News of the World Hacked to Death

The final issue of News of the World, in a surprising display of humour they covered it with some of the more dubious and exploitative headlines the newspaper has run in the past.

By Elliot Adams

I was going to wait until after reading the News of the World‘s final issue before weighing in on the latest batch of News International’s wrong-doing, very bravely taking shots at the things everyone else already hates. But even without the normal parade of witch-hunts, libel and outing of people’s sex lives the ‘Screws of the World has become famous for – it is junk food news, cheap to produce but devoid of any real content; I just can’t bring myself to do it.

The way NI have been addressing the situation has been reprehensible, and it is this that I want to now gripe on about. Putting aside for a moment allegations about the bribing of police officers and hacking into the private communications of union leaders, victims of terrorist bombings, fallen soldiers and murdered schoolgirls(in one instance leading her parents to believe she was still alive). Admittedly this is a fairly large aside, a fast stream of feculent ordure that threatens to choke News International, and the police, the Prime Minister and the self-regulated free press along with them – it is not called the gutter press for nothing.

There’s been a fervour to the hyperbolic coverage from the NotW‘s contemporaries; some bemoaned ‘The End of the World’ and its passage to the gallows, perhaps feeling that the mob could call for their own sacrifice in time. Others were shouting down the foul recreant with revolutionary zeal, a link Henry Porter made explicit in The Observer:

A lightning revolt with a whiff of the Arab Spring about it … a feeling of liberation at the end of this highly charged week and we can say that our society seems better off: our political system is freer and, I would suggest, a little bit cleaner; relations between the media, politicians and the public have changed for good.

While I agree that politicians have been given a scare with regards to how they cosy up to figures like Murdoch, the current situation is more akin to the Terror in Revolutionary France; conspiracies(both real and imagined) are rife and heads are rolling, but all the wrong ones. (Alongside Clive Goodman)David Cameron’s former director of communications Andy Coulson has been fired, arrested and fired again – but so far he is an exception. Though it has rapidly become apparent that the ‘one rouge reporter’ defence was about as silly as it sounded, executives, managers and editors calling the shots have remained safe while hacks, photographers and office workers at the NotW are put out of work. It seems they are being sacrificed on behalf of a what James Murdoch freely admits was as failure of NI corporate governance.

Murdoch's continued protection of Brooks may be due to dynastic concerns, reputedly his wife and daughter are not fond of her, but she is integral to James Murdoch's work - to turn on her might cause in-fighting.(Image: World Economic Forum)

In a structure based heavily on top-down authority it makes no sense for accountability to stop on the ground floor. Even with those who indulged in phone-hacking, you can’t expect a tabloid hack to have the self-awareness to critique the editorial guidance of his corporate overlords, these are pitiful creatures that think ‘ethics’ is a county just north of London. If they were not so blessed with the complete absence of self-awareness the job’s suicide rate would be atrocious, every day the clattering of keyboards would be punctuated by the sad thud of heads on desks as the pentobarbital takes effect, while James Murdoch whirrs past in a street sweeper keeping the aisles clear of corpses.

Maybe I am being too quick to judge though, Rebekah Brooks claims it is “inconceivable that [she] knew or worse, sanctioned these appalling [actions]allegations” well there you have it, literally incon-fucking-ceivable. There is no way anyone could conceive of a bizarro world where the head of a major newspaper would have any awareness of what was being published in said newspaper or where those stories had come from. Clearly those at the helm of NotW are the victims of some kind of cruel prank where they’ve been tricked into thinking that they were running a newspaper, are they entitled to compensation perhaps?

Likewise Brooks and Coulson are misunderstood on the allegation that they bribed the police for information. Now admittedly they did both inadvertently confess to this in front of a Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee hearing. But when asked if they would do so again Coulson was very clear;

We operate within the code and within the law and if there is a clear public interest then we will.

That’s reassuring, ‘within the law’. Clearly not the law we’ve had for centuries about not making payment to a police officer acting within his duty, but another law – perhaps the one outlawing wearing a suit of armour in the Houses of Parliament. So really News International is a paragon of truth and virtue.

The spontaneous closure of the News of the World was  seen by many as a virtuous move, doing the right thing by falling on their sword, but the cynic in me finds this unlikely. Last week, News Corporation posted a press release announcing a new “managing editor structure” at its newspapers in a move towards integration of daily and Sunday publications. To this end, a group managing editor position was created with responsibility over both The Sun and News of the World and News of the World‘s managing editor Bill Akass was to be moved to a safe regulatory executive position.

We will take a comprehensive look at where there is common ground across our titles and where we should remain unique. Where there is common ground we will find ways of implementing efficiencies to editorial systems and processes and, where appropriate, we will find ways of introducing seven day working.

