She’s back again!
Thank goodness. We can all relax. All is right with the world. Because it's a Monday morning and...
Yes! There she is, Princess Diana, smiling away at some more cooked-up nonsense about her own death. Ah, time was when you were never more than 24 hours away from a new Diana front page at the Express... now we've had to wait a while, but finally, she's back. Even in the lean times, the Express managed to churn out a Diana page on a Monday morning, regardless of whether anything new had been discovered or not (it obviously hadn't), but it has been a while now, hasn't it? Diana Mondays appeared to have gone the way of, well, journalism at the Express.
If the photo accurately represented what Diana's ghost might think of the Express's obsession with her, I think she'd have her head in her hands and be tutting away as if to say "Oh, for fuck's sake. Again? Really? You've found some more shit to stir up? Look, I didn't wear a seatbelt. Otherwise, I'd still be alive, even if a Fiat Uno - the international assassin's vehicle of choice - had caused the crash, even if Henri Paul hadn't been drunk, even if there was a massive conspiracy, even if they used a different body for his blood sample... I'D STILL BE ALIVE if I'd worn a seatbelt... don't you get it?"
Lovely to see her back, though. I had worried that the Express had a new policy of not mentioning the latest crazy theories about Diana's death, out of some sort of respect for the dead or something (!), or because they felt that, you know, all the other stories they'd done hadn't ever achieved anything of any note at all, and that furthermore their bizarre fixation with conspiracy theories surrounding her death had, in many people's eyes, lowered the Express as a newspaper and a trustworthy source of information.
But apparently not. Full steam ahead! More Diana! More conspiracy theories! Diana Mondays are back!
An arms race of irresponsibility
Earlier this week it appeared that the Mail had turned up the irresponsibility in reporting Natalie Morton's death up to 11 and that there was surely no way that anyone could skew the story more incorrectly in order to create panic. But wait. Back comes the Express today with what could be the most disgraceful front page of all time (or at least since the Scottish Sunday Express's Dunblane atrocity):
I'm guessing you probably have an incredulous look on your face, a bit like the opening-night audience watching Springtime For Hitler. But no. I saw this in the paper shop earlier: it's real all right.
Apart from the headline you'll see the sub-headline 'new doubts raised over death of teenager'. Bear that in mind when we look at the story, which is here (if you can stomach it). Is the HPV jab really as deadly as the cancer it's meant to protect? And who thinks that - a trusted source?
Dr Diane Harper, who was involved in the clinical trials of the controversial drug Cervarix, said the jab was being “over-marketed” and parents should be properly warned about the potential side effects.
But... is it as deadly as cervical cancer?
Authorities in the UK should be on the alert because its sister vaccine, Gardasil, used in America, has already been associated with 32 deaths, she said.
So another vaccine which isn't the one in the UK has been linked (but not proven to be the cause of) some deaths. I'm going to have to be terribly rude [/Paxman] but... is it as deadly as cervical cancer?
“Parents need to know this and that in a small number of cases there are serious side effects.”
But... is it as deadly as cervical cancer? Well, nothing this 'expert' has said implies that. Even if we assume the dissenting voice the Express has found is completely correct - and we'd be fucking mad to assume that - the headline still doesn't stack up.
Now to the fresh doubts over the teenager's death. Who do we think is behind these doubts - an expert? Someone who presided at the postmortem and disagrees with the conclusion? Or... just a tinfoil-hat fuckwit determined to bulldoze through their antivaxx bullshit even if it means creating baseless hysteria and being utterly disrespectful to the family of a young girl who has recently died?
Yes, I fear you guessed correctly.
Dr Richard Halvorsen, author of The Truth About Vaccines, said: “One minute Natalie is an apparently healthy girl, she has the vaccine and within two hours she is dead.
We are told she had a terrible cancer inside her that killed her but this is implausible.
What the fuck? Why implausible? What, they just made it up at the autopsy, did they? They slipped in a tumour with a bit of a conjuring trick?
“If you have cancer you have symptoms. Clearly public health doctors are desperate to turn the debate away from the vaccine as a possible cause.”
I'm not making it up. He really believes this shit, stopping short of saying that this poor girl's cancer is a smokescreen, that doctors faked the postmortem results, that there's a huge conspiracy all the way to the top of Government just to promote a vaccine. These are the kind of people the Express uses as trusted sources for its stories.
Bearing in mind the story's about the 'deadly' jab, this is the evidence that the Express has for that:
Jabs, the vaccine support group, has received details of 19 girls who have suffered serious health problems, including seizures, fatigue or joint and muscle pain, since their jabs.
Do you think muscle pain is the same as a seizure and should be bundled together to bulk out the numbers? I don't. And to call Jabs a 'vaccine support group' is a little on the generous side.
But why should anyone care? It's clearly an arms race now. The Mail and Express are trying to outdo each other with ever more irresponsible stories. It's appalling that they should come out with a cockeyed conspiracy theory as to the real cause of Natalie Morton's death, with no evidence whatsoever to back it up. And it's deplorable that they should claim that the jab is more deadly than the cancer it's meant to protect, when even their wheeled-in expert on the matter doesn't say it.
You have to conclude they couldn't give a shit. Who knows, maybe they've flogged a few more papers today on the back of this complete shower of shit. I hope they're really proud of themselves, if they have.
Hat-tip: Adam Bienkov.
Katie Price and the value of celebrity
I've written before about the allegations Katie Price has made about being raped. They were widely reported, especially by Richard Desmond publications, as the interview in which they were contained appeared in Desmond's OK! magazine. The other papers covered it, but not to the same degree.
Now, though, there's been another spike in interest in the story - it's much bigger news than it was before. Why's that? Well now it turns out that Price has said an unnamed celebrity was behind the attack on her. All of a sudden, it becomes a bigger story, appearing on the front page of every tabloid every day this week so far. Today's papers are a good example:
Celebrity raped? Meh. Celebrity raped by celebrity? Wow! I don't know if I'm alone in feeling a little queasy about this state of affairs. I also think the use by the Sun of the phrase 'celebrity rape' is fairly grim as well - this from a paper which used the chortling headline "By gum" the other day to describe alleged sex attacks by a dentist. And is "I didn't rape Jordan" really a story? Whatever you think of Katie Price and her desire to be in the papers, this whole business does not reflect well on tabloid papers in this country.
The Express, meanwhile, has gone back to familiar territory in what is clearly a new policy to return to the old favourites:
The same old tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories; the same old nonsense. I even discovered today that the Mail have recently been delving into this drivel thanks to Lauren Booth's article implying Our Queen of Hearts may have been slaughtered because she was about to single-handedly destroy the arms industry. The sort of guff you'd laugh off if it appeared in a student magazine, but not something worthy of turning up in a national paper.
It seems little changes.
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