The dirty northerners and their trial by football
This is a guest post by Alex Jackson, who is a writer from Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. He mainly writes unsuccessful novels but takes an interest in editorial pieces on politics, the media and local news. If you'd like to write a guest post for Enemies of Reason, email me at antonvowl@live.co.uk
Think of the North East and what do you visualise? Football? Unemployment? Violence? As a Northerner I wish to wipe these stereotypes from the Southern agenda, yet every now and again someone takes a stab at us Tynesiders (or Wearsiders or whatever), the most recent example being a Tory saying Northerners should be used to pick berries in the Summer. Yes, I am often upset by the Southern attitude to the North, partially due to the belief that we're all thick as bricks. Really? My sister recently left school and got a place at Newcastle University: one of the most prestigious schools in the UK, but I need to get to the point of this editorial: The Tyne-Wear derby.
There were some ugly scenes at the Stadium of Light on Sunday as Asamoah Gyan scored a late equaliser: A fan ran onto the pitch and pushed Steve Harper over, the fans got fighting as per usual and chairs were torn from their moorings and thrown around like deformed beach balls. Ugly indeed, but there were also some dodgy scenes in Birmingham during the Blues-Villa game (albeit not as bad as Newcastle-Sunderland, but you catch my drift), but who gets the most coverage in the Daily Mail? Of course, it's the poor, Labour voting thugs on Tyne and Wearside:
The title of the article is magnificent:
Sunderland vow to boot out thugs after crowd violence erupts in derby showdown with Newcastle
because you can't cram too much provocative language into one sentence.
Of course, the Mail need a nice big picture of the thugs fighting one another, and an equally big picture further down the page showing a big, tattooed man scuffling with Police, just to drill home the 'Ooh! Look at those horrible Northerners fighting at a football match!' effect. Yet what about Villa-Birmingham? Ah yes, further down the page are the pictures with the trails of smoke from a smoke bomb (with a Police officer handily caught up in the midst to get the Mail going about the lower classes) and a line of Police trying to paint the football fans in a bad light despite the fact there wasn't much fighting. Of course, they are two small pictures because they don't want to draw the attention away from the scummy Northerners. They also seem to think the idea of banning hooligans from grounds is a new concept, but then again, it's the Daily Mail, they probably think they're too upper class to go to football matches.
I'm not going to lie: the violence was unacceptable, as was throwing a smoke bomb onto a pitch, yet the pictures in the Mail make it look like everyone at the Tyne-Wear game was fighting. Think about it: the Stadium of Light holds around 49,000, at the most there would have been 100 people fighting, so that leaves 48,900 law abiding fans. Of course, the Mail doesn't furnish us with the fact that only 24 (or 33, depending on your source) arrests were made because they want it to look like all the Northerners were scrapping, then again, the other papers were no better. The Sun, The Mirror, The Times and another paper Mr Vowl loves with a passion: The Express
The picture pushes all of their buttons: a Northern thug of student age wearing a hoodie, it couldn't have been better for them unless Diana had rolled in to calm the violence. For some reason they appear to have put the word attack in speech marks. What was attacking Steve Harper if it wasn't an attack? 'A Northern scuffle' probably.
If you take a look at the BBC's article it seems quite fair despite the jab at European fans at the bottom of the page, but compared to The Star's it is slim pickings. The Star's article is perfectly summed up in the title: Steve Bruce's Fan Fury, basically an Orwellian Two Minutes Hate for the football world. Was Bruce furious about the fans? erm...no, he spent the majority of his interview praising the fans who handed the Harper attacker over to the Police.
Taken in isolation the violence itself is bad enough, but today every paper had either the back page or a double spread painted with pictures of Geordies and Mackems fighting it out to try and paint us in the worst image possible (not surprisingly, there were no pictures of the smoke bombs at St. Andrews). The Tory-orientated papers were the worst culprits, the Mail being the worst example and The Star the worst for vocabulary (article and spelling wise). Of course this sort of thing will sell their glorified bundles of dead tree, but as proved in the past it will only succeed in stoking the fires of hatred. First it was Labour, then the Muslims and then the Poles. This time it's Northerners, football fans or both.
