar one, though, one in which the hypocritical liberal-left fascist scum are the real anti-freedom people out there, and it's only brave souls like Liddle who are battling for freedom and truth, and de dah de dah de dah, you get the general idea. We encounter it so often it's wearying.
Maybe it wasn't us. Maybe it was just business, and a realisation that this person wasn't the right one for the job. Who knows - maybe there is another human being in Britain more capable of editing a national newspaper than Liddle? Can't we even entertain that possibility? No, blame the liberals; blame the mob. So much easier.
The Indy’s in a Liddle bit of trouble
You'll know I'm no fan of Rod Liddle. I'm not really much of a fan of the Independent nowadays either, though I still read it from time to time. So which is worse? There's only one to find out... make Liddle the editor!
Incredibly, that's what a real human being has thought up as a viable idea to actually happen. Really.
Roy Greenslade has a good post up today about the shockwaves that the possibility of Liddle turning up and editing the Indy has created:
High-profile writers and editors are privately expressing grave concern about the decision by the editor-in-chief, Simon Kelner, to appoint Liddle. They believe his views run counter to the paper's ethos and, in the words of one critic, it will prove to "a recipe for commercial disaster."
Not just commercial disaster, though, I'd wager - disaster for that newspaper in particular, and disastrous for the press in general. We've already got half a dozen or so "Climate change is bollocks, isn't it, of course you can't say anything nowadays for fear of upsetting minorities, and the PC liberal elite, who run everything, are ruining our country" newspapers; it's hard to imagine how Liddle would do anything than create another one.
There's an ever-growing Facebook group, now with 1,588 members at the time of writing, to try and stave off the threat of Liddle becoming editor and dragging the Indy into the toilet, which I think is an excellent idea. Paul over at Though Cowards Flinch is a bit more sceptical than me about that and hopes the NUJ will ride to the rescue - well I'd love to imagine they might, but I think the chances are remote. Still, a few days ago no-one would have thought that anyone in the world could have possibly considered Rod Liddle to be anything other than a miserably bad columnist who occasionally says things that are racist and whose blog entry about Marcus Brigstocke marked a new low water mark in his once-mediocre career.
There is another possibility, though, and it's one that I've considered for a while. Liddle might just be writing for his target market at the Spectator. He knows the kind of shit the readers there expect - ill-thought-out but provocative polemic about how liberals are all bastards and how it's actually the white people who are the good guys, and everyone in Bongobongoland is savage scum, written with enough conviction, if not evidence, to create a stir. You're faced with a choice if you're a writer like Liddle - you can write about what you want for buttons and a hearty "well done" every now and then; or you can abandon everything you believe in, all those principles you hold dear, and dive into the cesspit in order to keep the money coming in. I dare say he makes a decent enough living by dancing along the racism tightrope at the Spectator - who cares whether he believes in it or not? It's certainly effective, even if I find it blood-vomitingly offensive.
So there's a possibility that the liberal-left are worrying too much about Liddle. He may not be a borderline racist with keyboard-in-the-face stupid views about a great deal of things; he may simply be a canny journalist who knows exactly what his readership want from him - in the case of the Spectator, I think he's got them fairly well nailed down. It may be that ability to anticipate the demands of his readership that could lead to him being a great success at the Indy, you see.
All right, obviously not - of course not - but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway. I think the reason he's being picked is that someone, somewhere thinks he will be the kind of provocative, attention-grabbing editor who can turn up on the kind of TV programmes who need someone to make Quentin Letts not look so appalling and idiotic; he can generate publicity for the paper and attract people to it, people who might not otherwise be interested in the Independent and who might think that he'll bring a bit of fun to it. It's wrong, and it's doomed, if that's the strategy, but that's all I can think of.
Liddle gets the last laugh in all this, of course. He gets to chuckle about the people setting up Facebook groups, knowing that quite a lot of print dinosaurs are still lumberingly suspicious of anything electronic and wouldn't know social media if it came and bit them on the eyeball. He gets to arrive in his job with a pre-packaged controversy helping him get noticed. And, most of all, he gets the job. That said, I still think his presence as a national newspaper editor is another nail in the coffin of the dead-tree press. And I can't find myself thinking that's a good thing.
See also: Sarah Ditum at Liberal Conspiracy
A slight amendment
News of the liquid bomb plot paralysed global air travel, prompting authorities to implement stringent security measures at airports around the world.
