Tuesday, July 28, 2009 

The summer holidays were here again...

The silly season, in case you haven't already noticed, has begun in earnest. Not that newspapers and news sites aren't normally stocked fully with churnalism, but it just becomes instantly more evident when there's next to no real news around.

In case then you wondering, the Wookey Hole witch is a publicity stunt. Even if they are paying the winner £50,000, that's nothing as to the free advertising they've received and will receive, especially when compared to how much it would cost to take out adverts on the same pages and same size as the stories themselves will appear. Likewise, the BBC story that "Swedes miss Capri after GPS gaffe" is almost certainly a similar piece of churnalism. It's plausible, as anyone could accidentally make a typo on their system and be guided to Carpi instead of Capri, but like the Wookey Hole story it makes for excellent publicity, even if it isn't as unbelievable as the benchmark, the "Cab, innit", girl. Not directly publicity seeking churnalism, but also designed to fill up the pages, is the Coca Cola carbonated milk launch, which is only happening in the US. Why then do we care over here? Because we haven't much choice.

Over in the Sun they don't need so much churnalism because they've bought Amy Winehouse's ex-husband's story, no doubt for a gigantic wad of cash. This is despite the fact that the newspaper on numerous occasions directly blamed Blake Fielder-Civil for Winehouse's descent into drug addiction, and which it is now handsomely profiting from, with such eye-opening exclusives as the fact that Fielder-Civil saved her from an overdose, and that she stole cocaine from Kate Moss's bag. Winehouse herself in fact claimed that Fielder-Civil saved her, as reported by the Sun at the time, except with the added aside by the paper that FC left her in hospital to go and collect another fix. Doubtless though, the Sun was merely misinformed, and reports headlined "Amy's lag hubby has no shame", "Amy and Blake back to worst", "for God's sake, get help Amy!", "Amy stop your brainrotting", and "You should be ashamed Blake" were mistakes, all now rectified thanks to a bulging cheque.

With all this in mind, the Daily Quail has set up a form where anyone can submit a post mocking a specific example of piss-poor journalism, which has this blog's full support.

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7/28/2009 08:51:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, May 28, 2009 

Scum-watch: Evil monster in stuffing herself with chocolate shock.

Hold the front page! The Sun has another scorching exclusive concerning the Baby Peter case:

BABY P’s mother has put on TWO STONE in five months behind bars by gorging on chocolate.

Important news I'm sure you'll agree. I'm more interested though in how this amazing story has reached the Sun:

A friend who has kept in touch with her said she whined in a letter that her days at Holloway jail were spent “in pottery classes, watching movies and eating chocolate”.

The 27-year-old monster is being held in the prison’s segregation unit for her own safety.

Her friend told The Sun: “She says there’s very little to do in segregation except eat chocolate and laze around.

“She was an expert at that already.” When she appeared in court last week, the mum looked noticeably fatter and tried to hide her weight gain with an over-sized pink top.


This is obviously quite some friend to be selling her for a few pieces of silver to the newspaper that is making money out of describing her as both evil and a monster. It does therefore make you wonder whether this is a friend at all; one of the oldest tabloid journalism tricks in the book is to get in contact with a notable prisoner, claim to be sympathetic to their plight, gain their trust, and then once they tell you something even slightly interesting, it suddenly appears in the newspaper.

It is all rather stating the obvious though. Not much to do in the segregation unit? Who knew? What would the paper rather be happening to her? Perhaps they ought to get the "decent mums" from Facebook who were up for torturing her to death (slowly) and see just how ingenious their ideas were for bringing their anger and pain to bear on the mother were.

Somewhat predictably, the paper's campaign for the sentences of the three found guilty to be reviewed has borne fruit, although whether the Court of Appeal will decide whether the sentences were too lenient or not is another matter. As Afua Hirsch points out on CiF, the indeterminate sentences given to all three will almost certainly mean that they will serve far longer than the minimums which were handed down, which the Sun emphasised without bothering to explain just how difficult it is to be freed by those dates. Almost 11,000 people are now serving "indeterminate" sentences, of which less than 50 were released once their minimum term had expired. This though is of little concern to a newspaper which has so successfully mined the outrage surrounding the death of Baby Peter, and which also repeatedly informs its readers of just how soft both the lunatic judges and the prison system in general is.