P.S. I apologise for the blatant plagiarism of Mr Vowl's other post title: Chris Jeffries and his Trial by Media
Deliberately idiotic, perhaps
Oh, Liz Jones, Liz Jones, Liz Jones. You write about not having 50p to cross a bridge as if it's like being murdered; you slag off a spelling mistake in a wine list in a beer-based pub for which you clearly aren't the target demographic; you go wandering around a dead woman's house to confect some kind of colour piece, but the only colour you end up painting is a rather dirty, muddy brown. I don't know what to make of you. No Sleep Til Brooklands felt pretty much the same way as I did when I read your piece today.
I've written about you before a few times. Sometimes I don't like you; sometimes I feel a bit sorry for you; sometimes I just can't make up my mind. Are you just stupid, or idiotic, or is the ditsy stupid persona a literary creation, a stroke of genius; or are you just, perhaps, actually incapable of any kind of empathy whatsoever? If it's the latter, I find it hard to rouse a great deal of hatred; and since the latter possibility is some kind of possibility, if not a more plausible possibility, necessarily, than the other two, I don't know where to go. Is it wrong to read what you write, and walk around the room, pacing like an angry ocelot peering through the bars at a fattened sparrow bouncing around, wanting to rip its wings off and tear it to pieces? Is that wrong, or is it the right response to feel? Because I just don't really know whether it is, any more, or not.
Believe me, I want to feel sorry. I want to feel the best of people. I want to think that people aren't toxic lumps of atoms splodged in the way of anything that's kind, or decent, or humane; I want to think of the world as a place in which people are, generally, good; as a place in which people don't make horrendous, appalling, cackhanded judgements about others, and themselves, and stuff - but then there's the evidence, you see, from my eyes, and ears and all of that, and then I wonder. Oh, do I wonder.
Oh, Liz. Liz. I want you to be a naive fool, or someone who simply lacks understanding of other people; there's nothing wrong with that, of course, and maybe I could understand you a little better, or the things you write, if I knew that were the case. It would make sense, then, that you'd bleat on about being poor while having an enormous house and uber-luxurious tastes; it wouldn't be because you were being deliberately idiotic to raise a few hackles - you'd simply be winding others up accidentally, and that would be, well, OK I suppose, given that that's the way you are.
But which are you? I wrestle with this all the time. But I suppose, in the end, I wonder if I should give up the guessing game for good. What does it matter whether you're a clever writer who's made up a comic persona of someone rather snooty who doesn't understand the real world, or whether you're just someone rather snooty who doesn't understand the real world? What does it matter at all, when articles like today's turn up, squeezing that corpse a little more to get some fresh juice out of it? If it's a sly comic persona, it's not funny this time; if it's really you writing that, then I do feel a bit sorry for you, but not very sorry, because it's not very good. Deliberately idiotic, or just idiotic? Maybe it's time to stop guessing, and just look at the words. And they write a pretty sad story.
Joanna Yeates murder coverage update: Facebook and psychics
After the irresponsible reporting of Chris Jefferies, the arrested suspect in the Joanna Yeates murder case, the story is still at the top of the news. It is a perfect storm for the media: a middle-class photogenic victim; a mystery over the disappearance; a murder; the opportunity to tap into fear - in this case, fear of women being attacked and, as we'll see, Facebook.
Natalie Dzerins has a good summary of today's Mail front page, in which Facebook is fingered as a possible suspect:
- A woman was murdered
- The woman had a profile on Facebook
- The woman might have been killed by someone she knew
- The woman might have been killed by someone she didn't know
Well. I, for one, am enlightened by this stellar piece of journalism.
And that is indeed about it. What a casual observer might wonder - although this of course might be seen as naive and irresponsible by the thin-skinned Avon & Somerset Police - is why, according to the Mail, Facebook is only being looked at now as a possible source of information, so many days later. However, the answer is probably that it has been looked at from the beginning, but is only being reported now, to find a fresh angle to keep the story going. Which is fine, of course, if it gets the investigation somewhere and is genuinely in the public interest - but perhaps it should be asked what is gained, other than more speculation, at a time when a family is still grieving.