Clearly News Corporation were already planning on merging their daily and Sunday titles, is it really a stretch to see this as evidence that the death of NotW was also planned before all this kicked off anyway?

I disagree with the notion that NotW was a toxic influence that had to be killed off before it tainted Murdoch’s fitness to takeover BskyB, there’s plenty evidence that another of NI’s rags the Sun is also tainted by the phone-hacking scandal. Even if there wasn’t, the Sun is currently waiting to hear if they’ll be prosecuted for breaching contempt of court laws in their reporting of Joanna Yeates’ murder – so hardly a ‘clean’ example of NI’s responsibility. NotW‘s closure was merely expedient.

Some have speculated that the plan has long been to replace NotW with a superficially different Sun on Sunday title. I would not be surprised if this is the case, nor would I be particularly shocked if the News of the World made a comeback in a familiar form in a couple of years time. The simple fact of the matter is that Murdoch has a metric fuckton of money and influence enough to have king-making powers in UK politics. Unless the government curbs his influence, this is not going to change any time soon. To some in the media, the 7th of July may have been “a lightning revolt” reminiscent of the Arab spring, for some politicians it was the day they re-evaluated their relations with the media, but Murdoch is media-concentration incarnate, to him it was just Thursday.

Politician Bites Watchdog

Ed Miliband seems to understand the situation a lot better than Cameron. Gone is the simpering replicant who somehow got stuck in a loop during an interview 9 days ago, he hasn’t gone to war with Murdoch, but he has been uncompromising in seeking an independent solution to the mess his company has left in it’s wake.

Apparently ignoring the rumoured threats of a lifetime cut-off of support for labour policy from News Corp titles, Miliband has passionately pushed for Brook’s resignation and a delay or cancellation for Murdoch’s BskyB bid until an criminal investigation is complete or it is deferred to the competition commission – threatening to force the issue to a vote if necessary.

This is not necessarily to his credit though, he has less to lose because Cameron’s courtship of Murdoch was far more successful than his. Team Cameron has spent years getting News International to play for them, the linking of interests between the Conservative Party and NI was the product of endless negotiating, secretive dinner meetings, promises to abolish Ofcom and scale back the BBC, and quaffing wine in exotic villas. Ultimately I think the clincher was the link Cameron trusted route to Murdoch through Brooks via her disgraced – and newly employed by the Tories – friend Andy Coulson. Ever since Murdoch’s papers have served the interests of the Conservative party, even supporting the Scottish Nationalist Party who provide a softer resistance to Tory policies north of the border.

Miliband beat Cameron to the punch in seeking reform of the PCC, but to abolish and replace it at this time would be a mistake.(Image: DECC)

Miliband’s has had no chance at wooing Murdoch, whereas David Cameron couldn’t be more ‘in’ with News International right now unless Murdoch buried his gentleman’s region testes-deep inside him, which would be about as uncomfortable for Cameron as he appears to be now anyway. Dave is tethered to NI and so has been flopping about defending Andy Coulson while condemning his actions, spitting soundbites criticising vague notions of something wrong in the UK media while constantly on running from talking about his own involvement with problematic media figures – he is loud and showboating but directionless, a rodeo clown afraid of his own Bull.

Hence Cameron’s distraction tactic of attacking the Press Complaints Commission. It is true that the PCC’s initial response to phone-hacking in 2009 was insubstantial and not enough attention was given to the evidence revealed by The Guardian, but it has since become obvious that they were intentionally misled and  the PCC have withdrawn their report from that time. Hindsight is always 20/20, but prior to this past few weeks even the police thought the matter was confined to a small number of celebrities. If the police and James Murdoch himself both could not accurately assess the scale of the problem with their greater access to evidence, how then can Cameron claim that the self-regulation apparatus of the PCC should have done?

Those calling for stronger regulation than the PCC can provide seem to be forgetting that these acts were against the law, there have been arrests and those responsible may face prison sentences – is illegality and the full force of law not ample regulation?

It seems to me like there is a drive building off Cameron’s statements for MPs to castigate journalism as a whole for recent events. I find it difficult to listen to MPs pontificating on the failings of the press without ever acknowledging New Labour’s part in the cementing Murdoch’s power or these Thatcherite-lite conservatives courting that same power.

The PCC has its failings and we have long needed a way to address the concentration of media ownership. But it should be remembered that it was a journalist applying all the bounds of good practice who exposed these latest scandals. The PCC has helped resolve a constant supply of complaints at no cost, free speech and good practice are protected by independent self-regulation, but are also fostered by it. Nick Davies and other ‘Guardian journalists have been exemplar in applying a meticulously accurate scrutiny to the News of the World. This very process has been a shining example of media plurality prevailing over media concentration and of the industry regulating itself independent of government control.

