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.

The Heartache of Students Reporting Their Own Tragedy

33 Virginia Tech students died during the shootings, this a candlelight vigil was held as part of VT's memorialisation process.

By Elliot Adams

I stumbled across this moving and provocative documentary about how The Collegiate Times, a student-run newspaper at Virginia Tech., dealt with the Virginia Tech Massacre. Their coverage was ahead of the international press, being the first media outlet to break news on the shootings, with online coverage as information came in on the day and extensive coverage that stayed ahead of the national press in the days following. The newspaper faced unique problems in how to give sensitive coverage of events from the student community’s perspective, and provide resources to assist the students in their recovery – all in the face of an increasingly frenzied and insensitive US media circus.

Documenting Disaster follows the 2007 Collegiate Times staff as they recall

How the student paper chose to cover the events.

the chaos of the week following the tragedy, reflecting on the responsibilities of being journalists dealing with tragedy on their campus. These students tell their personal experiences about covering the story of the tragedy, with accounts from their faculty advisor and the university spokesman who dealt with the media during the event.

It’s a pretty long video, but I highly recommend it. It is my opinion that often the press mishandles mass shootings by sensationalising them and focusing on death tolls, sirens and the killer in a way that encourages copy-cats. Perhaps it is reassuring then that a student-run paper has found a far more powerful and responsible approach by focusing on the stories of the victims and survivors.

Documenting Disaster: A Look into the Collegiate Times from Victoria Shirley Productions on Vimeo.

Blue Monday

Wall's Icecream, proud sponsor of happiness

By Elliot Adams

There’s plenty of newsvomit around today concerning the annual occurrence of ‘Blue Monday’, supposedly calculated as the most miserable day in the year. So far it’s passing has been piously observed by The Sun, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Mirror, The Sunday Times and legion uniformed bloggers who’ve plagiarised whatever publication they happen to have read today.

Churnalism of the highest order, ‘blue monday’ was not – as some have claimed – based on reasearch at Cambridge University, it was nothing more than a publicity stunt dreamt up by Sky Travel seven years ago. Sky’s pet ‘academic’ picked this date using a dubious formula with ‘debt’, ‘weather’ and other grim factors written arbitrarily in it – he has gone on to make a habit of selling similar concepts, for instance, the happiest day of the year formula he created for Wall’s ice-cream.

This year it is claimed that the date of Blue Monday was derived from a peak in demand for counselling services. The problem is that the claim is now being made by mentaline.com a company that sells – suprise, suprise – online counselling services. Several other corporations are tagging along to sell similar products; although perhaps one could find ActionAid’s bandwagon jumping less repulsive as it is in a good cause.

Obviously the asinine formulae and studies drawn up to support these faddish PR events are uninformative, deceptive and wholly driven by people whoring themselves out to corporate money. Which is all quite comic really, but aren’t they more dangerous than that? Because these alarmingly frequent stories hold a considerable share in coverage of medical or scientific issues, and as such, are clogging a valuable space, where the press could be fulfilling it’s informative social purpose, with meaningless drivel and fluff that only undermines the legitimacy and authority of science, medicine and journalism. The 17th of January stands out as the laziest day of the year for those employed in the art of regurgitating corporate press-releases and damaging the reputation of the press, but that’s it.

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.

It’s Not a Small World After All

The Small World ride at disneyland paris, applying the same journalistic standards as the daily mail we can extrapolate that it's led to the neglect of two children by their mother..

By Elliot Adams

Both the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Metro have run the story that a mother addicted to an online game called ‘Small World‘ neglected her children and left her two pet dogs to starve so that she could play the game – for those of you not familiar with the Metro, it is a free Daily Mail owned newspaper distributed on public transport in the UK and designed to be read in under 20 minutes. Coverage generously lifts text and images from the game’s own advertising and the story has quickly been repeated elsewhere.

It’s an interesting anecdote of the dangers of the disconnect we feel with the rest of our lives when over-dependent on more mediated communication, but there is one major problem with the story – ‘Small World’ is a board game and cannot be played online in any way. I assume the game the woman played was smallworlds.com,  a sandbox online role-playing game which has a social networking element accessible through facebook.

Aside from downplaying the less controversy-generating influence her husband’s tragic death had in making the woman a virtual recluse, this piece of google-journalism is a troubling fact-checking failure that shows the true extent of the laziness of the UK’s tabloid press.