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5/28/2009 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, November 11, 2008 

Clarence Mitchell bursts Paul Dacre's bubble.

Notable in Dacre's speech on Sunday was the absence of a mention of the name Madeleine McCann. After all, little Maddie has been undoubtedly the biggest story of the last year, and only since the summer and the apparent evaporation of any remaining leads, alongside the unfortunate legal actions launched against all of the tabloid titles, but especially the Express and Star, has apparent gravy train come to an abrupt halt. He did however praise the brilliance of Fleet Street, while condemning those, especially in the malevolent liberal media, who do so much to do down our superb popular press:

Now, in these difficult times, is the time to celebrate that light.

 For all their many imperfections, British papers – which are full of journalists who work extraordinarily long and difficult hours, often on very low salaries – do a pretty good job, which is why I suspect there is much less corruption in this country than in Europe. In a world of Mandelsons hobnobbing with dubious Russian oligarchs on luxury yachts, Campbells making up dossiers on which we went to war, and of a rampant centralising state that year by year seems intent on eroding basic civil liberties, newspapers are the only brakes on the increasingly arrogant – and, in the case of the EU, unaccountable – behaviour of our ruling classes.

...

Let’s be proud of our industry. Let’s stop this drip, drip, drip of self-denigration. Stand up for the illumination at the top of the lamp post.

Yesterday Clarence Mitchell, the spokesman for the McCanns, had his say on this "illumination at the top of the lamp post" at the same Society of Editors conference:

"The British press out there in Portugal, and I'm not singling out any particular publication, were - I'm afraid to say this and I don't like to say this because I'm a former journalist myself - they were lazy," he told the conference.

...

"However, when the British press made inquiries they came up against a stone wall so they resorted to sitting in the local bar, which had the lethal combination of free Wi-Fi and alcohol, and that became the newsroom predictably enough.

"It meant that they then sat every morning just going through whatever had been leaked to the Portuguese papers, 99% of it totally inaccurate lies, 1% I would say distorted or misunderstood through cultural differences in some cases.

"This was then put to me, I would then deny or try to correct it, that would be a quote from me, 'Mitchell's balanced it', that was balanced journalism, and off it went."


We shouldn't however blame these self-same journalists though, as it was, as Mitchell went on, their editors whom were making the demands of them (although kicking the likes of Lori Campbell is surely somewhat deserved):

"I had certain reporters from certain groups almost in tears some mornings saying, 'If you don't give me a front-page splash by 4pm I'm going to be fired," he added.

"I can understand the pressure they are under but when I said 'I can't help you, we honestly haven't got anything of value or anything to warrant that coverage' nevertheless a front page would then duly appear in certain titles."

Mitchell added: "Things that were allegations or suggestions in the Portuguese press were hardened up into absolute fact when they crossed the Channel."


Undoubtedly Mitchell is referring primarily to the Express, which had decided that Madeleine should be the front page story regardless of other news or whether there had been any developments, but the demands being made of hacks was undoubtedly much the same across the "popular" press.

The reason why Dacre dared not mention the McCanns is because the tabloid coverage of her disappearance was a masterclass in what journalism should not be, but what Dacre believes sells: empty, soulless emotional pornography, crass xenophobia, rampant ignorance, offset by leaping to conclusions on the slightest of new information, casual pointing of the finger of blame, and depending on your publication, either knee-jerk defence of the McCanns or equally knee-jerk accusations that they were fully responsible, all due to the fact that they knew this stuff was selling, with very little care, except for the McCanns themselves in some quarters, for what this coverage was doing to real lives and real people. The legal payouts have been chicken-feed to what they most likely made, not necessarily in putting on sales, but in ensuring that the sales stayed mostly on the same level as the year before, which in the current conditions is a major success. And they still honestly try to claim that they have ethics, or morals, or that unelected, unrepresentative judges are more of a threat than they are.