DoucheMoveWatch: Daily Mail Exploits Child’s Death to Berate Teachers

By DAILY MAIL REVILER

Today’s Daily Mail was the normal mix of sensationalism, scaremongering, racism, pseudo-science and anti-reason(their idiocy surpasses common nonsense to such a degree that it annihilates reason whenever the two collide). But The ‘Mail has now seemingly given up all pretence of being a newspaper, not a comicbook, by headlining a report on a car-bombing in Thailand and the rising death-toll from such occurrences with “Ka-boom! …”. They swiftly followed this up with one of the most appalling and malign pieces I have ever had the misfortune to read. They have opted to exploit the sad story of Sophie Howard, a 13-year-old killed by a falling tree branch in Yaxley on Thursday, to spread more of their unthinking anti-union bile.

I've been in the pub since taking this screenshot and The Daily Mail has since adjusted the headline and some of the article content to hide their vindictive implication.

This was  an apparently unpredictable accident, Sophie Howard hit by a falling branch as she sat on a park bench in Peterborough. But the ‘Mail clearly blames her teachers for being on strike, and therefore allowing Sophie and her friends time for their fatal trip to the park. The Mirror and The Telegraph took the same ridiculous angle on the story, but with a great deal more subtlety.

It even seems unlikely to me that anyone prior to the ‘Mail itself was making this absurd connection between events, though obviously, as is typical with this auspicious publication, the article is peppered with conveniently anonymous vox pop quotations reiterating the anonymous journalist’s position. “The fact is if the teachers were not on strike Sophie would have been at school and this would not have happened,” one anonymous source says, completely unprompted of course.

Now, perhaps this is my problem, but I seem entirely unable to find that dubious twitter quote from Mrs “one angry parent” claiming “she should have been safe at school … it could have been my daughter” – perhaps twitter’s search function is broken. Admittedly though, other people have made similar posts following The Daily Mail‘s trash – so if they can’t be honest, at least they’re sometimes prescient(“even stopped clocks”).

If the teachers were not on strike Sophie would have been at school and this would not have happened

Another anonymous source points the finger at local government – yet another constant enemy of the ‘Mail - for ignoring his warnings of the dangerous trees. I wonder if anyone in the ‘Mail’s newsroom recalls the Daily Mail‘s claims that council efforts to maintain or replace dangerous trees were health-and-safety-’gorn-mad caused by “misguided fears” of deadfall accidents. Accidents which the, ever forgetful,  Daily Mail have themselves pointed out do happen even in the presence of teachers.

No matter how much of a technically inept Kelvin MacKenzie job this piece was, the crux of its post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacious argument is that; though this accident could have happened at any time, it didn’t, it happened during strikes. Well I too, indirectly , think this is the important issue here. Though the accident could have happened at any time, it happened less than a day ago. There is a family and a school that has just lost a child in a tragic accident, so recently that there is no guarantee that those the ‘Mail accuses know of the death yet. Yet instead of covering the accident in a decent and sensitive manner, this vacuous thought-hole of a newspaper has been peddling that butterfly-flaps-its-wings-and-causes-a-hurricane crap to groundlessly accuse those who knew and taught Sophie Howard on a daily basis of being responsible for her death. They are the soul cancer that is going to finish us all.

If there is anyone at the Daily Mail who still remembers what it was like to be a human being then they will be apologising to both the Howard family and the teaching staff from her school. Failing that, shutting the hell up for a bit and taking a long hard look at the mindless screeching terrorhawk you have become would be a start.

Update: Ending on a song because why not.

Bravemouth

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Alex Salmond at the launch of the failed and much maligned ‘national conversation’ on independence [Image: Harris Morgan

By Elliot Adams

In our childhood it's easy to find ourselves deifying action film heroes. But because their personalities are so ludicrously adonised by hollywood scripts and interviews, they are almost fated to disappoint - by their descent into such ugly areas as alcoholism, racism or even politics.

With Sean Connery there have been many such disappointments. From his repeated advocacy of hitting women, to his being entangled in corruption scandals. Most lamentably though, despite living thousands of miles away and essentially rejecting the UK until it is dismantled as a nation, Connery insists on using his considerable finances and fanatical devotion to the Scottish Nationalist Party to meddle in UK politics from abroad.

With an election in Edinburgh looming, he's sticking his oar into UK politics again with a pundit-piece in today's  'Express - 'why it must be the SNP', or something similar. The argument was the same independence-obssessed pomposity that he normally trots out about vague notions connected with political wrangling back in 1704 or based on the - extremely fictional - movie Braveheart.