Newspapers like the Daily Mail enjoy linking Facebook and crime, whether they're really linked or not. There's a 'scared of technology' aspect to it, and the idea that people aren't safe; there's a tapping in to fear among their readership of what's new and what the young people are doing. It runs a number of articles about bad experiences on the social networking site, which could lead some readers to suspect there is an anti-Facebook or anti social networking agenda at work. You could say that's because the target Mail newspaper demographic is people who wouldn't go on Facebook and who therefore might be fearful or suspicious of what's there; regardless, the coverage often focuses on the fear aspect, rather than the reality of millions of social networking transactions carried out without murder, assault or any negative consequences.
And then we come to the Daily Star. The Mail is really quite a mild treatment of this murder story compared to the Star's effort today. As Exclarotive says:
I can’t imagine how this must make Joanna Yeates’ family feel. To have a national newspaper exploiting her death by printing pathetic, desperate, unfounded claims from a publicity-seeking fraud under a headline promising some sort of hope.
The Daily Star. Because sometimes losing your daughter just doesn’t hurt enough.
Yes, it is truly appalling. It is that bad.
New evidence emerges? Really?
A PSYCHIC has told police she sketched Jo Yeates’s killers only days before the murder.
Carol Everett says she saw the pair in a premonition she had about the landscape architect’s death.
The psychic investigator insists she “saw” Jo being attacked by two of a group of five men after she rejected their offer of a lift.
I wrote a post yesterday explaining why the overuse of the term 'woo' by sceptics can be undermining, and here's a perfect example of why it's important to keep the powder dry for occasions when there are false claims and a horribly unpleasant exploitation of grief. This is simply disgusting. I don't care whether this 'psychic investigator' is deluded or deliberately misleading; it's disgraceful that a national newspaper should give credibility to totally unproven and unfounded claims in relation to a real-life tragedy. The paper even gives descriptions of the people 'seen' by the psychic, as if they're genuine sightings and not some made-up fantasy.
Don't blame the psychic; blame the newspaper that gave them the front page. And I don't care if it is 'just the Daily Star' and 'no-one will believe it'; that is simply not good enough. This is a human being's life, being belittled and cheapened and demeaned by this artifice, this pretence of insight, this nonsense.
So now we appear to have entered the realm of speculation in this murder case - bereft of leads, copy still needs to be filed and fresh angles found. And it is leading to some miserably bad journalism, exploitative, unpleasant and distasteful.
Christmas fat fear
Fear. Fear! Fear about chubbiness. Fear about Christmas! Fear. Put on half a stone and he'll leave you! Stop eating that turkey! Stop the fun! Fear. Live in fear. Fear yourself. Fear everything. Fear Christmas fat!
Why putting on just half a stone will cause your husband's eyes to start wandering
My husband? Does the Daily Mail know something I don't?
There are only two days to go before the biggest feast of the year.
But for those who cannot help but ask for seconds of the Christmas turkey this might be enough to put you off.
According to a survey published yesterday partners who gain just 8lbs over the festive period could be single before the dawn of the New Year.
It seems adding just half a stone is enough for their partners to simply look elsewhere.
Ah, the 'Christmas survey pimping some weight loss guff' story. Fear! Be fearful! Use our weight-loss stuff or your husband will run off with someone else! Mind you:
Almost 42 per cent of men interviewed said they would be less attracted to their girlfriend if they gained half a stone in weight.
And five per cent even said they would consider ending the relationship altogether.
isn't quite the same as 'put on a few pounds and hubby's off dogging', and:
Overall, more than three quarters of respondents said weight gain was a turn off, with just 21 per cent admitting they would find their partner more attractive.
Spin that roulette wheel! Have a few more pigs-in-blankets and maybe it'll do wonders!
Or: don't bother with tedious surveys flogging diet stuff ahead of Christmas, and fear-tapping articles telling you that you should hate yourself, that you're basically a loser, that everything will go wrong, and that other people are shallow. Maybe they aren't.
Tell you what would be a turn-off in a potential partner of any size or shape, though: seeing them reading the Daily Mail and nodding in agreement.
The Mohammeds are taking over! Or are they?
Some stories just keep coming back, like zombies, or boomerangs, or boomerang-zombies. The "Mohammeds are taking over!" nonsense is getting to be such an annual event now that you can almost sense the weariness with which the ONS compiles its stats on popular baby names. Whatever they do, however they do it, the story - as far as the Mail, Telegraph and others - will be "Mohammeds are taking over (but the PC folk at the ONS want to keep it a secret!)".