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11/11/2008 11:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, October 27, 2008 

Scum-watch: Katy Perry condones spoon crime!

Katy Perry (or at least her publicists) has provided a master class in how to take on the tabloids and win: don't apologise, and do it with humour. Perry has posted the above picture on her blog along with:

…But I DO condone eating ice cream with a very large spoon.

Dear Sun:

You deserve a time out. Your “journalistic” approach has half the soul of the National Enquirer. Shame on you.


Naturally, the Sun itself doesn't know when to give up. While failing to reproduce Perry's wounding second sentence, it has instead got straight on the phone to all the recent relatives of murder victims, which is getting really tiresome:

Furious Richard Taylor, 59, whose son Damilola, ten, was murdered, raged: “She has lost all integrity by this."

Ah yes, a young woman singing a song about kissing girls and liking it, while mocking "metrosexual" young men on another, whilst formerly being a gospel singer; she had and has integrity by the bucketload.

“It would have been better for her to have apologised. Youngsters would have seen that and taken it as something positive. Instead she has decided to challenge us.”

Yes, quite: how dare someone challenge the apparently perpetually grieving, those who can never let go, those who have apparently sold their own integrity in order to be available a provide an outraged quote whenever a newspaper invents a scandal. That's the real outrage here, not Perry's posing with a knife, but her refusal to take it lying down.

Paul Bowman, 45, dad of murdered model Sally Anne Bowman, 18, said: “MTV should pull this woman off air. She shouldn’t be rewarded with an appearance before billions of youngsters. She’s a bad role model.”

Indeed, they should probably get Snoop Dogg to do it again, like he did last year. He's never done anything bad.

Sylvia Lancaster, 52, whose daughter Sophie, 20, was killed in Bacup, Lancs, for being a Goth said: “It’s tasteless. She shouldn’t be allowed to perform in Liverpool considering that poor lad was stabbed to death only a few days ago.”

The idea that the Sun or its pages will ever have any influence in any case on what goes on in Liverpool again is laughable in the extreme, but hey, it's got to keep up appearances.

Note to Russell Brand: this is how you're meant to do it.

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10/27/2008 09:28:00 PM | | | links to this post

Thursday, October 23, 2008 

Scum-watch: Perry knifes Sun.

Katy Perry's publicist has replied to yesterday's Scum super-splash:

Katy Perry is against all violence. The photo in question was taken in 2005 and is in no way related to the current events in the UK.

Not just two years old then, but three years. This also rather undermines the Sun's "sources" claims that the shots were for her debut album or her website; back in 2005 Perry was working on an entirely different album, according to Wikipedia.

The Sun meanwhile has contacted another relative of a victim of crime:

Ex-EastEnders star Brooke Kinsella, 25, whose brother Ben, 16, was stabbed to death, said: “Celebrities should be role models.”

Quite right. Miss Kinsella's thoughts that "[I]f these evil people want to fight so badly, let them fight for their country" are exactly the sort of thing we should be encouraging.

The Sun incidentally does mention the publicist's comments, but strangely cuts them off mid-flow:

Katy’s publicist said last night: “She is against all violence.”

A case study then for aspiring tabloid journalists: when you need to spice up an otherwise boring report on someone dying, just go to the latest star's MySpace page, grab a photograph of them doing something that makes them seem oblivious or indifferent to someone else's pain, completely invent a "source" to attempt to back the story up, and get a quote from someone guaranteed to be outraged, and you have a front page splash. That you'll be promoting that person at the same time, whilst belittling the victim for sales purposes is neither here nor there.

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10/23/2008 09:35:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 22, 2008 

Scum-watch: I knifed a girl and I liked it.

The invented scandal is undoubtedly one of the very lowest forms of journalism. Alongside the hatchet job on those who can't defend themselves, the trick of getting someone to condemn what someone else has either done or said is not just lazy, dishonest and contemptible, it's also cheap, the first and most important rule of production which now silently governs the press.

Five Chinese Crackers never said it better when he wrote that the tabloids aren't there to report the news; they exist to tell the same stories over and over again in a slightly different way, regardless of the actual facts of the matter, all the time promoting their own viewpoint on just why these things are either happening or what needs to be done to stop them from happening.