The first issue with this is that - as Sean Connery would know if he hadn't been living elsewhere for decades - at present the SNP have practically nothing to do with the idea of Scottish independence. Now don't confuse my self-conscious snarkiness for an interest in any sort of independence-debate, like most of the population of Scotland nothing bores me more(the Union Jack in my avatar is only there because it looks rad), it is simply a dead issue.

Studies and surveys have shown negligible support for the idea and the half million the SNP wasted on 'the national conversation' - consulting the public on independence - was reported as having been met with "absolute indifference" outside a small racist core of SNP activists.

There are lingering legal questions about Connery, who lives as a tax-exile abroad contributing financial to a political party in the UK.

This is actually good for the SNP and the incompetent shitehawk at their helm, Alex Salmond. They currently have the backing of many centre-right voters and some of the right-wing press, The Sun for instance. But only because independence isn’t on even the longest of the SNP’s long-term agendas. If it were, then their ephemeral popularity would disappear as they are unfriended, unfollowed and blocked by their friend-list of Conservative voters and even more so with the press – none of the major newspapers in Scotland support independence.

Not that this deters Connery, who considers independence a certainty, and soon at that – what can I say, some people see a glass and say it’s half full, and other people see a glass and say it’s a fucking aquarium. As Connery is doing in California, the elections for the regional Scottish executive are certain to be wrongly interpreted in a context of national politics and independence by most of fleet street. Labour gains will be seen as public anger at the coalition’s attacks on public services, Lib-dem losses will be seen as the student voters’ revenge for the tuition fees betrayals, and SNP gains will be seen as somehow endorsing independence. In reality the SNP will merely be the most convenient stick to beat labour with, without voting for the lib-dems.

The axioms of Scottish politics have long dictated that a Conservative government combined with the bureaucratic muddle of the Scottish executive would be a boon for the SNP. The theory being that nationalists would be supported by an electorate reacting strongly against the rule of a government with so little mandate granted to it in Scotland. But untill recently Labour had been pulling way ahead of the SNP in the polls, as the public seemed to be deciding that Labour would be more suited to the task of protecting Scotland from Conservative policies than the SNP who have relied on Conservative votes to pass all their budgets.

That it is looking like the SNP might win the day is solely a testament to the power of television. Alex Salmond is an awkward troll of a man, with a face like a knuckle balancing precariously above several chins, he seems to me ineloquent and easily confused at first minister’s questions. But Salmond’s charismatic performance on-screen is superior by far to his opponents – particularly Labour leader Iain Gray. Any serious Westminster politician would have ripped Salmond and the SNP apart on their record and desperate eleventh-hour undeliverable promises, but the current opposition in Scotland are simply not up to the task.

I’m really embracing my bias here, but I find the idea of voting for the SNP in the coming election repugnant and it truly makes me fear for the future of Scotland.

There are of course problems with the SNP’s consistency and credibility as a serious political entity, for example think of their last-minute U-turns over issues like the proposals of the Calman commision – which they were seemingly opposing just because the Unionist parties were supporting them.

Then there are also ethical concerns with the SNP’s behaviour, they orchestrated the selling off of Scotland’s forests by stealth, despite their assurances to the contrary. They constructed a case for Scottish fiscal autonomy on skewed figures and omitted evidence. Most morally shaky is the fact that they had apparently prepared a deal to release the Lockerbie bomber in quid pro quo trade for human rights exemption over prisoners ‘slopping-out’ and perhaps also devolved gun control if they could swing it – a fairly large departure from the party-line that it was a ‘compassionate release’ guided by Scottish law.

But it’s not these or even a sense of self-preservation as a student in Scotland that disturbs me about the idea of voting SNP in May – it’s the SNP’s lacking economic literacy.

The nationalists have come under fire from small business, the public sector and big business for their lack of economic competency during the financial crisis. Cancelled transport projects, a failure to reform the public sector, the imposition of a supplementary business rate and other slip-ups contributed to this, particularly in rousing the Confederation of British Industry’s ire. But generally it has been the perception that they have been fiddling while Rome burns with their expensive and often pointless schemes to hold a ‘national conversation’ on independence or translate Scottish road signs into near-dead languages. Then there’s the SNP’s huge administration costs, this sort of failure to impose efficiency cuts on themselves when they are cutting so much elsewhere has been absurd.

It’s going to get worse too. The build up to these elections have been taking place under the threat of the most dramatic change in Scotland’s finances since the acts of union. The Barnett Formula gives £1600 a head more public expenditure in Scotland than in England. Starting next year the OBR will be attempting to devise a substitute for Barnett, most likely needs-based. That would leave Scotland with a funding shortfall of about five million pounds. It is in this context that Salmond has produced an election manifesto postponing financial cuts, pledging no compulsory redundancies for civil servants and promising a council tax freeze for five years costing more than a billion pounds.