News of the alleged liquid bomb plot paralysed global air travel in August 2006, prompting authorities to implement stringent security measures at airports around the world.
I'm almost entirely sure it was nothing to do with me. But at least it's a step in the right direction from the corporation that brought you AIRLINE TERROR PLOT while the trial was ongoing - but the jury wasn't as convinced as the subeditors. Today's Indy, of course, carries on with the same assumption:
labelling Rashid Rauf PLANE PLOT BRITON.
What's the evidence he was involved in a 'plane plot'? I'm not saying he wasn't, I'm just wondering why, if it was so compelling that newspapers and other media have decided he did it, why he was never charged, tried or convicted. Do the media say that about other people never charged, tried or convicted of anything, even if they are dead and libel laws cease to worry them? I don't think they do.
Someone’s got to pay for all that red ink…
Ouch. 90 staff are being booted out at the Indy. What a glowing recommendation of the new regime!
I don't know if this strategy of hiking up the price, using loads of red ink, turning into the Express and then booting out journalists, is a wonderfully good thing. Someone somewhere must think it's a good thing.
Crap journalism, Indy-style
For a while now I've been irritated by the new-look Independent: the red ink; the celebrity obsessions, the Mail-style white woman corner on the front page; the Express-style headlines; the fact it's a quid, and isn't really worth that by any stretch of the imagination; but, above all, the fact it used to be rather good, and now isn't.
Tony Blair used his final speech as PM to slag off the Independent as a 'views paper' not a newspaper. He didn't slag off the Mail for pursuing an anti-Muslim agenda, nor the Express, nor the Sun; he decided it was much more important to have a bash at the Indy for sometimes saying things that he disagreed with. Which made me think: for a newspaper to have pissed of the Prime Minister, of whatever party, so much, it must have been doing something right; and it must have been carrying out that strange alchemy which we call 'journalism'.
No longer. Today's front-page splash is the kind of tedious wank that you'd expect to get in the Mail or Express - not in terms of content, as I think it's trying to make a liberal point, but in structure it's just the same as the bullshit you'll find in the other mid-market scream sheets. In other words, the Indy has given up being what it was, the paper that pissed off the Prime Minister; now it wants to be a slightly left-of-centre Mail/Express.
So there we are. And the story itself is written just as a Mail/Express one would be:
The number of children born behind bars has almost doubled since Labour came to power, with new figures showing women prisoners currently giving birth at nearly four a week.
Is it really that significant a leap from two a week to four a week? Is that statistically relevant, or not? But what pisses me off is the 'since Labour came to power', a classic Mail statbollocks story, implying that some great causal change came about when Labour got in.
And now I present you with this:
Figures from the Ministry of Justice show that 283 children were born in prisons in England and Wales between April 2005 and July this year, an average of 1.7 a week. But 49 babies were born between April and the beginning of July this year alone, almost four a week, meaning the 2008 total could reach nearly 200 if births continue at the same rate, more than double the 64 prison births recorded in 1995-96 before Labour came to power.
"If this carried on at exactly the same rate, then this would happen" - yes, I'm sure it would, but what point are the Indy trying to make? That more crims are getting pregnant? Or that more pregnant crims are being banged up? I think it's the latter, but do the figures really prove that? Yes, if X, Y and Z happened then that would be double the 1995-6 figures, but does that prove that there's a policy in place to imprison pregnant women regardless of the effect on them? I'm not so sure it does.
Prison reformers demanded that women should be locked up only in extreme circumstances, saying that keeping mothers and young babies in prison can harm young children and does nothing to cut crime.
I think that should read 'pregnant women', otherwise it's not really making sense. Anyway, you know the headline...?
Number of babies born in prison soars
I know it's a bit pernickety to point this out, but:
Officials say women do not give birth inside jails – except in medical emergencies – and they offer special units to provide a calm environment for babies to bond with their mothers.
Well 'babies born to women prisoners but not actually in jail' wouldn't quite fit the headline box, would it?
I don't know. Time was when you'd hope a story like this would be illustrated with a testimony from a woman prisoner who'd given birth, quotes from people at the sharp end, not just official sources in dusty offices preparing neat little press releases; that was the sort of thing the Indy used to do, and it was a good read. Now it's just the same desk-chained re-heated bollocks of stats + quotes = easy story. It's pretty sad to see it in a newspaper that used to be good.