Same thing last year, same thing this year - you can see my 2009 article about the Telegraph's efforts here, and you'll notice that not a great deal has changed if you pop over to the Telegraph's tale from this time around. I imagine it's marked out in the newsroom diaries in red pen, because it's an easy enough free hit for a hack in a hurry: a bit of listmaking, a bit of class prejudice against 'chavvy' names and a bit of "Oh my goodness! Those brown folk are reproducing at ungodly speed!" all wrapped up in one easy-to-C&V story.
Primly Stable points out:
The problem is, the Mail has had to fix the facts in order to make the story fit its readers' prejudices. As they admit halfway down the story, Mohammed is actually the 16th most popular name in Britain. But Home Affairs Correspondent Jack Doyle has taken the liberty of including various other spellings of the same name - Muhammad, Mohammad, Muhammed and so on - and added them all together in order to give the "true picture". The Office for National Statistics didn't feel the need to do this, but who are they to argue with the Mail's methodology?
Of course, Mohammed is the only name to get this treatment from the Mail. Alexs are not bundled in with Alexanders, Alixs and Alecksanders. Charlie and Charles are kept distinct. Thomas and Tom apparently have nothing in common at all.
The paper also fails to mention that naming your firstborn son after the prophet is a standard thing for Muslims, so there is always going to be a bias towards it
There is indeed. What makes that context important is the fact that the Telegraph is (once again) saying that the ONS is 'disguising the truth'. If you're going to say people are disguising the truth, you'd better be pretty sure not to do it yourself, I think. So, as No Sleep Til Brooklands points out, if you're going to add up spellings, then you really ought to do it for all the spellings, not just the scarily Islamic-sounding ones:
As someone who occasionally gets a mild semi-on over statistics, this isn't actually totally unreasonable, allowing for variations like that. However, if you're going to apply statistical massaging like this, you have to be, y'know, fair about it. By 'fair', I mean simply applying the same rules to everyone. So, if you're going to add up all the various spellings of 'Mohammed', then you should do the same for other names in the list.
So, I went to the source at the ONS There I found the full list: 2009 Baby Names Statistics Boys (.xls file - 535kb). Here, we discover that there are 127 Oliviers, 104 Oliwiers, 9 Olis, 9 Oliwers, 4 Olivers' (plural!), 4 Ollivers, and most significantly, 511 Ollies (with an additional 16 Ollis). Even just adding Oliver and Ollie together, we get to 7,875, putting it back above Mohammed into first place again (and it becomes 8,148 if you add all the above variants). And that's before we get onto the more controversial stuff about how 'Jack' is historically a diminutive of the name 'John' (although of course many would argue that the former has now become a name in its own right).
But let's assume Mohammed is the most popular boys' name, and it's right to add up all the spellings. Does that represent a scarily high amount of Muslim births? Tabloid Watch says:
The Mail says that when you add 12 other recognised variations of Mohammed together, the number of boys given that name in 2009 was 7,549 (out of 362,135 boys born).
Yet the ONS figures show that the number of boys given those same 12 names in 2008 was 7,673.
Overall, this accounted for 2.09% of all boys born in 2008, a very slightly higher number than the 2.08% in 2009.
Two per cent. Not quite as scary as all that, then, surely, especially when you put that two per cent into the context of cultural tradition giving a male child the name of the prophet. So did the Mail and Telegraph (and others) put the figures into that context? The Telegraph, to be fair to them, did say this:
Experts said the development reflected the name's overwhelming popularity among British Muslims rather than any "explosion" in the British Muslim population.
The only thing that seems a little odd is the 'explosion' in quotes, because I can't see anyone saying there has been an explosion. Nevertheless, the Telegraph has, to be fair to them, put the figures into some sort of context. It comes after saying that Mohammed is the 'secret' popular name and that the official figures 'disguise the truth', but still: I don't think they're trying to be scaremongering. The Mail has a slight bit of context, too, pointing out that Mohammed has appeared in the popular names list since 1944 - though it's actually been there since 1924 if you look at the data. You'll also see that the variant spellings of Mohammed have been kept separate for decades, and the variant spellings of other names too (Fred and Frederick kept apart in 1904, for example - wonder if the Mail and Telegraph did articles adding them up then?).