So, in short: screw you Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton was a better Bond anyway. Out of vitriol, goodnight.

Newspaper Anti-Union Bias Against ‘Red Ed’

The newspapers may have been backing Miliband D, but is it really their place to criticise the fact that hundreds of thousands of the individuals who voted for Miliband E are members of trade unions?

By Elliot Adams

Running through the coverage of the intensely dreary Labour leadership contest between David and Ed Miliband has been a particularly nasty suggestion that somehow the trade union support for Ed Miliband is undesirable and undemocratic – his links to this support base leaving him portrayed as “Red Ed”, a pinko Stalinist to be feared and abhorred. I think this is partly motivated by simple snobbery, partly by an irritation that the public has chosen the ‘wrong’ Miliband, but I think it is mostly motivated by a palpable jealousy of the political power of organised labour – influence which they feel rightfully belongs to our media giants and fleet street’s political pundits. They seem incapable of understanding how and why people who don’t have the ‘right’ friends, the ‘right’ wealth and the ‘right’ Oxbridge PPE degree, can shape political change in Britain.

What’s more, the fleet street figures with all those ‘right’ elements wouldn’t be

The winning Miliband brother has already started to cave under anti-union newspaper pressure in his conference speech, condemning "irresponsible strikes"

the people who should be making this decision anyway. I would step short from fully buying into a Chomskyite propaganda model of the media, but the press really does structure news around an underlying elite consensus, based on the media’s vested interests in supporting the axioms of private and state power. Now that it is trying to shake off the remnants of new labour and the Blairites, the labour party should again be the mass party, the party of collective labour groups – without ordinary members and union affiliates, there would be no NHS, no welfare, no labour party.

Many newspaper proprietors have an anti-union bias and are uncomfortable with union influence in any sphere. So of those who didn’t just lump all voters in favour of Ed Miliband into the category of “trade union votes” criticised the unions for encouraging those individual voters to vote for ‘Red Ed’.

Essentially they’ve managed to both say that about a quarter of a million individual voters should not be allowed a political opinion on the Labour leadership because they joined a union, and that unions shouldn’t be allowed to tell their members that Ed is their preferred candidate – though the same newspapers can say that David is theirs.

Listen fleet street, it’s the ‘Labour’ party, that he has the support of organised labour is a good thing. And on the charisma scale David Miliband was less electable than even Gordon Brown was with his terrifying smile, David Miliband is dull but beneath his passive exterior beats the beige limp heart of a man so boring, scientists are, as we speak, using him to create an ennui-based renewable power source to solve the energy crisis -Whenever he opens his mouth the world visibly greys around him as the vacuum of interest his conversation creates sucks in light from the non-dreary spectrum. He wasn’t your Miliband, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he is the wrong one, get over it.

Pope Pilgrim Vs. The Secular World

Emperor Palpatine finds your lack of faith disturbing

By Elliot Adams

So the Pope has come and gone through Edinburgh, the corner of the UK I call home, on his deeply unpopular tour of Britain. It’s not just that there were more seats empty than expected at his gigs, people were questioning whether in the current economic climate Britain should be footing most of the multi-million pound bill for his trip. Stephen Fry in particular put this quite eloquently in an interview with the BBC discussing how he feels the Pope does not qualify for a state visit and should instead pay for his totally welcome visit from the Vatican’s own immensely deep pockets, this and similarly sedate comments were of course portrayed by the Daily Mail as a left-wing venom spitting “atheist hate campaign“, but in reality these reasonable concerns were being voiced from a national majority varied in their political and spiritual leanings.

But behind the usual tabloid hysterics, there was for once an once of truth. There were campaigns to protest the popes visit on grounds of the church’s stance on contraception, homosexuals, women’s rights and child abusers amongst the clergy – there was even a plan to have the pope arrested in the same manner as Augusto Pinochet when he was arrested in Britain in 1998 - which is all fair enough if the evidence is there. But what concerns me is all the comments I heard and read about ‘the Catholics’, connecting them (and the pope) as a group with paedophilia and homophobia just because they were Catholics.

The Vatican got their equally-reductive pre-emptive strike in first before leaving for Old Blighty’s shores. One of Benedict’s closest aides, Cardinal Walter Kasper, was pulled off the trip when in German magazine Focus he called Britain a ”third world country” because of “an aggressive New Atheism [which] is widespread in England” and brutalises Christians with its monstrous secular ways and presumably it’s long thin claws.

