Friday, March 13, 2009 

Laming to the slaughter.

Slowly, the memory of Baby P will fade. Last November and December's moral panic, wrapped up with one of the most unpleasant and counter-productive witch-hunts of recent times and also containing more than a dose of the emotional incontinence which has afflicted some since the death of Diana is still pulsing, but barely. Even as our natural empathy for each other and for those who are actually still alive seems to inexorably ebb, we seem to find it far easier to care about those who we can't bring back. At least those cut up about the upcoming death of Jade Goody (if indeed anyone genuinely is) are directing their attention at someone still breathing.

For social workers themselves though, Baby P will continue to haunt them. Not just because they too will be fearful of receiving the same treatment that Sharon Shoesmith, Maria Ward and others were subjected to should they be unfortunate enough to also fail to prevent a child in their care from being killed, but also because of how the rattled Ed Balls turned once again to Lord Laming to produce a report on what went wrong. As Martin Kettle points out, Laming's first review after the death of Victoria Climbie made 108 recommendations. Social workers complain bitterly that Laming's report instituted the kind of bureaucracy and paperwork more associated with the police; Shoesmith in her interview with the Guardian noted that those working under her were spending up to 70% of their time in front of computers instead of working with families and children. The word "bureaucracy" doesn't feature once in Laming's report (PDF). The word "paperwork" appears once, with Laming emphasising that paperwork not being up to date shouldn't stop an application for a care or supervision order being made.

To add to those first 108 recommendations, there are another 58 in yesterday's to add to them. Balls, unsurprisingly, announced that the government would endeavour to introduce every single one. Not that the language used in Laming's report really gave them much option: flicking through the various proposals, must is used only slightly less sparingly than should. In any event, Laming's report was always a ploy to buy the government time, meant to show that something was being done. Reports and inquiries set up and turned around in such a relative short space of time are always stop-gaps, hardly likely to really help, and in some instances make things worst. They are however a vital part of modern politics: when there really should be inquiries and reports, such as into the 7/7 bombings, our involvement in extraordinary rendition and the Iraq war, they're denied. We might learn something from those; you're unlikely to learn much from Laming's report.

This top-down approach, which seems to be designed to further demoralise workers with edicts from above when they are already under such strain is destined to fail, yet the centralisation instinct continues to reign supreme despite all the negatives which have become attached to it over time. Part of the problem is undoubtedly fear on the part of politicians of losing both influence and power, but it's also because we increasingly demand ourselves that something must be done instantaneously, and that the best way to do it is to rip it up and start again. It's also the easiest thing to do, because it gives us someone to blame and ridicule, whether it be Shoesmith or Sir Fred Goodwin, enabling us to have our own watered down version of the two minutes' hate.

This isn't to dismiss all of Laming's recommendations out of hand. One of the key failings has been a lack of proper training, but this itself has not been helped by the abject failure of politicians to stand up for, support and defend social workers when they are often unfairly criticised by the press. They're either breaking up families too easily or letting parents or carers kill when it should have been obvious that something was wrong. The lack of support in the aftermath of the Baby P case was palpable, further demoralising a profession which already finds it incredibly difficult to retain staff that are overworked and dealing with some of the most intractable problems in society as a whole. The response was institutional risk aversion, taking unprecedented numbers of children in temporary state care. Laming's report will do little more than make social workers and those in charge of them jump through ever tighter hoops, while the opprobrium has not been staunched.

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Thursday, March 12, 2009 

How not to react to idiotic protests.

Over 5,000 people protested yesterday across Northern Ireland for peace. That was on the inside pages. On Tuesday between 12 and 20 Islamists, almost certainly connected with the successor groups to al-Muhajiroun, exercising their clear democratic right, protested at a parade of troops returning from Iraq. Their slogans and placards were admittedly inflammatory, but probably just on the side of not causing a public order offence or inciting hatred, and in any event they should have been given the benefit of the doubt in order to exercise their legitimate right to demonstrate. Their protest, clearly designed to attract widespread attention, makes the front pages of the tabloids for two days running. Forgive me for wondering about the sense of priorities.

