Tarts and hookers
I've written before about the way in which the tabloids have acted with all the subtlety of a tonne of ants at a particularly sugary picnic with regard to the latest Wayne Rooney stories. And I've tried to argue that these stories don't come about because of any hypocrisy on his part, or because of his endorsements or picture spreads in glossy mags talking about family values, or any particular moral outrage - they are published purely and simply because a lot of people get a buzz out of reading about other people's sex lives.
Earlier on today, I looked at the way in which a 'pal' of one of the women involved in this story said that she was 'not a nice person' and enjoyed drink and drugs. The 'pal' may not of course really exist, or may be someone who only vaguely knows the woman concerned; whatever the truth, they don't sound like much of a 'pal'. They may not be telling the truth but it's a pretty good gamble that once someone is outed as a sex worker their reputation could be said to be pretty low anyway, and that you can get away with saying what you like about them, accurate or not. That's how it is, unpleasant as it is; I'm not saying it's right, but it's the way this kind of thing is viewed.
You might remember from the Tiger Woods saga that the women involved with him were reduced to mere numbers, like holes on a golf course:
And I think there's a similar dehumanising process going on with the women involved in the Rooney story. They aren't people in their own right, but hookers and tarts:
The Sun refers to the 'tarty twosome who gave soccer rat Wayne Rooney a threesome'. And then there's some intrusion (or it may be speculation) into the life of Coleen Rooney:
Rooney's shattered wife Coleen will go against her family's wishes today by seeing the Man United striker for crisis talks.
It's not as if the Sun has ever been caught telling porkies about something like that, is it? Oh, hang on:
As part of our coverage of the break-up of Cheryl and Ashley Cole's marriage we reported on March 4 the singer would fly to France to meet her estranged husband who was texting her lines from her songs. We accept Cheryl did not fly to France, no such texts were sent and she denies saying she was scared of life as a single girl as we reported on March 1. We are happy to set the record straight and apologise to Cheryl.
Well, who knows whether it's true or not? It is intrusive, whatever it is. This is part two of these stories - the pictures you'll see on the Sun website and elsewhere are a bit poor quality, like they've been blown up too much; they've almost certainly been harvested from Facebook-type sites or other websites. In the battle to scrabble around for a fresh angle, it doesn't matter who gets hurt, has their privacy ruined or gets dehumanised - we need a new story, we need to dig some new dirt, while it's still fresh. And that's what we get. We learn nothing, really, from all of this; we just get treated to more and more of the same.
Rooneygate and more news about dicks
I want to start this by looking at the justification for the latest Wayne Rooney stories. It's pretty much the same justification that we all remember from the Tiger Woods tales about what he'd been up to and what he'd been doing with his dick.
News about dicks - the same old story. Except we're meant to believe that there's a reason for all this, beyond the giggling prurience and the intrusion into someone's private life. You can see the figleaf over at the News of the World's original story:
Rooney's earlier brush with scandal came in 2004 when he confessed to visiting a seedy massage parlour in a rundown area of Liverpool for £45-a-time sex, including a romp with a 48-year-old grandmother nicknamed Auld Slapper - the first time he was caught cheating on devastated childhood sweetheart Coleen.
Since then Rooney, who played for England on Friday night at Wembley, has crafted a brand of happy family life that's helped win big-money sponsorships and endorsements.
But the tawdry truth is just a year ago he was at it again.
But interestingly enough, that defence is torpedoed by Max Clifford in today's Sun:
Publicist Max Clifford believes football fans won't be bothered by the allegations surrounding Rooney's private life — as long as he keeps on scoring goals.
Mr Clifford said: "The only thing Wayne Rooney has to worry about is his wife, whether she, like all the others, is prepared to accept her husband's alleged infidelities.
"Nobody in football gives a monkey's as long as he's winning on the pitch. Will it stop people drinking Tiger Beer? No. Will it stop people buying Coca Cola? No. Will it stop parents buying Nike for their children? No."
Well, of course it won't. But the gleeful press attempted to scramble up to the moral high ground during the Tiger Woods revelation by claiming that it was Tiger Woods's family-friendly image - and not the fact he's one of the most spectacular golfers in history - that was responsible for his ever-growing list of endorsements. Some of them are doing the same, this time - but others are being a little more honest.