The the pope himself tripped over Godwin’s law in a speech condemning atheist ways and putting responsibility for the rise of Nazi fascism in Germany, the holocaust et c. at atheism’s door. This is of course ridiculous in many ways and some easily provoked sorts have pointed out Hitler’s Catholicism, the various Nazi-Vatican concords and that the pope himself was a member of the Hitler youth. I prefer to just chuckle occasionally at his similarity in appearance to Emperor Palpatine off star wars and his awesome car, but it’s clear that the heart of his trip was to give warnings of the dangers and evils of secularism.

This is a tame squabble compared to the GROUND ZERO MONSTER MOSQUE OF MURDER debate from across the pond, which is currently so heated that you can just about boil an egg by pointing a chicken at the Atlantic.

If you’ve been lucky enough to avoid this ‘debate’; it concerns a mile-high mosque that is going to be built at ground zero, with a thousand golden minarets that are carefully arranged to cast the shadow of a giant upraised middle finger over mourning 9/11 widows, while Muslims fire AK-47′s into the air screaming whatever that foreign word for ‘victory’ is, around a bonfire of bibles, American flags and human decency.

Or at least that’s what some media outlets would have you believe, it’s actually a community centre a few blocks away from ground zero with a basketball court, swimming pool, small restaurant, comfy chairs and presumably somewhere you can buy a halal muffin, the bastards.

It all seems very myopic from where I’m standing, i.e. gawking from the sidelines of an absurd fight I didn’t pick, and which seems intent on dragging me in somehow.

The pope rolled down my road in the pope-mobile but I didn’t go see him, because my spiritual experience only extends to typing ‘omg’ every now and then; he’s just another rich old guy with a cool car to me and though I find the papacy historically very interesting, I know very little about this particular chap. Consequently I can’t really comment on whether he is involved in covering up child-molesting or if his spiritual disposition is related to this in any way. I do however have an old mate with a cool car who has a narcotic-triggered spiritual disposition that leaves many people incensed and I’d like to use him to express myself here – it’s one of them there ‘metaphors’ I’ve been hearing about.

The mate in question can ramble for hours about the time he took a especially lethal strain of hallucinogenic fungus he bought off the internet and sat outside in the rain staring cross-legged at a wall, and found himself seeing through its, like, inner-eyes man – his mouth tasted of mortar, he felt moss growing in the cracks of his mind and had an epiphany that when you think about it, deep-down we’re all bricks, in a way, and that was a truly bloody life-changing spiritual experience, let me tell you. ‘Want to try some? Do you want to take some? Go on, I need someone on my level to discuss things with. EAT THE BLOODY SHROOMS!’

His company is combative to say the least, also confusing and at times terrifying. But putting it in a facile and patronising manner, he is a stoner -this does not make him evil, nor does it people with similar opinions on spiritual experience.

In the same vein and in condescending order, I do not think there is a god – this does not make me and those like me responsible for the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany. The pope thinks there is a god – this does not make him and those like him paedophiles. Muslims think there is a god – this does not make them terrorists.

This may be a gross simplification, but could we not just all be nice to each other and stuff, accept that people have differing opinions on these matters? Didn’t that Jesus fella’ say something along those lines?

Daily Mail’s Hidden Job Ad

By Elliot Adams

Just a quick mention because it amused me, proper post on the way soon promise!

Displaying uncharacteristic intelligence the Daily Mail has advertised a job for an engineer hidden in it’s website’s robots.txt. For those who don’t know robots.txt is a convention to prevent web spiders and other bots from accessing specific parts of a website which are otherwise publicly accessable. Bots are used by search engines to categorize and archive sites, so it’s useful for removing search engine results that don’t add much value for users.

Of course, in terms of security, this is more of a ‘keep out’ sign than a locked door and requires the bots cooperation. Also without a decent workaround in place it can be used by human visitors as a handy guide to what you want to hide, consequently files like http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt get considerable traffic and attention when changes are made – I wouldn’t bother checking it incidentally, it’s pretty dull.

Needless to say, people reading the contents of a robots.txt file tend to be of a nerdier ilk and have a working knowledge of search engine optimisation – which is what makes the following extract from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/robots.txt really quite clever.

# August 12th, MailOnline are looking for a talented SEO Manager so if you found this then you’re the kind of techie we need!
# Send your CV to holly dot ward at mailonline dot co dot uk

# Begin standard rules
# Apply rules to all user agents updated 08/06/08

Well I thought it was cute anyway.