Express subcontracts hatred out to Star
What you have to remember is that Star readers will be either (a) sitting in a Transit, sipping at a vast mug of hot tea before embarking on a long day's tutting or (b) having a wank at the nudie ladies. If they're doing (a) then I suppose a bit of hatred is enough to stoke you up for a hard day's graft, even if it is based on bollocks prejudice and not true in the slightest. If they're doing (b) then it becomes an uncomfortable hate-sex interface.
Anyway, the Express has abandoned bashing the Musselmen for a day or two, and is concentrating on its latest favourite topic, prices:
We told you yesterday that prices would fall, and look, they have! Aren't we the brilliant oracle of wisdom? Er, yes. We kind of knew that already, by driving past petrol stations. And hearing it on the news. And that kind of thing. If anyone wondered why newspapers are going down the toilet, you could do worse than look at this shambles. All those redundancies to come too... though it'll still take six months to pay back the cost of libelling Kate n Gerry McCann, Robert Murat and now the 'Tapas Seven'.
Meanwhile, it's the Star that has been given Muslim-bashing duties, with a story about the evil brown bastards being juxtaposed with a woman in her pants:
See, the evil BBCCCP are putting Muslims before YOU. Not that I guess many Muslims enjoy the Star's infrequent anti-Islam rants, but it creates the idea that Muslims aren't welcome to read the paper - it's US and THEM as far as they're concerned. There's a deeper level at which it's just a whole big bowlful of wrong: the story is about the BBC supposedly allowing anti-Christian jokes but not anti-Muslim jokes; therefore Star readers are Christians, not Jews, Hindus, atheists, agnostics or any kind of non-Muslims, but definitely Christians. Now I'm not saying Christians won't buy a paper with tits and bums all over it, but on the other hand, surely true Christians would think that slagging off other religions is a bit, er, un-Christian... no?
Meanwhile, the Expressdependent has another photo of a baguette to remind you of what baguettes look like. They look like this:
Ah yes, thought that was how baguettes looked, but wasn't too sure. Thank fuck for the handy 'woman with baguette' photo to help me be sure of what I'd be getting!
Expressdependent strikes again
There was a time when I used to make fun of the Express on a regular basis for having the most rubbish front pages in the world. Don't get me wrong - they're still as laughably shite as ever, viz today's pisspoor Beanoesque effort:
Seeing as the Express has been wittering on for months about how things, including bread and butter (illustrated with a handy snap of a plate of toast), have been rocketing up in price, it's a bit odd to say the least that on the day inflation figures break through the five per cent barrier they turn into the voice of calmness and reason, telling their panic-crazed readers not to panic - everything's going to be all right, and prices will come down.
Sure, it's a crap front page: a dull headline, a big picture shoved into the bottom right-hand corner, some dithering shite about a bollocks reader offer in childishly bright colours... Just what you'd expect from the team of vaguely sentient creatures who gather together to knock out the Express fronts. But... what's this over in the quality press?
A dull headline, a big picture shoved into the bottom right-hand corner, some dithering shite about a bollocks reader offer in childishly bright colours... ooh look! It's a free lunch for every reader! A free fucking lunch! Imagine that! Fuck you, Mr Guardian and Mr Telegraph, I'm eschewing your superior more highbrow news coverage, for you do not tempt me with a baguette! And thank fuck that the Indy have managed to illustrate the free lunch with a picture of someone holding a baguette, just in case you were unaware of what lunch looked like. Remind you of the plate of toast? And instead of an interesting image or graphic to illustrate the news, let's just have pictures of people's heads. A dead white woman's head down in Dead White Woman corner, much beloved of the Mail and Express, and three other disembodied heads up top. Wow! What visual excitement for Indy readers. Thank fuck for the baguette, that's all I can say.
Yes, it's happening before our very eyes, just as we've seen before. Unable or unwilling to tackle their former broadsheet soi-disant 'quality' rivals, the Indy has decided that there's one group of readers who are thick enough to be swayed by a photo of a woman with a baguette, some pisspoor reader offers and a dumbed-down load of old toss about 'Big Brother': Express readers.
You don't believe me? Not only is this story out of date, but it's exactly the fucking same story as a certain other publication mentioned last week. The paper in question?
Of course it was!
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