Not that any of this was in the slightest bit surprising. It ticked all the buttons for the tabloids: our brave heroic boys being unfairly abused when they are just doing their jobs, mad Muslims doubtless sponging off the state daring to appear in public with a different view from that of the Fleet Street consensus, and then they of course got to make phone calls to their favourite people, the spouting likes of Anjem Choudary and Omar Bakri Muhammad, always waiting on the end of the phone line to deliver a diatribe against some part of life or society. All so predictable.

Less predictable was the tenor of the condemnation from politicians, who rather than suggesting that perhaps the best way to respond to the protest was to not give those who desperately wanted publicity the exact thing that they craved instead competed to spout the most meaningless platitude. Hence we had Harriet Harman hilariously suggesting that the soldiers were fighting for "democracy and for freedom of speech as well as peace and security in the region and the world." These were the troops which have just spent their last six months rarely leaving their base outside Basra, and according to most accounts doing a rather poor job of training the Iraqi police. Their presence, according to no less an authority than the head of the army himself, was in fact "exacerbating" the security situation. She was however outdone by the egregious Liam Fox, who said "[I]t is only because of the sacrifices made by our armed forces that these people live in a free society where they are able to make their sordid protests." He is of course right, up to a point, but the idea that our current armed forces and their deployments are in any way protecting us currently, and that this somehow means that they are beyond criticism, is an attempt to close down such debate, without getting into other arguments such as that made by Matthew Norman. We could however depend on other shrill Tory politicians, such as Sayeedi Warsi, who described the protesters as "criminals", and this blog's much loved Nadine Dorries, who described their intervention as "atrocities" (according to the Sun, although I can't seem to find her describing them thusly elsewhere, although she makes points similar to Harman and Fox on her blog) to even further ramp up the synthetic outrage.

Quite how far what should have been an insignificant protest launched by marginalised individuals with absolutely no wide support was blown out of proportion was symbolised by what we have since learned about the attempts to organise their presence. Mass leafleting went on in Luton, which has an estimated population of around 20,000 Muslims, to encourage protests at the homecoming: that just 20 turned up, and that indeed there are claims that some of those there were not even from Luton or the surrounding area shows how ignored their message was in the town itself. Indeed, the TV pictures clearly showed that there were plenty of other Muslims who had turned up to applaud the troops, who have been completely ignored in all of this. That though was never going to fit into the message which was meant to be conveyed here: that the protest itself was bordering on the almost treasonable, and that anyone who treats the armed forces in such a disrespectful matter ought to be put on the first plane out of the country.

The reaction which those who organised the protest have received will if anything embolden them to repeat their actions. That one of them has lost his job working at Luton airport due to his attendance will be a further greviance they will build on. The real victims in all of this will of course will be the ordinary Muslims whom have been tarnished, both by the protesters themselves and by the media who at the first opportunity get in contact with individuals who build themselves up as representative of the wider community when they are representative only of themselves. Choudary and al-Bakri stigmatise Muslims as a whole, and then individuals demand that good, decent Muslims raise their voices against them; why should they when it should already be apparent that they loathe those who are only interested in their own self-aggrandisement? The other beneficiaries, as always, are the BNP, with Nick Griffin sending out an email to supporters which was actually milder in the language used than most other politicians were.

One final, controversial point to make is to challenge the idea that the troops themselves are completely above reproach. While we thankfully don't have the same jingoistic view of our soldiers as they do in the US, the tabloid press especially insists on regarding every single member of the armed forces automatically as a "hero"; this, it should go without saying, is an incredibly simplistic and unhelpful view to take. The soldiers themselves for the most part resent the way the media portrays them, regarding it both as cynical and false, not to mention embarrassing when they themselves are for the most part incredibly humble about what they do. It also undermines the very real fact that they are working for what many of us would regard as poverty pay, in often horrendous conditions, with old equipment and in unsanitary housing. They deserve respect and support, not fawning and brown-nosing. Targeting them in such insulting terms is wrong, but is not to say that all protests against soldiers are automatically unacceptable. If only we could get past all such orthodoxies, we might eventually get somewhere in challenging all those involved, but it seems destined not to be.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2009 

Gun control and school shootings.