Ground Zero Mosque Bullshit-Cycle

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By Elliot Adams

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the activist who is behind the Cordoba House (Image: Magnus Manske)

The Ground Zero Mosque is the most half-baked political hot-potato currently in circulation. It concerns the proposed building of a community centre in Manhattan by a Muslim organization; which is truly bizarre as it’s planned to be built on legitimately acquired private property a considerable distance away from ground zero, it’s not a mosque (though the group has had one in the same neighbourhood for years), there is already a mosque far closer to the former site of the world trade centre, the people behind it have no connection to the attacks on the world trade centre, the Imam behind it is a remarkably moderate Sufi even by Republican tastes; and of course US law legally protects the freedom of religious assembly. It’s not the most newsworthy issue in that part of New York, or even on that street, yet the US press have given it amazing prominence over the past few months.

The most concerning thing is that the media furore surrounding this non-story seems to be largely originating with, and driven by, Pamela Geller, a conspiracy-vomiting terrorhawk of a blogger who is viciously anti-Muslim. She posts her protracted and bigoted diatribes and conspiracy theories across a range of far-right and end-times blogs, she is also a leading member of Stop Islamization[sic] Of America(SIOA; if you can’t guess what they advocate, consider that one founder encourages people to murder their liberal relatives and all Muslims).

Last December The New York Times published a fairly passive piece on the plans to build the Cordoba community centre. The article covered Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s plans to counter extremism – and quoted the mayor’s office, families of world trade centre victims, representatives of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, the leader of the local Jewish community centre and the FBI (who have worked with the Imam in the past) all giving their support to the community centre and Imam Feisal.

Even Fox News was largely positive when in the same month Imam Feisal’s wife was interviewed by Laura Ingraham, a guest host on Fox news’ O’Reilly factor mainly notable for her past homophobic rhetoric and an attempt to hinder Democratic Party voters. But Ingraham remained supportive of the project, saying she couldn’t find many people who have a problem with it and saying “I like what you’re trying to do,” even though she does seem to imply that American-Muslims aren’t properly ‘Americanized’.

Then the story all but disappeared from the press for about six months, as no one except Geller and a few other bloggers really cared where the Cordoba community centre was built – and rightly so.

That is until May of this year, when an NYC community committee unanimously approved the project and Geller’s SIOA launched it’s campai

Denying the right of free religious assembly here is an attempt to apply a collective guilt to the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims for a pitiful act of mass murder committed by a small heretical sect, it delineates the conflict with Jihadists as a war between western civilisation and Islam. Pictured is one of the people who've been pushing this agenda in the past.

gn to stop what she was now calling the “Monster Mosque” that will be built at ground zero “just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.” It is important to remember that this woman is either delusional or a habitual liar; she has variously claimed that President Obama was involved with a crack whore, was a Pimp, that he wears gang colours in the white house, that Malcom X is his real father(based on some kind of neo-phrenology) and that she has pornographic photograph’s of Obama’s mother.

What the ultra-conservative factions of the US press did next though was truly revolutionary outside the box thinking. The box in question is the one clearly labelled ‘Journalistic Integrity.’

They fully adopted those like Geller and the way in which they framed the story. Notably for once, or at least first out of the starting block this time, was Andrea Peyser of the New York Post in her column, ”Mosque Madness at Ground Zero.” Peyser quotes Geller extensively and unironically describes her SIOA group as a “human-rights group.” It’s the first article I can find that depicts the ‘Monster Mosque’ in the way that bloggers from the far-right had been framing the story, as a despicable attack on America.

The rest of the conservative media quickly fell into line, the Washington Examiner called it “a second attack on the World Trade Center” and Fox News was almost beautiful in how much it’s coverage got behind bigots like SIOA, it’s like watching them pick a fight with the idea of journalism itself – media matters covers this far better than I could hope to. The more moderate conservative news outlets and other mainstream organisations were forced to now respond to this with dissent, or reporting both sides of the ‘dispute’, but by doing so were also framing the story within terms of a entirely manufactured controversy.

Geller herself put in a few more forays into the press, including a radio appearance with Sean Hannity, but her part in this was largely that of the vanishing mediator and she had already succeeded. The story in the US press has been delineated into this simulation of a fake controversy to such an extent that now even Obama’s weak statement, and re-statement, that those behind the Cordoba community centre had the right to free religious assembly is now read as both an appeasement to Islamic extremists and then a back-tracking of his comments.

This whole debate that has played out in the media is just too much hyperreality in the headlines for me – if you’ll forgive the jargon wankery – there was simply nothing newsworthy about it before the press picked up Geller and her ilk’s touting of the proposed Islamic community centre as something it wasn’t. To abuse a Harmsworthian proverb, it wasn’t a man-bites-dog story, or even a dog-bites-man story; it was a conspiracy-theorist-looks-at-dog-and-claims-it’s-a-badger-poised-to-bite-all-you-hold-dear story.