As I wrote yesterday, this kind of story carries with it a responsibility. This is the kind of thing that will be used by extremists and racists to paint a picture of Britain as a place where the Muslim birthrate is accelerating, where Mohammeds are taking over from Jacks and Johns, even if that's not the true or full picture. The onus on people reporting these stats, then, is to be fair and accurate, and place the data in context. If you don't, I think you run the risk of being seen as sending out dog-whistles, appealing to racists or trying to imply that somehow there's some kind of Islamification going on when really there isn't. That can be done deliberately or accidentally, of course; though when the same thing happens time after time, year after year, you have to wonder how much of an accident it can be.
This glimpse of the 'worst-rated' comments on the Mail website might give you a clue as to how some people have seen it:
"I'm Muslim" - CLICK TO DISAPPROVE! As I always say, you can't tell whether online comments, red or green arrows or anything like that really represents a readership in its entirety, or just online readers, or just readers of a certain mindset who look out for certain types of stories to try and skew polls, comments and so on to make their points of view appear more popular than they really are. However, all I do know is that it's pretty depressing to see that - and it's pretty depressing to think that the context into which the name Mohammed is popular has to come from online commenters, who are then voted well into the red. Does that represent a failure of journalism to put the facts into context, or a success of cherrypicking certain facts to create a false impression? I'll leave that up to you.
One last thing: it's been pointed out to me there might be a personal reason why the Mail writer took such an interest in the story:
By Jack Doyle - no wonder he was annoyed.
(Thanks to Chris F, wordwidewade, reevery, tabloidwatch, press_not_sorry and others.)
Computer game dog attack confusion
Evil computer games have made a dog attack a child, according to the Mail:
A terrified schoolgirl had her top lip torn off by a dog as she played with a computer game.
Megan Walker's family say a friend’s bull mastiff cross went berserk when it heard barking on a Nintendo DS game.
It dragged Megan, nine, off a sofa as she played the virtual pet puppy game Nintendogs.
The dog sank its teeth into her face, bit her several times and ripped off her top lip.
Quick-thinking police officers put the piece of lip on ice and surgeons were able to sew it back on.
'I think this game should carry some kind of warning,' said the girl’s grandma Jean Taylor.
'People should be told not to play it when there are dogs in the room. I blame the game for what happened to Megan. If they hadn’t been playing it I don’t think the dog would have gone for her.'
This is one of those stories that fits neatly into the 'computers are evil' and 'scared of technology' narratives for the Mail. Imagine a game that makes dogs attack you, for no reason, with no provocation!
Ms Melville was unavailable for comment, but it is understood that she told police that Megan may have kicked Saracen and that is why he attacked her.
Ah. Well to be fair to the Mail, they did actually include that bit - albeit right at the bottom of the story. Still, a lot of readers won't have made it down there and might be convinced that it's computer games of doom that are definitely responsible for this dog attack.
Thanks to Chris for the spot!
Is ‘Daily Mail Reporter’ looking for a new job?
To illustrate this article about a Facebook outage, the following picture is used:
Hey, what's that tab open at the top left of the screengrab? "Journalism jobs..."
Well, I can't blame Daily Mail Reporter for wanting to get out of there. Good luck with your search! It's lovely out here in the clean world.
Thanks to Tom for the tipoff!
THAT CANNOT BE A COW
Comment gold under this Daily Mail story about a newsreader doing a story about a dead animal found on a Cornwall beach, initially thought to be a polar bear but later discovered to be a cow. Not everyone's buying that explanation, though:
It's a cover-up! Aaargh! One thing I do like about Mail readers - and I do mean like - is the way in which they think critically about a lot of things, more critically than perhaps they're sometimes given credit for. They're not prepared to just accept what they're told by 'the man'. Of course there's a fine line between being a sceptical thinker and turning into David Icke, and I fear Lauren may have wandered slightly across it.
This being a Mail story, though, it wouldn't be a comments section without a proper helping of misogyny:
Yeah, terrific.
Thanks to Tom for the tipoff!
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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
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