While I tend to be for the most part as socially libertarian as you can get, one of the things I tend to disagree with the actual libertarians on is gun control. One of the undoubted major reasons why gun crime in this country is for the most part incredibly rare, especially when compared to other countries is thanks to the draconian nature of our laws; you could argue that we've never been major gun lovers over the last century in any case, and that we've never had the sort of constitutional protection like in the United States which has encouraged mass gun ownership, but it's almost certainly a factor as to why we thankfully haven't experienced the school shooting massacres that the US has become notorious for and which Germany experienced its second of today. True, the Dunblane massacre, alongside the Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings is one of the most well-known, but that doesn't really count as it wasn't committed by either a student or former pupil who had only recently left.

Sadly, I do however think that it's only a matter of time until we do experience our own version, which is why triumphalism or sneering at other countries' problems and policies, and especially putting it down to some sort of moral decay, societal problems or a nation's history is incredibly unhelpful. The key thing that has to be stated is that all of these massacres are essentially copycat crimes: media coverage and especially sensationalism does nothing whatsoever to help them from being repeated. Some of those who launch such shootings will do it on the spur of the moment; the majority however will have almost certainly been planning their attacks for some time, and the warning signs may well have been there. What I wrote after the Virginia Tech massacre seems worth repeating:

There have always been serial killers, murderers and terrorists, but never before have young men and teenagers in such a short space of time carried out such wanton acts of carnage against their own peers in the corridors of their schools. The easy availability of such lethal weaponry plays its part, but it doesn't explain why this epidemic has erupted in such a way, especially in the last decade. Teenage angst, alienation, mental illness and a thirst for revenge against both perceived and actual slights help us to understand why, but they don't tell the full story. These may be extroverted suicides, as [Lionel, author of We Need to Talk About Kevin] Shriver also argues, and Oliver James seems to concur, but there are thousands who kill themselves and who want to end it all without taking dozens of others with them. We have to examine whether the pressures being put on children everywhere to succeed whatever the costs, especially in a dog eat dog world which seems to grow crueller and nastier by the year, and where failing and even being "different" is worthy of ridicule is helping to contribute to the malaise which is afflicting youngsters, even if very few of them are going to slaughter their classmates as a result.

...

I don't have the solution or the answer, but if there is one thing that perhaps would help, it would be for more understanding both for those who suffer from mental ill-health and more attention to be given to those who do suffer from their own private demons while young. It just might prevent more re-runs of the current grieving than is necessary.

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Scum-watch: Hypocrisy amongst a defense of Maddie-balls.

You'd really think that the Sun would have just said nothing about Gerry McCann's evidence to the culture, media and sport select committee's investigation into press standards and left it at that. Every line and word would have the potential to be gloriously hypocritical and also highlight their own role in the smearing, not perhaps of the McCanns themselves, where they acted for the most part with relative restraint compared to their rivals, but certainly in their far less balanced coverage dedicated to Robert Murat, who the Sun along with the rest of the tabloid media paid damages to.

Instead, it's dedicated a leader to somewhat defending itself, although the real point behind it becomes evident with its conclusion. Still, let's delve in (url subject to change):

KATE and Gerry McCann suffered the double agony of losing a precious daughter — and media lies about their role in her disappearance.

Dignified Gerry says Madeleine’s nightmare abduction plunged them into an agonising “media storm”.

Distraught with shock and guilt, they faced vile claims they murdered their own child and dumped the body.

Trashy “exclusives” added to the grief of this tragically unlucky couple.