One of the few sociology studies I tolerate is Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics, a look at the media hype and social reaction to the mods and rockers brawls of the 60s. In it he proposes a ‘Deviancy Amplification Spiral’ to describe the way in which media hype of behaviour increases the intensity of that behaviour, attracts people expecting that behaviour and consequently intensifies media hype – closing a cycle of amplification. But what we have here is a ‘Bullshit Amplification Spiral’, completely devoid of any real event or behaviour in the first place, the press has just been taking every comment and statement and forcing it into the polemic framework of a debate that never really existed outside of the mind of one hate dribbling blogger.

Daily Express Campaigns Against a Daily Express Campaign

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By Elliot Adams

A Pamphlet published by William Willett, one of the early proponents of Daylight Savings Time, who did not live to see it become law.

It’s a rare day when I can find myself cheering on tabloid newspaper the Daily Express in one of their ridiculous crusades, but this Weekend was one of those happy occasions, because they’ve decided to pick a fight with themselves – here’s hoping they kick seven shades out of their opponent Tyler Durden stylee.

The ‘Express front page story, headlined ‘TIME FOR CHANGE: DON’T PUT THE CLOCKS BACK,’ announced the launch of their Time For Change campaign,  a noble “crusade to stop Britain being plunged into early evening darkness every autumn.”

They argue this would bring “the country into line with much of the rest of Europe … make roads safer … boost the nation’s health by encouraging more leisure activities, cut energy bills, benefit the environment and boost tourism,” other benefits they attach to this plan include a cut in childhood obesity and helping the Scottish skiing industry.

However the Scottish edition of the same newspaper ran with the front page story ‘DON’T KEEP US IN THE DARK‘ a noble campaign to stop the dastardly English who “want the Prime Minister to introduce British Summer Time throughout the year to give families one hour more of daylight in the evenings” – as it is apparently just families involved, perhaps they’re implying single people would live under the old time zone?

The Scottish edition of the Daily Express tells their readership how furious and deeply opposed they are to all this. But I think it might be a bit gullible of us to believe that they have these mind reading powers over the British public, when apparently they don’t have the power of reading their own newspaper.

The Sun Is Not in Enough Trouble For Mocking ‘Schizo’s

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By Elliot Adams

70% of people affected by mental illness say they have experienced discrimination because of it, the press should never be part of that prejudice. (Image:Flickr/Arty Smokes)

Several years ago, The Sun published their infamous ”Bonkers Bruno Locked Up” front page, which belittled the mentally ill and their treatment with prejudice, understandably this received numerous complaints from readers, doctors and mental health charities. Now they’re in trouble again for using the pejorative term ‘schizo’ in coverage of mental health issues referring to patients suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. A clear breach of article 12 of the Press Complaints Commission’s Editor’s Code of Practice;

12. Discrimination

i) The press must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability.

ii) Details of an individual’s race, colour, religion, sexual orientation, physical or mental illness or disability must be avoided unless genuinely relevant to the story.

The PCC have not upheld the complaints, rather they seem satisfied with The Sun‘s assurances that they would “use [their] best endeavours not to use the term ‘schizo’ in the future.” Although I find it hard to believe the tabloid is particularly concerned with what will happen if they continue to use the term in this way, not after such soft treatment.

It’s not like it’s a one-off occurrence either, The Sun‘s website contains 14 articles using the word ‘schizo’, 58 using the word ‘nutter’ and 187 using the word ‘psycho’.

Not all of these incidences will be using this derogatory language to stigmatise mental illness, but many of those that aren’t are framing story’s on violent crime within negative terms of mental illness. Of course, despite tabloid opinion, national studies indicate that severe mental illness is not a significant cause of violence in society* – the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators.

Perhaps I’m over-reacting, this is after-all the tabloid that I recall referring to a man convicted of sexual assault as ‘the craven rape beast’, expectations of their editorial-integrity should be kept suitably low.

But the influence of tabloid publications like The Sun is massive upon attitudes towards a group seen through so many misconceptions. Mental illness is at a positive but delicate transitory stage in how it is perceived and treated. It’s now seen as a medical condition like any other condition, people with mental illness can expect to get the same kind of respect and services as people who have a physical disability. But negative attitudes perpetuated by the tabloid treatment of mental health are still rife. For a more in depth look at these attitudes look to 250 labels used to stigmatise people with mental illness, a qualitative study by Diana Rose, Graham Thornicroft et al. that shows the negative and confused attitudes a sample of students had towards the mentally ill.

If we are to provide the factual information and appropriate respect required to change these attitudes, we will need a new degree of editorial responsibility, not just ”best endeavours not to use the term ‘schizo’ in the future”, but best endeavours to counteract stigma and prejudice where it is most potent – in our own minds.

* There is though a statistical association with factors that do relate to violence, such as substance abuse and various, social and economic factors.