You really couldn't get a better example of this than today's front page Sun super-splash, featuring singer Katy Perry holding a flick knife. Juxtaposed with the shot of Perry, apparently taken during a photo-shoot to go with either her album or onto her website, is the fact that in Liverpool another teenager was stabbed to death. The two obviously go together: Perry, by foolishly posing with a knife is glamorising the culture which leads to teenagers carrying knives and then to the inevitable conclusion, the knife being used to injure someone. Ergo, Perry is partially responsible for what has happened, and hence she, along with everyone who has ever held a knife while being photographed, is little less reprehensible than the murderers themselves. The Sun though can't just leave to chance that this is what will run through their readers' heads; they're far too stupid to be left to think for themselves, after all:

POP star Katy Perry poses with a knife — an image which sparked fury last night after another teen was killed by a blade in Broken Britain.

Angry critics said 23-year-old Katy, who sold five million copies of her No1 hit I Kissed A Girl, was “out of her mind” for glamorising knives.

The snap of the singer was taken to make her look “edgy”.

The grieving families of Broken Britain’s young victims could not be faced with a greater — or more baffling — contrast.

This is nothing less than emotional blackmail. How dare someone consider holding a knife in view of a camera while families out there are grieving because other people have used them to stab someone with? Don't you have a conscience?

There is however an obvious contradiction here. If an image of someone holding a knife is so intensely dangerous, so alluring to the average teenager that by just looking at an image of someone fairly famous holding one is likely to lead to them also carrying one, why is the Sun bringing it to such wider audience? After all, in the words of the one person the Sun bothered to contact, or the only one that gave them a suitable quote, Damilola Taylor's father, Richard:

“Any youngsters seeing her will think it is OK to carry a blade.”

Really? Are teenagers so shallow and feeble-minded that seeing one of the most manufactured singers of recent years in the company of a blade that they'll be instantly informed that if she does it in a staged photograph that they can do it in their everyday life? Or is this actually a truly warped view of human nature? As Anorak puts it, if we apply such logic to the Sun's wider oeuvre, we're shortly to be plagued by teenager girls walking around topless, alternately kissing each other whilst plunging a sharp edge into each other's chests.

Such level-headedness though is alien to the Sun's very concept. It treats its readers as infants, therefore they must be infants, therefore they will act like infants when presented with glamour shots of weapons. Any evidence will do to show just how Broken Britain is; it doesn't matter that Perry is American, that the shoot probably took place in America and that the shot in any event was rejected, this is a wider symptom of just how smashed and atomised our society is, as their accompanying "discussion" has it. Anyone would think that the Sun and its owner's other commercial concerns had never glamorised violence, or provided space for similar images.

For a newspaper that so crusades against political correctness, this is an very oddly politically correct line to take. Without wanting to give credence to the idea, it's long been evident that there is either a reverse or a right-wing political correctness, very closely tied to censorship as a whole. This decrees that something must be restricted as a whole because it might be bad to a certain section of society; that adults can make their own choices is irrelevant if children are potentially at risk of harm.

Even the demand for what Perry must do to make amends for her crime is familiar: she must, of course, apologise. Whether she should do it while kissing a girl, or while down on her knees begging for forgiveness from all those throughout the ages that have been the victims of crimes involving knives is unclear, but express sorrow she must:

SCORES of teenagers are stabbed to death each year in Britain.

The latest tragic victim was a 16-year-old Liverpool lad, knifed to death incredibly on his first visit to a church youth club.

So how does publicity-hungry pop babe Katy Perry respond to this massacre on our streets?

By posing for a publicity shot waving a flick-knife.

We need to hear an apology. Fast.

Never mind then that being American, Perry probably isn't aware of this "massacre on our streets", and so isn't responding to it unless you're a Scum leader writer making a story out of nothing, she must apologise and fast. The nation's biggest selling newspaper demands it. The shed blood of our children necessitates it. Nothing less will do.

