It would appear that the Sun has finally lost patience with New Labour. Front page splash after front page splash pile on the misery for Gordon Brown’s beleagured government.
The most savage criticism and opprobrium meted out to Bottler Brown comes unsurprisingly from the Sun’s army of angry columnists. What is surprising is the level of abuse the columnists are allowed to get away with.
Trevor Kavanagh on May 12 unfavourably compared our PM to fallen Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed for genocide and crimes against the state following a popular revolution.
Stronger, and less tastefully still, Kelvin MacKenzie claimed on May 1 that many people in the country would be happy to strangle Gordon until his one good eye popped out.
Greater abuse followed from the poisoned pen of Jon Gaunt who on May 9 claimed that Gary Glitter, a convicted paedophile, has more chance of a comeback than Bottler Brown.
These outrageous personal slurs are not only indicative of the Sun’s rapid loss of faith in Gordon Brown but highlight the complete lack of editorial control or censor under which these high profile and well paid columnists operate.
Food shortage insult
Jeremy Clarkson on May 10 dismissed the global food shortage on account of the shelves at his local Sainsbury’s store being rammed. To top this gloriously insensitive and ignorant statement off the following double page spread described the plight of starving Burmese children.
How else can such lame, ill-considered and moronic thoughts be allowed in a national newspaper unless there is a reluctance on the behalf of editing staff to ask star columnists to re-submit ideas which they have patently taken no time to consider and which fall well below journalistic standards of taste and decency.
Chief offender so far this month must go to Ally Ross who managed to squeeze out three spectacularly insensitive remarks in his column on May 9.
First he asked whether recently deceased comedian Mike Reid would have to defend his Baron title won on a recent posthumously shown ITV show on Living TV’s ghost hunting programme Most Haunted.
Secondly he suggested that self confessed bulimic John Prescott should appear on Celebrity Freaky Eaters.
And finally he produced a litany of lame tsunami puns to review ITV drama Flood. His column page preceded a double page spread on the victims of the Burma cyclone.
Editors should be demanding more from their star turns than just a flow of tasteless invective. Gordon Brown would be the first to agree.
4 responses so far ↓
Dugarry // May 13, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Is Kelvin Mackenzie actually the most vile and moronic person ever to ‘grace’ the planet? Would seem so, and yet who pays for his many many appearance fees on Question? Oh yes, the license fee payer. Jolly good.
If it’s not broken…don’t fix it! « Ladylavinia’s Weblog // May 14, 2008 at 12:42 pm
[...] on May 14th, 2008 This blog is in direct response to a fellow blogger’s comment, namely “Sun columnists and their free rein to offend.” Posted on May 13th, [...]
Owen Howell // May 14, 2008 at 1:40 pm
The Sun does consistently flout standards of taste and decency. The question is: are we just getting what we want, need, or even demand?
In all markets, from the heroin trade to tabloid news stand, there needs to be a demand – otherwise the product will not sell.
This is indeed a sensible argument, as far as it goes – but the next stage of the hack’s argument is quite odious.
It is this: the demand itself is enough to justify printing anything. It is a re-hash of the “fair game” argument which attempts to justify gross intrusions into people’s privacy just because they have courted the press.
This attitude, you might have noticed, has helped to drive Britney Spears, quite literally, to insanity.
The trouble is, this demand is very often created artificially – insofar as it is not fostered by enlightened or free consumer choices, but by incessant and belligerent subject-saturation and deception.
Indeed, recent studies by the Media department of Glasgow University proved that most people were misled by both the “factual” content and agenda-setting powers of television and newpapers.
Of course, many do, in a sense, “choose” to buy the Sun, but many of those do so guided by a false premise – that the information supplied is largely correct or honest.
Choosing a tabloid paper is like a choosing which type of heart disease you are going to die from if you live in one of Britain’s food deserts. By comparison, our tabloid press is a vast swathe of intellectual desert and almost impossible to avoid.
Let me explain, at length:
One problem is that what sells – “Brave troop killed on birthday in Iraq” – is often at odds with the full, representative truth, which is more like this: “The Iraq conflict is a complex thing, involving complex motives and complex actors, corporations and governments”.
Perhaps this sells better, not just because of the laziness of the consumer, but because they have never really been given a decent choice, or because media exposure has re-educated or numbed their sensibilities.
Of course, everybody has a choice of sorts: in totalitarian Russia, people were “free to choose” any state-controlled newspaper, and the people of the Weimar Republic “freely” voted for Hitler, even though they were corralled into this decision by lies and economic desparation.
These examples are a far cry from the choices we make at the news stand – but the analogy is correct: freedom consists not only in how we choose but what, why and when we choose.
These are in turn dictated by the narrow ideological spectrum of tabloid-land, whose inhabitants seek, at every turn, to mould our consumer preferences, so we can associate complex phenomena with anodyne tags like “War on Terror.”
The better we do this, the better we buy in to a readily identifiable, stripped-down set of values.
These values are best imparted by an anodyne, stripped-down lexicon – which is most easily borrowed and reproduced from press releases, or established newspaper language like “WAGS” or “Maddie”.
The implications for freedom of thought and expression are obvious and far-reaching.
Chomsky once said that “propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
The stream of misinformation received through the tabloid press might fit his description: whether the information is lazily reproduced from press releases, or jacked-up to sell newspapers, or an ideolgy that does not stray too far from a media magnate’s political and economic interests.
And the increasingly impoverished printed word is pitted against two things: the oligopolisation of all media, and the increasing pressure on journalists to churn out copy in an industry buckling under the weight of the internet news factory and massive job cutbacks.
These factors indenture the overburdened and underpaid reporter to the official or editorial line, the soundbite, and the press release, which they are ever-less likely to challenge for fear of losing the immediate sources of news they need for their paltry journalistic sustenance.
Resultantly, content is often selected uncritically and therefore is absent of representative and honest facts.
Critics might claim I am patronising the masses by criticizing their ability to choose. They would be right: when, as with Maddie, the Middle East conflicts, to name but a few stories, the public are misled so blatently, the onus is on them to open their eyes and challenge the mainstream media.
The 1960s social revolution proved that people were capable of mobilising and thinking independently, but this no longer seems to be the case.
I do not know why this ability became dormant, but since that capability once existed, we might assume that it can again.
Only if we challenge the barriers to free thought, true knowledge and critical discourse can this be achieved, and this is why our stupefying, lying and inhuman tabloid press needs to be compromised.
After all the problem is, as ever, that we do not have a free press. Said Orwell: “Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Too true.
liz21 // May 14, 2008 at 4:58 pm
I think the free-reign the “Red-Tops” seem to take to criticise is what makes them so popular.
The Daily Express has also been spotted today putting the boot into Gordon over the 10p tax shenanigans – http://www.express.co.uk/ourcomments/view/44418/Tax-climbdowns-smack-of-a-government-in-chaos
While the Express are less, shall we say, brutal than The Sun, their columists still put the boot in in a way news reporters just can’t.
And, I think that’s what we want from columists. After all, if they didn’t say what we’re all thinking then wouldn’t it just be news?