I predict that they will of course take the articles offline and make the usual apologetic statement saying that they try their hardest to fact-check all stories, but they receive many stories like this through press agency wires and lack the time and resources to ensure minor details are correct. But really that’s like saying you try your hardest not to have sex with farmyard animals but that you do sometimes fuck corpses – it doesn’t really fix the problem. Even on this relatively minor level, misrepresentation in the press affects people’s lives and one day when they approach one of those ‘major’ stories with this sort of sloppy journalism, it really will be game over.

UPDATE: The Daily Mail have deleted the offending article from their online edition and Days of Wonder who produce the game Small World say that they are “currently considering legal action regarding this misrepresentation … and [hope] the newspapers responsible for these defamatory statements will give similar coverage to a retraction.”

The End of Silly Season, No News Tonight

By Elliot Adams

The tragic death of a fish called Benson was one of the first and finest of this silly season's parade of the nugatory, but there are dangerous inherent to the journalism of this stagnant time of year.

August is ending and silly season is ending with it for another year. ‘Silly season’ denotes the few summer months when parliament is in recess, organisations are hesitant to enact any major changes while important staff are vacationing, the law-courts aren’t sitting and new shows are rare outside of festivals because of the expectation of critics being on holiday – this annually starves the media of newsworthy stories to the extent that everyone runs pieces on exams getting harder/easier and cats being stuck in drainpipes. Many other countries have comparable periods, for example France’s morte-saison(dead season) and my personal favourite Germany’s Sommerloch (summer[news] hole).

This season has been an exemplar treat for those of us who value the valueless. I was particularly tickled by The Guardian‘s stunning news that ancient Roman soldiers may have worn socks with their sandals and the BBC report that two strippers have been picketing a small church in Ohio. These triumphs of the inane join the silly season repertoire of cows that moo in regional accents, a cheese puff shaped like Jesus (all the puns have been done already, to death, forever) and the classic Sun story on Victor Meldrew being found in space.

Doubtless the vacuum created by the lack of newsworthy material sucks in some absolute shite. But the press hasn’t always been so desperate to fill this empty space. On Good Friday 1930, Britain was on holiday, the economy seemed to be recovering after the Wall Street Crash and the political world was quiet – it was the slowest of news days. In response to this, BBC radio news delivered the most honest statement journalism has ever produced;

“Ladies and gentlemen, there is no news tonight. So here is some music.”

Now, I understand replicating this is impracticable - in a culture of 24 hour news broadcasting, 1930′s era piano music is not an acceptable substitute for newsworthy material – but it is still preferable by far to the dark-side of silly season.

Firstly, the hunger for content increases the frequency of bad science which is particularly dangerous when it deals with medical issues like The Telegraph‘s claim that shopping receipts make men impotent, or the report that housework stops women from getting breast cancer -this joins the hundreds of things the Daily Mail have claimed cause/cure/prevent cancer. If you doubt the danger of such poor understanding of scientific research, remember that there are still thousands of people who think the MMR vaccine is linked to Autism.

The same hunger is also exploited by public relations and marketing drones the world over, silly season is the highpoint of the year for those seeking to get their press release – or advertisement masquerading as such – into the press with few changes. This process also works in the other direction as press outlets dredge stories from within the highly partisan and  second-level agenda setting environment of blogs and pressure groups, as further fuelled the argument over the so-called ‘ground zero mosque‘ earlier this summer.

The pretence that you always have something newsworthy ready to publish is deceptive but necessary. Whatever has – or has not – happened, The Mirror has forty or so pages to print, the news at ten has it’s half an hour to fill and The Today Programme has it’s three, and like a wagon train in some desert-bound circle of hell reserved for the myopic and excitable, the rolling news broadcasters must keep endlessly rolling on.

But just as the 1930 BBC broadcasters making their ‘there is no news tonight’ announcement were using the music as an alternative to the news agency material they were trying to break free from, modern broadcasters should use the fluff of silly season to break away from the PR material and bad science that likewise thrives in a newsless environment.

So by all means throw away some self-respect with articles about baby polar bears if you can’t run significant world news, just don’t throw away your respect for your readership at the same time.

Ladies and gentlemen, there is no news tonight. So here is a story about how the Roman’s wore socks with sandals.

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.