Update:
According to the Katy Perry forum the photograph is years old, so the "source" the Sun is quoting is probably completely made up. It's also quite possible that they might have found the image on Perry's.... MySpace, from where it has since been deleted.

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10/22/2008 09:38:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 08, 2008 

Locked up myself and forced to eat journalism.

More quite brilliant examples of the high standards of British journalism via the Press Complaints Commission:

 Complainant Name:
Resolved - Mr Iain Harris v Love It

Clauses Noted: 1

Publication: Love It

Complaint:

Mr Iain Harris complained that the magazine had used an inaccurate front page headline for an article in which his wife described her struggles with anorexia. It stated: “Locked up by my hubby and forced to eat”. In fact, his wife was sectioned under the Mental Health Act via a process that was controlled by a consultant, a GP and other medical staff.

Resolution:
The complaint was resolved privately by the parties, including through the magazine sending a letter of apology to the complainant, accepting that he had not behaved in any way improperly as to his wife’s sectioning and that the process was under the control of properly qualified medical staff.

But apart from that the story was true, right? Doubtless his wife was paid for her story; he by the looks of things has ended up with a big fat zero.

Love It! is owned by News International, and is handily summarised by its sadly vandalised Wikipedia page, which ought to be saved for posterity:

Love it! is a weekly magazine produced in the UK. It was launched on February 7, 2006 by News Magazines Ltd, News International's magazine division.

Entering into the so-called real life category, it is aimed at women aged 18-35 who have about two brain cells, combining inspirational real-life stories, sick stories about child abuse and rape with those on fashion, beauty and sex, including an advice column from a so called 'sexpert'.

The magazine has been heavily promoted by The Sun, News International's daily tabloid newspaper (Now there's a surprise!). Each week an article is lifted from the forthcoming magazine and published in The Sun to coincide with its release.


The Sun itself has also been heavily featured by the PCC of late:

Complainant Name:
Stonewall Scotland

Clauses Noted: 1

Publication: Scottish Sun

Complaint:

Ms Christina Stokes, Communications Officer at Stonewall Scotland, complained that an article which claimed that the organisation had been consulted in regard to new NHS uniforms was inaccurate and misleading.

Resolution:

Report: 77


Homophobia it seems is more acceptable above the border, or at least the Sun's hacks think so.

Complainant Name:
Resolved - Mr Mickey Morris v The Sun

Clauses Noted: 1

Publication: The Sun

Complaint:

Mr Mickey Morris complained that an article on the newspaper’s website had inaccurately claimed that his son Lee, a paratrooper, felt safer fighting in Afghanistan than in his previous job as a male stripper.

Resolution:

Report: 77


Ah yes, now I remember why the Sun calls itself the forces' paper and why the likes of ARRSE love it so.

Complainant Name:
Resolved - Mathew Shaw v The Sun

Clauses Noted: 1

Publication: The Sun

Complaint:

Mathew Shaw of Reading (who was not complaining as a representative of Robert Mugabe) complained that the newspaper had published an online article which featured photographs of a “palace with 30 bedrooms…where no expense was spared” and alleged that it belonged to Robert Mugabe. The complainant said the claim that the house belonged to Mr Mugabe was an urban myth.

Resolution:

The newspaper initially provided an article from the Daily Telegraph which it said featured the same house and made the same claim in respect of Robert Mugabe. The managing editor also said a Zimbabwean correspondent had confirmed the information.

The complainant provided evidence to dispute the claim that the house featured was the same as that which appeared in the Daily Telegraph. He contended that the house was in fact used on the movie set of the film Beethoven’s 4th (set in the US). He provided stills from the film which showed a “remarkable resemblance” to the house in the article. The newspaper thanked the complainant for drawing the issues to its attention and, given the nature of the evidence he had provided, it removed the article from its website.

The complainant considered that the newspaper might have published a correction or apology on the point but decided to resolve the matter on the basis of the removal of the online article.

Report: 77


You have to hand it to the Sun: more or less admitting that your article was pilfered from the Torygraph is a novel defense. It must be true, it was in the Telegraph, a serious newspaper! Still, who knew that Robert Mugabe lived in the same house as a fictional dog?