Trashy "exclusives" like splashing on the front page with a picture of a random little blonde girl who looked slightly like Madeleine, for example? Or running a completely bogus story about Murat that couldn't possibly have been true because the McCanns themselves told the paper that their daughter hadn't gone missing at the time the witness claimed to have driven them in his cab? Or a 12-page super special on the anniversary of Madeleine going missing that plumbed new depths of even tabloid journalism?

Much blame lies with Portuguese police who made up for their incompetence by smearing the McCanns as suspects, leaving them defenceless against poisonous rumour.

Ah yes, the blame the ignorant, incompetent foreigners defence. I'm pretty sure they didn't force the Sun to print what it did.

Some newspapers greedily pounced on any dodgy rubbish to increase sales.

The Sun’s own coverage was sometimes less than perfect.

But we are proud to have been praised by the McCanns for our steadfast support.

And the tabloids were not alone in this media frenzy.

The BBC’s Huw Edwards fronted the news standing outside alleged suspect Robert Murat’s front door.


Quite true, the BBC hardly helped matters by flying anchors over to Portugal, which was completely over the top. I seem to remember Sky News (majority shareholder R. Murdoch) however had an entire dedicated section to Madeleine, and when the McCanns returned from Portugal followed them for their entire journey from the airport to where they were staying by helicopter, in the world's slowest and most boring car chase. The BBC merely joined in the race to the bottom, and would use the exact same defence as the tabloids would: that they were giving the public what they wanted.

And, it has to be said, the McCanns themselves fed the headlines.

They hired spokesmen, courted the cameras and at one stage flew to Rome to meet the Pope.

Who can blame them? They were desperate to keep the world focused on the search for their little girl.


Again, quite true: from the moment the McCanns went all out with the media hunt the chances of finding their daughter seemed to decline immeasurably. Making your missing child the most famous face in Europe, if not the best part of the world, is not necessarily the best way to find her. They however did this for the best possible reasons: the media regardless chewed them up and spat them out.

Despite all this, Gerry McCann still believes in freedom of speech.

Which is more than can be said for Max Mosley who wants EU-style privacy laws.

Britain already has draconian libel laws and self-regulation. It also has the Press Complaints Commission where issues are resolved swiftly and cheaply, without £500-an-hour lawyers.

The last thing we need is unelected judges censoring the truth about scandalous conduct among the Great and the Good.

And so we get to the real reason for this tortuous leader. McCann incidentally said much the same as Mosley, with he too wanting far tighter regulation. Mosley's demands also fall short of a fully-fledged privacy law: fundamentally he wants those who are going to be featured in exposes like the one he found himself at the centre of to be informed before they go to publication, which is simply common courtesy, so they can then challenge that publication in the courts. In Mosley's case this would have meant that the NotW would not have been published the story in the form it was; it still probably could have splashed on his antics, just not with the fabricated Nazi angle, although again he still could have challenged it on invasion of privacy grounds. It's also true we have draconian libel laws, but as has been argued repeatedly by myself, the PCC is for the most part toothless. To pretend that it's a completely competent and strong regulator is a nonsense, as the McCann case comprehensively proved. Those who respected and feared it would never have published the articles they did in the first place, and the fact that all those who subsequently sued firmly rejected going to it with their complaints, and that the McCanns themselves were apparently advised by Christopher Meyer to launch legal action is hardly a vote of confidence in its abilities. Fundamentally, the Sun realises that Mosley threatens their business model: they rely on the scandals and the sex concerning the dregs of the celebrity world which has no real public interest. Exposing the real great and good often is in the public interest.

The chances in any event of any change to the law, which is what it will require rather than rulings by judges, are incredibly slim. That the Sun felt the need to defend itself in print, something it very rarely does, suggests that perhaps it isn't that unthinkable after all.

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Tuesday, March 10, 2009 

The peace process strikes back.

The sudden revival of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland is neither as sudden nor as surprising as has been made out in some quarters. Warnings had been made over the last couple of years that dissident Republicans were growing in strength, or at the least growing in their brazenness; the terrorist groups on both sides have long kept their capability to commit outrages on ice, mainly to enforce their criminal rather than political activities. Quite why they chose precisely now to launch the first murders of soldiers and policemen in over 10 years is unclear, but it might not be entirely unrelated to the decision last week by Sir Hugh Orde to reintroduce special forces troops into the province, ostensibly on the grounds of preventing that which has now happened, but a move that has always been a red line with nationalists.