Because this isn't about exposing the hypocrisy between a person's public image and private life - this is pure and simple about digging dirt. Rooney's past transgressions didn't stop him from getting endorsements, and nor will this, so long as the goals keep going in. I don't remember Avram Grant having a load of picture spreads in Hello! magazine with his wife, but that didn't stop the papers ferreting around in his private business last year.
Perhaps the most telling paragraph in all of this business is to be found in the Sun's coverage today:
Wannabe glamour model Natalie, whose dad is Wayne's uncle John, also said: "Other footballers have girls begging to have sex with them. He pays for it. Lost all my respect for him now! He's obviously got more money than sense."
I'm no prude, but there are times when even I start yearning for a gentler time before all of this stuff was considered fair game. I don't think there should be rules preventing it from being published; I just wish people, no matter how famous, could be allowed to have private lives, and there wasn't a market for this grubby kind of story. I don't have a huge amount of sympathy for Rooney at all, of course, given what he's done. But that doesn't mean I think it's a worthwhile story for the papers to be covering. But cover it they have, and not just the red-tops:
I don't care what Wayne Rooney does with his dick, just as I don't care what William Hague does or doesn't do or did or didn't do with his. Maybe that puts me in the minority, but so be it. It's always a different justification... it's about the taxpayers' money, it's about the endorsements, it's about the hypocrisy... no. No it isn't. It's about digging up sleaze, that benefits no-one, but titillates a few. That is all it has ever been about.
A new approach in celebrity death stories?
When looking back over the Jan Moir / Stephen Gately atrocity, a lot of people have concluded that the outrage over the abysmal and nasty article written by Moir didn't do any good. She's still in a job, and the PCC rejected the complaint - so all that anger on Twitter and elsewhere didn't achieve anything, did it?
I'm not so sure about that, though I can understand why people would like to settle into that narrative like a comfy pair of old slippers. It means there's nothing to worry about. But I would like to hope - hope against hope - that the storm the Daily Mail found itself in after Moir's ill-judged and venomous article made them, in some small way, feel they were a little more vulnerable to the outside world, and their own readers, than they were before. It's easy to dismiss the rantings of a few pointless troublemakers like me, for example, but when it's several thousand people, and several thousand readers, that's a different matter.
It's worth pointing out here that the immediate swipes at Stephen Gately just hours after he had died were not a one-off. The Mail had previously delighted in the disappearance of TV presenter Mark Speight, gleefully poring over his personal life and allowing reader comments to insult him while he was missing and, as it turned out, suicidal. Missing chef Claudia Lawrence has had her personal life intruded into, also, supposedly in the public interest - though I fail to see how. The message has always been 'Don't let the corpse get cold', although it's also important to say that the Mail are by no means the only offender when it comes to this kind of behaviour.
Today, after the death of Kristian Digby, the Mail's article* is was calm and respectful. Now you can imagine this is for all sorts of reasons, none of which are connected to the Jan Moir article, and I'm sure most of them aren't - it shouldn't be a cause for celebration when a newspaper has published a decent article, should it? - but what's important to know is that there is another story here.
The Sun, who I won't link to, have been tipped off as to the cause of death. It is, if true, a fairly embarrassing one - and one which, incidentally, benefits no-one to know about, especially in the hours just after someone has died. I couldn't give a shit how this poor man died and it's largely up to the coroner to decide these things anyway; speculation is unhelpful, possibly distressing to family and friends, and doesn't tell us anything. As ever, some copper with a keen eye for making a fast buck off the back of someone else's death by selling info to the tabs has made the relevant phone call, and the Sun have revelled in the story.
I hope that the Mail, and other papers, don't follow the Sun's line on this. I had hoped this would be the case, but sadly not. And yes, I know. Many will say this information is now 'in the public domain' and that I'm frankly rather naive if I think that everyone else won't follow the Sun's lead and revel in the details. I'm not saying that anyone shouldn't be allowed to reveal these kind of things; just that sometimes it doesn't add anything to a story, other than a kind of prurient hand-rubbing at someone else's unfortunate demise, and that I find it entirely irrelevant. My life is not enriched or improved by knowing the exact way in which this poor man died, and I don't think anyone else's either. And spare me any argument about needing to be accurate and report the facts; funny how these arguments only turn up when it's a matter of intruding into someone's personal life and revealing embarrassing details, and never about real investigations into matters of genuine public interest.