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10/08/2008 09:33:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, October 01, 2008 

The most contempt for readers ever?

Pretty par for the course complaint about a celebrity magazine lying on its front cover, it's the response of the magazine and the editor which rises this above the usual standard of contemptible "journalistic practice":
Complainant Name:
Resolved - Elaine Benton v Look Magazine

Clauses Noted: 1

Publication: Look Magazine

Complaint:
Elaine Benton of Berkshire complained that the front cover of the magazine pictured Jennifer Aniston with the caption ‘I’m having a baby!’. However, the article itself made clear that Jennifer Aniston was only thinking about having a baby with her partner.

Straight forward then - magazine lies with a view to giving the impression to the layman that they have the exclusive scoop on a celeb pregnancy. You would expect the magazine and the editor to be grudging and admit that they're a bunch of cocks, generally, but no:

Resolution:

The magazine argued that single – as opposed to double – quotation marks would have distinguished the claim as a paraphrase rather than a direct quotation.

Ah you see, this isn't us lying in attempt to boost sales - it's the reader being too damn stupid to distinguish between a single quotation mark and double quotation marks! How could they be so foolish?! Never mind that there is no industry-wide usage of double quotation marks to make clear that it's a direct quote, and single quotes for paraphrases, it's not our fault, it's hers!

Wait though, it gets ever better:

However, the editor emphasised that the magazine valued its relationship with its readers and that it would never seek intentionally to mislead them.

Of course not: that's why they put a lie on the front page and then excused it to the PCC on the grounds that the reader was too stupid to realise it was a paraphrase due to the single quotation marks. You can understand that those working on such horrible magazines are big on self-loathing; they probably dreamed of being investigative reporters, and there they are, reduced to reporting on which celeb is fat/thin this week, when they're not producing sticker sets insulting disabled children and conniving to portray them as bad parents that is. You would have also thought though that actually projecting this loathing onto those who buy the magazine might not necessarily be good for business.

Still, at least Mrs Elaine Benton can be happy with her settlement from the magazine:

The editor was happy to write to the complainant to apologise and assure her that her comments and concerns had been taken on board for the future. The complainant accepted this, along with the reimbursement of the cover price, as a resolution to her complaint.

Spend that £1.40 wisely!

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10/01/2008 08:44:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, August 13, 2008 

The Stagg hunt draws to a close.

It's difficult to think of someone more of a victim of the gutter press in this country than Colin Stagg. One other name does come to mind, but she used them as much as they used her. Here's a prediction: tomorrow the very same newspapers that stalked and hunted him for over a decade will be at the least less than happy with the £706,000 that Stagg through his solicitors has revealed he will receive in compensation for his treatment courtesy of the Metropolitan police. They will raise the amount which Rachel Nickell's son received, a derisory sum which could never even begin to account for how he was found, gripping his mother, covered in blood and begging her to get up. They will point out for a very long time indeed he was the only suspect; because the police themselves wanted him to remain the only suspect. Keith Pedder for one, the detective inspector in charge on the case, has written two self-affirming and congratulatory books on how Stagg had managed to get away with murder. It was only after a further investigation by a separate cold case team that another man, Robert Napper, a paranoid schizophrenic being held at Broadmoor indefinitely for two murders with similarities to the killing of Nickell that the police finally admitted to themselves that their hunt for Stagg had been futile.

Not that they have admitted publicly to that, or said the simplest words to Stagg personally that they got it wrong. Then again, why should they? After all, those other companions in the decade long stalking, baiting and smearing of Stagg, this country's finest tabloid newspapers, have never admitted they were wrong or said sorry either. Although almost of them were involved in pursuing him and ran articles calling either for the abolition of the laws on double jeopardy (which New Labour happily obliged in removing) or that implicated him in the murder if not directly accusing him, undoubtedly the most bile was delivered in the limp Sunday rag The People, which republished the letters which "Lizzie James", the Met's honeytrap exchanged with Stagg during the attempt to link him to the kind of bizarre sexual practices which the psychologist Paul Britton was convinced the perpetrator had. The Mail meanwhile, in the best practices which the newspaper retains for those that are accused of crimes, performed hatchet job after hatchet job, serialising Pedder's impotent book, and also ran an interview with Nickell's former boyfriend, who made a personal appeal for the double jeopardy law to be repealed. Their attitude towards Stagg could not be more summed up than by the words of John Junor, whom in an article purporting to ask the question whether Stagg would always be targeted as the killer who got away, wrote:

It would be terrible, however, to think that he is going to be hounded for the rest of his life for having been found not guilty of murder when it is certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility that he was indeed innocent.