Immensely important here is gaining a sense of perspective. At most, active members of both the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA number in the low hundreds, if that; their supporters are probably only a few hundred higher, and going by the graffiti which has quickly been sprayed up on walls some of those involved may well not be able to even remember the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. The next generation, sometimes just until they grow out of their youthful radicalism, often want to rerun the battles of their fathers. Furthermore, if we deal with the murders of the two soldiers and the policeman as we should have responded to the far larger threat posed by Islamic extremists, who themselves probably number not much more than the groups in Northern Ireland but who often have far wider aspirations, as criminal acts and not as an existential challenge, the number of murders involving shootings in London alone in a month is probably more than the three in the last few days.

Always key to isolating support for the extremists was the response of Sinn Fein. More even than a challenge to the peace process itself, the attacks were a challenge to them, intended to push the party and the IRA's former members and leaders now turned politicians into what they regard as full collaboration with the British state itself. This was why the criticism, almost all from the right-wing press, directed at Sinn Fein for not condemning the attacks harshly enough was potentially incredibly counter-productive; both Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams have had to provide a balance between denouncing their former comrades while not alienating their supporters by giving too much away. They were certainly right to suggest that these attacks were also aimed at cultivating a harsh overreaction from the state: they know more than anyone that it was the doors being kicked in, the impunity of the RUC and the treatment of the nationalist community that brought more recruits than anything else into the IRA. It certainly wasn't their rhetoric or other political aims, that's for certain.

John Ware noted in his Guardian article
that the "m" word had not been used by Sinn Fein. This might well have been because they were building up to using a far more punishing and ostracising one: standing alongside Orde and the first minister Peter Robinson, McGuinness denounced those responsible for the murders as traitors. For a member of Sinn Fein to be standing alongside either man at a press conference would not so long ago have been unthinkable; for him to also launch such a vicious, angry assault on the RIRA and CIRA could well be as historic a moment as some of the previous signings of agreements have been, as was the formal declaration from the IRA that war was over and that their weapons had been put beyond use. After his statement, the criticism about Adams' supposed "mealy-mouthed" criticisms or him fanning the flames by comparing the deaths of soldiers to the death of former provisionals seems utterly misplaced.

Just as it was to be hoped that the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan last week may have brought the disparate factions there together in condemnation of those who wished to undermine their nation state, it seems more likely that something along those lines may happen now in Northern Ireland. Of course, the huge differences between the nationalists and the unionists are never going to be fully breached, but the overwhelming response so far has been that the people there never want a return to the days where the gun and the bomb, but most of all fear itself, ruled the day. Sinn Fein has done all that could be reasonably asked of them: now it is up to the police force they have come to support to bring those responsible to justice.

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Dehumanised to a commodity.

Never has a truer word been spoken than the description by Gerry McCann of how his daughter became a commodity, with profits to be made out of her disappearance. He sugared the pill slightly in his evidence to the culture, media and sport select committee slightly by acknowledging that to begin with there was a "desire to try to help get facts that would lead to Madeleine's whereabouts", but even this was coloured, as it always is, by the media at the same time trying to promote themselves. There was no need to for the likes of the Sun and the News of the World to splash their logos all over the t-shirts they produced, or the posters which went up across Portugal, where they were almost as big if not bigger than the words "FIND MADDIE". Newspapers know full well that launching such campaigns benefits them, the chances of having to pay out being extremely slight, even though offering such huge rewards tends to attract cranks, and in extreme circumstances, such as in the Shannon Matthews case, even encourage the desperate to stage disappearances.

It's equally difficult to disagree with Mr McCann's other claim:

...our family have been the focus of some of the most sensationalist, untruthful, irresponsible and damaging reporting in the history of the press.