This was a human being, after all, with friends and family who are all grieving right now. How does it benefit anyone, and how is it in the public interest, to speculate over the cause of death? And now answer me this: how the hell is it right to allow these kinds of comments just hours after someone has died?
Hilarious. Look, I may well be wrong, but I hope I'm not. It's just that there appears to be not quite so much appetite over at the Mail to 'not let the corpse get cold' or to come in with the other angle on Kristian Digby's death. I was wrong, unfortunately, but you've got to have hope. You've always got to try and be optimistic about these things, and hope that people will have high standards; I don't like being eternally cynical. I always have hope. So often it's proved wrong, but never mind. You have to have hope.
You have to hope, also, that some columnist doesn't use it as easy fodder for a pointless rant about people's lifestyles. You can hope, anyway, and I always do. You never know: perhaps this man's death can be treated with the dignity and respect it deserves. Not by the Sun, obviously, but perhaps by others.
Incidentally, it could be argued - and may even be argued by someone, somewhere - that it's in the public interest to let people know the details of deaths like this so that others don't have it happen to them. I would believe that a whole lot more if the very newspapers who do this didn't constantly argue that if school-age children are taught about sex education, they will automatically go out and have sex. Funny how other inquests about sudden deaths, not involving celebrities, don't attract that same public service journalism, then.
*updated updated* Apparently there was another story (see comments) with a big headline referring to the alleged manner of Kristian Digby's death, which has apparently disappeared. Maybe it's not too late to hope after all... or is it? Even so, they're still including it in their original story (at the time of writing, though that my change yet again).
* This may of course change, which is one of many reasons why I am often loath to link to Mail stories. They are often updated on the same URL and end up being entirely different. All I can say is, at the time of writing, this was what I found. And, silly me, it did go and change.
Tiger Woods: Who gives a shit?
I should put my hands up here at the very beginning and admit I don't like golf. Other than knocking a ball through the windmill at a windswept Camber Sands when I was younger, I've never played it. And yet quite rational people I know, who are perfectly reasonable in other ways, seem to regard it as some kind of religion. When they 'get golf' you hardly see them ever again; their lives consist of wearing slightly odd-looking trousers and knitwear, and disappointedly tut-tutting at you for not wanting to be frozen to death at 7.20am every Saturday. You find yourself slipping out of their lives as the golf takes a stronger grip on them, until... then they're gone. The golf has won.
Watching it on TV has never really interested me either. A bit of green, a bit of blue, a bit of green - and some screaming nutcase roaring "Getinthehole!" when the ball is quite clearly not going anywhere near it - like it'd listen to him anyway.
But that's beside the point. Even I've heard of Tiger Woods. And despite his massive celebrity, I can't help asking the question: who gives a shit? What's happened over the past few days has been fairly ridiculous. Sure, he had a car accident. And...? Ah, but there's something else involved, a suspicion that he's had an affair, and the papers have reverted to their 1970s type. Ooh men and women doing it, they whoop, like teenage boys talking about fucking behind the bike sheds! And then you have the tragic misogyny of the Sun, as ever, talking about a 'girl' who is Tiger's 'birdie', I mean how cheap is that?
Oh sorry, my mistake, that was the Telegraph, Britain's top selling quality newspaper, who decided that kind of outdated shit was worth putting on the front page of their paper. Good on them for outdoing the tabloids and getting something thoroughly unpleasant and derogatory into a national newspaper; well done for that. Still, now that Woods has appealed for privacy over his private and personal affairs, it's obviously open season:
I'm still wondering who really gives a shit, though. So what? I don't know if there's some attempt to expose hypocrisy but I don't remember Tiger Woods moralising to the rest of the world about what a great guy he was and how he'd never have an affair, or even traded on his family image in advertising. I don't think so, and even then it'd still be fairly tenuous as to why we were meant to be reading about this in our newspapers. Aren't there more important things going on in the world?
But they're all at it. The women said to have had affairs with Woods are mere window-dressing for these newspapers and I find it all a bit juvenile and faintly tragic, but maybe that's just me. Maybe everyone else is really interested in all this and amazed by every single detail. Maybe there's something else going on about the blackness of Tiger and the whiteness of the women involved, but I don't really understand that either.
Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe this is really important news and I don't understand it because I'm too slow, but a lot of people in the media seem to think that we're all dumbfounded and gripped by this story. I'm not. I couldn't care less. Even if I liked golf, I think it'd be a case of: so fucking what? So human beings behave like human beings - is it really worth invading their privacy? Is it really to our benefit to hear the phone calls, see the photos, have all the details of this spilled out in the papers, while elsewhere there is real news that is being ignored?
Maybe this is about it being cheap journalism, where newsdesks can be spoonfed everything they need without ever bothering to leave the office. All the pictures and video and audio come straight to them. Maybe I am missing the point entirely and this is the biggest story in the history of the world ever, and we'll look back in 50 years and say: Do you remember where you were when Tiger Woods had a car accident and then some people said they'd fucked him? Do you remember that? Cor, hasn't journalism gone downhill since then?
SuBollocks
I think it was Charlie Brooker back in the TV Go Home days who did a spoof of a celebrity magazine covering a man walking past some crates. To prove that news does emulate comedy, here's today's Sky News website:
(Spotter's badge: ryanfmc)
Yes. It's true. A woman has walked up to her bin and put some rubbish in it. To clarify, the news story, on Sky News, a news channel that thinks it's grown-up enough to host a debate with the leaders of all political parties in the run-up to the next election, is that a woman has put some rubbish in a bin.
That would be bad enough, just the sheer banality of it, but they couldn't resist this:
Earlier this week, Boyle reportedly burst into tears while visiting the US for a whistlestop tour.
...
The star has previously suffered from stress and checked into the Priory clinic for treatment shortly after she shot to fame.
Ah, lovely. There we are: waiting for the tears, the breakdown, the stress and the problems so they can make fun out of her, just as they did when she was admitted to the Priory. Doesn't it make you proud of the British media?
Disturbing sentence of the week
is this, from the Mail's latest story about Suri Cruise's shoes:
'She's looking a little grown-up for a three-year-old' - try saying that without vomiting blood.
Suri Cruise’s shoes
Yesterday I wrote about how the Mail were wasting their time (and ours) by churning out spectacularly pointless articles, including one about a couple who happen to be BBC journalists who've split up. I didn't really notice the significance of this paragraph at the time
Not all of Mr Arney's tweets have been about his estrangement from Ms Iqbal. On November 10, at 9.42pm, he was concentrating on work-related matters and wrote: 'Just listened to very illuminating interview with Ecuador's splendid pro-people president, conducted by the ever-excellent Fergus Nicholl.'
but, reading it back, there's something poignant in there. On the one hand you have one journalist enjoying the fact that his department is covering highbrow, complex, 'illuminating' issues; on the other you have another journalist who is writing about how some people are arguing on Twitter.
While the BBC might be covering Ecuador's president, the Mail have bigger fish to fry. What kind of shoes is three-year-old Suri Cruise wearing, for example? You might say: hang on a minute, is it really appropriate to be writing stories about three-year-old kids? But yes. Apparently, it is. Last week brought the revelation that the pre-school child had been wearing high heels in the street:
And today comes the stunning news that now Suri Cruise is wearing Wellington boots.
Daily Mail Reporter, presumably just polishing off their very own article about Ecuador's presidency, types with excitement:
Maybe Katie Holmes decided the close call last week was enough to put an end to her daughter wearing footwear made for grown-ups? Or maybe the recent change in the weather convinced her that wellingtons were a more practical option?
We can only speculate at the moment, I'm afraid. It's depressing to know that wherever this three-year-old child goes, photographers will be invading her privacy. And newspapers will be there to buy the pictures and write shit stories about them. Just take a look at this list of stories. It's not going to stop anytime soon, I'm afraid.
Buy my book, it’s great
Switch site
Donate
Recent Posts
- Workbrain
- So Solid Wiki fun
- Quentin Letts killed by a woodchipper
- I just sent Robin round
- Kim Jong Ill
Most Commented On
Recent Comments
- Maxine on Workbrain
- Sirenofbrixton on Workbrain
- Katie on Workbrain
- bernard on Workbrain
- Darren on Workbrain
About Me
Hello. I'm a Bristol-based writer and soon-to-be-redundant journalist. You can read more about me and the Enemies site here, or follow me on Twitter. Email me if you like - antonvowl at live dot co dot uk
If you're struggling to read the site please use the drop down box below to increase the text size.