How magnanimous and kind of both Junor and the Mail to admit that it was possible that Stagg was indeed innocent, despite his acquittal. The irony and amazing chutzpah of the Mail asking whether Stagg would remain to be stalked when it was the one leading the stalking, while also attempting to soften its line but failing miserably is something to behold.

Nick Cohen, writing in the Observer a couple of years back, linked the credulity and continuing belief that Stagg was guilty among the tabloid hacks to the influence of the police on them, to the closeness which gives them their stories, their exclusives, and the photographs of the suspects themselves either being brought in or when arrested. This is undoubtedly part of the reason, but I am far more cynical than Cohen. These reporters knew full well that Stagg was innocent, as did their editors. The best that can be said is that they convinced themselves in order to appraise their consciences of any guilt. This had to be done because there was no evidence whatsoever linking Stagg to Nickell except the Met's attempts to entrapment, which he even then rebuffed. No, these stories were not out of any public interest to ensure that the killer was brought to justice, they were because they knew they were what the public wants to read, that they want someone to blame when such horrible crimes are committed, even if the case is apparently unsolvable, and that most of all, they sold. Nickell's former boyfriend, already mentioned, noted this. His bitterness at being chased out of the country, forced to live in France to escape was more than palpable in his description of the hacks:

"Callous, mercenary and unfeeling scum ... you've got people on your doorstep every day, people following you around in cars taking pictures of you, people peeping over fences and Rachel's face appearing in the paper every day with any tenuous link ... it's one of those stories that's become part of British culture."

Quite so. Much is the same with any attractive woman or child that is tragically killed, murdered or abducted. Whether it be Nickell, Princess Diana, Sally Anne Bowman or Madeleine McCann, they stare out from the front pages, forever locked in their youthful beauty, demanding that something be done about their disappearance or deaths. They pretend that it's because they care, when in reality it's because of their own business models, the phoniness of providing a service while sucking the individual they've latched onto dry until they too can be dispensed with, when the trail finally dries up and everyone, except those being exploited, have moved on.

The police's insistence in having found the right person is the justification, not the reason why. We saw it again just a couple of weeks back with Barry George, where again hardly any journalists or anyone outside of the police really believed he was anywhere near capable of killing Jill Dando, let alone in the way in which she was assassinated. Yet they printed the police's self-serving, laughably weak attempts to still pretend that George was the murderer, even while they must surely have known it was not true. In Nickell's case, at least the police have now found a man who might well be her real murderer, while with Dando it seems incredibly unlikely that her killer will ever be brought to justice. The victims in both cases have been treated abominably, whether they be the relatives or those fitted up. And yet our supposed justice seeking media, which never lets up on the law and order agenda, defends and carries the squeals of innocence spoon-fed to them by their sources.

Stagg's award, despite its size, will never get him his life back. It seems doubtful, even now, that he'll find work, after being made unemployable because of his notoriety. There is however most certainly a case for the £706,000 not completely being stumped up by the taxpayer. No, the real damage was done not by the trial and the fit-up, but by the compliant media which demonised and destroyed day by day, week by week, month by month and year by year. It should be Associated Newspapers, the Mirror Group and News International that should be writing the cheques and stumping up at least half if not more of the money. The suffering they have caused and continue to cause to countless people through their complete lack of integrity and not knowing when enough is enough is such that it's time they were hit in the only place where it hurts: the pocket. Their power however protects them, and there is absolutely nothing it seems that we can do about it.

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8/13/2008 10:59:00 PM | | | links to this post

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