When you know the sorry history of the tabloid press in this country, and some of the recent low points, that's quite the statement. It's all the more depressing that it's almost certainly true.

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Monday, March 09, 2009 

First and last words on the Jade Goody phenomenon.

Part of the reason I've abstained for the most part from commenting on the media/Jade Goody complex is that I've covered very similar examples here in the past ad nauseum. Goody is the latest continuation of what has been building in our media since the death of Diana: the perfect opportunity for the tabloid press to show they care while at the same exploiting the person for all they're worth, even if at the same time the person they're pretending to care about is also exploiting them. The line can be drawn fairly straight from Diana, through to Jill Dando, Sarah Payne, perhaps even Holly and Jessica, Madeleine McCann, Baby P at a stretch and now to Goody. The difference this time round is that Goody is still alive, for now; Madeleine technically is but was being treated as dead from almost as soon as she went missing. The fact that she was missing meant that she and her parents were fair game; to begin with they cooperated, then they were turned on, then they were rehabilitated. Remarkably like Goody, except she went through an initial process of vilification before being rehabilitated before once again being vilified.

The line of defence is that the media is expressing the public will, or the public mood: we too were grieving for Diana, we wanted the murderer of Jill Dando caught, we wanted to string paedophiles up by their testicles, we wanted to find Madeleine, and now we all feel the pain of Goody, of a life unjustly cut short by a disease that strikes us down at random. These moods can sometimes be fleeting, they can sometimes be lengthy, but the media will always be there to milk them to their full potential. Madeleine was only the most extreme example: a press which had lost all sense of its normal journalistic values, reduced to translating gossip in the local Portuguese rags, regardless of how heartless or defamatory, all because they believed that it was what their readers wanted, and that even if it wasn't, it was what they were going to get. Another justification increasingly cited is that the internet now allows constant, almost always unmoderated speculation and rumour, far beyond what even the Express published; the newspapers are only competing in a race to the bottom. It's wholly unconvincing, but expect it to be increasingly depended on as the recession deepens, advertising revenues fall further and circulations drop.

The case of Jade is however slightly different because it's the first real alignment between public relations and media which has dominated the tabloids for such a lengthy period of time. Most of the previous outbreaks of group-think were when those involved were either dead or missing, and when the only people who profited from it, apart from the media, if at all and hardly by much were the relatives. Jade is more comparable with those other individuals famous for no real reason, Jordan and Kerry Katona, the latter also previously handled by Max Clifford. Clifford is both a genius and probably the most shameless individual in the country, other than the tabloid editors themselves: his control and power are probably only comparable in the media world to, believe it or not, Sir Alex Ferguson, another person who can banish media organisations from his presence on the slightest of whims and with the same amount of accountability, namely next to none.

Clifford in fact didn't really devise the model of turning an individual into a brand; Jordan's people are probably those chiefly responsible. Jordan, or Katie Price is not just a perpetually surgically enhanced model, she's an underwear designer, a novelist, the modern equivalent of a diarist, a children's author, a singer, a horse rider, a perfume brand, even a porn star, if you're willing to count her amateur antics with Dwight Yorke which were released onto the net, while at one point she was even set to give birth live online. This edifice is of course a complete and utter sham: she no more writes a single word of her books than she does actively design the underwear sold under her name. Who knows, perhaps it isn't even really her riding a horse or on that TV show with her husband; everything else about her life is fake, why couldn't she herself be? The remarkable thing about all this is that in a world where the tabloids are prepared to scream at the slightest example of phoniness on BBC programmes, they completely indulge Jordan, Katona and Jade. Sure, they might occasionally run the odd article pointing out that Jordan doesn't actually write her books, but the Faustian pact between them is strong enough to ensure that it doesn't affect the next exclusives they've got lined up to keep the punters happy. The other thing is we honestly don't know whether those who buy the books or the garments actually care whether or not they're not getting the real deal: they probably don't. At any rate, the whole thing would be unlikely to come completely crumbling down even if the whole thing eventually turns out to be one long hoax to see just how low someone can go and get some of the general public to follow them.

