Newspapers

We’re All Doomed

As President Obama might put it, let me be clear: the Daily Mail is a terrific newspaper and one may admire its professionalism and the talent of its journalists (some of whom are friends, of course) without necessarily agreeing or even sympathising with its worldview. But, if you were to only read the Mail you might be terrified of life given the long list of substances that, according to the paper, may increase your chances of dying a hideous, painful, cancer-riddled death. These include: Artificial Light, Beer, Candle-lit dinners, Deoderant, Electricity, Facebook, Grapefruit, Hair Dye, Left-handedness, Money, Oestregen, Oral Sex, Plastic Bags, American Rice, Shaving, Space Travel, Soy Sauce, Talcum

The Fox News Effect

According to James Carville there’d be 67 Democratic Senators if it weren’t for those ghastly chaps at Fox News. As with everything Carville says this must be taken with a pinch of salt. Nevetheless one need not look too hard to discover evidence of the impact Fox has had on American journalism* in precincts far from and not naturally disposed to take their orders from Roger Ailes’ command-bunker. Why, the very same edition of the New York Times contains an excellent example of how Fox’s “framing” of an issue has leached into the mainstream. In the paper’s Week in Review section Helene Cooper “examines” the burning issue of whether Barack

The President is not your Daddy

Maureen Dowd is a lovely person but this is a truly terrible column. No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it’s in a debate or after a debacle. But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared. Our professorial president is no feckless W., biking through Katrina. He is no doubt on top of the crisis in terms of studying it top to bottom. But his inner certainty creates an outer disconnect. He’s

Paul Clarke Update II

The national newspapers may not be terribly interested in the Paul Clarke case but, happily, legal blogger Jack of Kent is. He’s produced a detailed account of the case, and the law, that I highly recommend. Mr Clarke may not be the ideal poster boy for liberty but it’s equally clear that this is of little to no import. What we have here, as Jack of Kent makes clear, is a case that makes a nonsense of a) strict liability offences, b) manadatory minimums, c) the police and d) the CPS. It’s possible that e) the judiciary and f) the jury could also be added to this list. Mr Clarke

Paul Clarke Update

Remember the outcry after the discovery that Paul Clarke could face five years in prison for the “crime” of finding a sawn-off shotgun in his garden and handing it in to his local police station? No, me neither. Well, blog-land has not been happy about this but, as a reader points out, our friends at newspapers and the BBC have completely ignored it: This story is getting zero coverage. I’ve seen more coverage from American websites than I have from UK sources. I’ve done a search at the Times, the Guardian and the BBC News website and – unless I’m doing something very wrong – none of them seem to

Shocker! Public Back Brown!

But only on the absurd row over his letters to the mothers and wives of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Heck of a job, Sun. A Politics Home poll reports: And: And: In a way these results are quite comforting. Voters are rather more sophisticated and decent than the papers they read. Thank Christ for that.

Poor Gordon Brown

I had a pretty keen dislike of Gordon Brown long before it was popular or profitable to hold the Prime Minister in low regard, but it’s now obvious that the time for anger or disappointment or fury has passed. The only humane response to the Prime Minister’s predicament is pity. The grotesque, trumped-up, “row” over the Prime Minister’s hand-written letters to the widows and mothers of fallen servicemen is sickening. The British press corps has rarely been known for its sense of decorum or restraint, but there come moments when legitmate criticism crosses some kind of line and becomes bullying. This is one such instance. Clearly it’s regrettable that the

The Neather Brouhaha: A Correction

So I was wrong. It was a mistake to suggest that the alleged Neather Plot – that is, the conspiracy to “swamp” Britain with Labour-voting imigrants – was the kind of cockamamie scheme that could only be the work of over-excited junior clever chaps at the Home Office. Not so! It turns out that it’s even simpler than that: the scheme didn’t exist at all. Remember, Mr Neather originally claimed that a report from Downing Street’s Performance and Innovation Unit saw immigration as a massive political opportunity for the government: But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the

Vietnam Watch: Ben Macintyre

An occasional series deploring pundits’ determination to treat the curret Afghan campaign as though it were a replay of the Vietnam War. Today’s episode disappoints me since I have a considerable regard for Ben Macintyre. Nevertheless, his column in the Times today is, right from the get-go, a classic of the genre: An unquiet ghost stalks the White House Situation Room as Barack Obama, increasingly Hamlet-like, ponders what to do in Afghanistan: it is the spectre of the Vietnam War, America’s enduring historical hang-up. Oh dear. The most important parallels with Vietnam are neither tactical nor practical, but cultural and emotional. Americans are not backward-looking by nature, but the trauma

David Cameron’s Watford Playground Problem

Brother Liddle is right to despair at the latest local government absurdity: banning parents from children’s playgrounds unless they’ve undergone a criminal background check to prove that they’re not paedophiles. There would appear to be no limit to local government lunacy. O tempora, O mores indeed. This sort of thing, however, also poses a problem for David Cameron. The Tories’ “localism agenda” is by some way their most interesting and, at least potentially, important idea. But there’s one obvious drawback: it means giving more power to local councils. And, as we are reminded on a daily basis, local councils are more than amply-stocked with fools. Decentralisation is an admirable and,

British Press Banned from Reporting Parliament. Seriously.

This time, perhaps even the lawyers have gone too far. It’s hard to recall, even in the long history of appalling gagging orders, a more disgraceful injunction than this: The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights. Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found. The Guardian is also forbidden

Story of the Day

I think this is probably the best intro you’re likely to read all day week: A gay man tried to poison his lesbian neighbours by putting slug pellets into their curry after he was accused of kidnapping their three-legged cat. Fair play to the Daily Mail. This is tabloid, er, catnip. As always, the story itself is a little sadder than the lede, but that’s the kind of sentence you don’t get to write very often. Hats off to Jaya Narain, the hack responsible for this gem. [Hat-tip: Mark Steyn who alerts you to another great story,]

Department of Things Could Be Worse: Irish Edition

George Osborne may be warning of austere times ahead, but the situation is much graver on the other side of the Irish sea. Yesterday’s Irish Times revealed the startling details of a new plan to resuce Hibernia. Even the cute hoors are cheap hoors now. [Hat-tip: BadJournalism via Twitter. My Twitter feed is here.]

The Moonie Times Loves Reverend Moon. Hold the Front Page!

Sometimes you have to pity Literary Editors. Or, to put it another way, one of life’s small pleasures is seeing how newspapers review books written by their own proprietors. I always thought the Telegraph should just have asked Conrad Black to review his own books and like to think that he’d have done it well. By which I mean he’d have done it entertainingly. But pity poor Carol Herman, literary editor* of the Washington Times. Sensibly, I think, she must have concluded that asking an outside reviewer to write a notice for the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s autobiography would risk trouble. Nobly, then, she took one for the team and

Alex Massie

Memo to Labour: the Press is Always Revolting

The press really is beastly, isn’t it? According to Jonathan Freedland, The media’s conviction that Labour, and Gordon Brown in particular, are doomed has grown so intense that it has turned into a kind of sneering disdain for the government, casting aside all conventions of respect for those holding elected office… You don’t have to yearn for a return to the days of dinner-jacketed deference on the BBC, or want an end to robust questioning, to feel uncomfortable at all this playground bullying of a man deemed weak. Like it or not, Brown does lead the democratically-elected government of this country. True, he does not have a personal mandate. But

Wedding Crashers in Japan

I don’t pretend to understand Japan at all, but while this may seem rather funny, it’s surely also terribly melancholy: Japanese couples, too busy for a normal social life, are increasingly turning to actors to play their friends on the most important days of their lives. Several agencies have sprung up offering actors to attend weddings or even funerals… Agencies such as Hagemashi Tai – which means “I want to cheer you up” – charge around £100 for each “guest”. Other services such as giving a speech in praise of a bride or the groom cost extra. Increasingly busy and put upon, many Japanese surround themselves with only a very

Chris de Burgh is an Angry, Misunderstood, Man. Apparently.

From the Department of Criticism: the Irish Times handed my old Dublin University Players contemporary Peter Crawley the unenviable task of reviewing Chris de Burgh in concert. It’s fair to say that his notice was less than generous… Certain toes will never uncurl after this experience, but it is almost admirable how unaltered de Burgh has remained by the flow of time. You may have grown out of seeking epic significance in the portentous verses of Spanish Train, you may greet Patricia the Stripper with the same mortification as a faded photo of yourself. This is because you’ve changed. Chris de Burgh has not. Not one to take this sort

Hey, Jaycee Dugard! Here’s the sports news you missed while you were being raped!

This is perhaps the single worst column I’ve read. Ever. Anywhere. I have absolutely no idea what Mark Whicker thought he was attempting when he wrote this. But that the editors at the Orange County Register would then actually see fit to publish it is utterly incomprehensible. Mr Whicker begins: It doesn’t sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page. Box scores were not available to her from June 10, 1991 until Aug. 31 of this year. She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably hasn’t high-fived in a while. She was not allowed to spike a volleyball. Or pitch

Daniel Hannan & Enoch Powell: Spectacular Media Stupidity Guaranteed

If a politician expresses admiration for Winston Churchill do you immediately think that he’s a great fan of, among other considerations, casual indifference to the Bengal famine, the use of chemical weapons in Iraq or the pulverisation and total destruction of German cities? Of course you don’t. But when a politician says he admires Enoch Powell it’s as if he’d decided to fill the Tiber with blood by scurrying around the country and slaughtering the children of every immigrant in the land. This is, as you might expect, also nonsense. But, lo and behold there’s a mini-rumpus and a song and dance over some comments made by Daniel Hannan to