It's only when someone makes a truly glorious mistake, such as that made by Goody when she bullied Shilpa Shetty that for a time they're sent to the dog house, awaiting their rehabilitation. In the most extreme examples this never happens: Michael Barrymore is one such case, and some of the other famous men accused of various crimes, both proved and disproved also come to mind. Some directly link Goody's subsequent living secular saint status to the fact she was diagnosed with cancer live on Indian Big Brother, but she had in fact been back in the tabloids and not been pilloried for some time before that. The cancer diagnosis though changed everything: sympathy will always win through, unless someone is either a paedophile or a murderer, as it ought to. This though has instead been taken to ludicrous extremes over the last few weeks, resembling a unending wake before she's even close to death's door, all the past insults forgotten, just as they were after Diana died, the harlot that betrayed the royal family turned into one of the greatest Britons to have ever lived, as Rosie Boycott so risibly argued (Interestingly, when Channel 4 did its equally unscientific 100 Worst Britons poll, Jordan came 2nd and Goody came 4th<, which was certainly unfair on Goody at the time). It has gone far, far beyond emotional pornography, instead evolving into the journalistic equivalent of an onanism obsessed teenager filling a whole drawer with spunk-laden tissues, not knowing what to do with them. The whole shallow, facile, revolting spectacle has been variously defended on the grounds that it's encouraging young women to get cervical check-ups, which is far from a compelling reason but a slight positive side-effect, to the completely baseless one that Goody is doing it so that her sons can have the life that she didn't. This is nonsense, not only because Goody was already more than well-off before she was diagnosed, but also because it seems to assume that you can't do well unless you're financially stable and go to a decent, presumably private school.

The real reason I was driven to write this drivel was Madeleine Bunting's even worse article in today's Grauniad, a similar act of masturbation, albeit a pretentious one, trying to explain the Goody phenomenon in terms of the economic calamity. This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "needing to restore our faith in human nature", "grieving for the death of a fantasy world we have all been living in" or wondering what "sacrifices will we have to make as a nation to pull ourselves out of this economic mess", even if not all of those are directly thinking about Goody's death in these terms but instead through "tap[ping] into vague inchoate emotional anxieties", but is instead all to do with how Jade has been marketed and branded: she is an everywoman, and to those that have followed her, her death is similar to someone they know dying. With Diana certain people felt they knew her, through constantly seeing her life played out in the newspapers; with Goody this has been increased ten-fold, to the point where some probably are on the point of grieving because of her death, or even harming her, as the woman found with the hammer in her room may have done if not disturbed. Goody and the media have signed up because it benefits them both, and to hell with the actual effect that this real-life soap opera has on some people.

This obscene voyeurism is the ultimate tabloidisation of our culture, the latest pinnacle of the celebration of the completely unremarkable individual, the obeisance to the know-nothing. The worst thing of all is that the majority are almost certainly completely unmoved by Goody's demise, sad and sympathetic certainly, but not to the point where they want her to stare out from every tabloid front page for getting on for a month. It is instead being imposed on them by those in on the joke, those personally profiting from it. It just isn't funny. The real tragedy is that the woman with the hammer didn't cave it into Goody's skull and put all of us out of our misery.

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Paula Murray is a disgraceful hack.

I have very little to add to the astounding new barrel scraping low from the Sunday Express of stalking the survivors of the Dunblane massacre and analysing their moral purity, except to make a point the others missed: Paula Murray is employed by the man who produces and profits from such essential cultural films as Anal Boutique, Heavy Petting, Favourite Fucks 3, Katie K's Teen Rampage, Omar's Big Tit Virgins 4 and Old Guys Young Thighs 4 (link very nsfw). Quite how Richard Desmond has the nerve to print such outraged invasive cant is amazing in itself.

Update: The Press Complaints Commission already seem to be investigating, and the article has vanished. Lasted slightly more than 48 hours; a new record?

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