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Courtesy of Adam on Twitter, Paula Murray’s revolting Dunblane story in the Express has been pulled from the website. You can still read the filth in Google’s cache however. Adam says the Press Complaints Commission is now looking into it.

In other news Gerry McCann has been speaking to the Commons culture, media and sport committee today. You may recognise the newspaper publisher who more than any made the McCann’s already hellish lives even worse…

Asked by the committee why he and his family only took action against a single newspaper group, McCann said that Express Newspapers were the biggest offenders by some distance but they could have easily sued more publishers. “That was not what we were interested in, we were interested in putting a stop to it first and foremost,” McCann said.

The McCanns launched a libel action against Express Newspapers for more than 100 articles that appeared in its newspapers.

A year ago, Express Newspapers published front-page apologies in the Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Star and Daily Star Sunday to the McCann family and paid them £550,000 in libel damages over coverage of Madeleine’s disapperance.

Flanked by his legal representatives, Adam Tudor of Carter-Ruck, and press representative Clarence Mitchell, McCann told MPs that it became a cause for concern that he was in dispute with Express Newspapers when the Express editor Peter Hill was sitting on the board of the press watchdog. Hill subsequently left the PCC board.

“I did think it was surprising that the editor of the paper that had so flagrantly libelled us could be a representative of the PCC,” McCann said.

Express Newspaper’s owner Richard Desmond is a pornographer.

Update March 11: Thanks to Adam the Tory Troll, we now have PDF scans of the newspaper articles. You can download them here and here. You’ll especially enjoy the section that didn’t make it online. It’s about the ‘good’ victims of Dunblane. Nice to see them get a mention for a bit of contrast, no?

In a moralising speech to the Society of Editors last year, Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre had this to say about Max Mosely and the court judgement that had gone in his favour…

The judge found for Max Mosley because he had not engaged in a “sick Nazi orgy” as the News of the World contested, though some of the participants were dressed in military-style uniform. Mosley was issuing commands in German while one prostitute pretended to pick lice from his hair, a second fellated him and a third caned his backside until blood was drawn.

Now most people would consider such activities to be perverted, depraved, the very abrogation of civilised behaviour of which the law is supposed to be the safeguard. Not Justice Eady. To him such behaviour was merely “unconventional”.

Nor in his mind was there anything wrong in a man of such wealth using his money to exploit women in this way. Would he feel the same way, I wonder, if one of those women had been his wife or daughter?

Would he feel the same way, I wonder, if one of those women had been his wife or daughter?

Hostage to fortune anyone?

Today’s Daily Mail has an article highlighting ‘the most degrading advertisement of the year by a European women’s group.’ The Mail helpfully prints some of the offenders – less, one assumes, to raise outrage and more to pander to the immaturely prurient who makes up a large contingent of the Mail’s readership. It’s less having their cake and eating it as having their wank and hating it.

Would Paul Dacre feel the same about publishing those images, I wonder, if one of those women had been his wife or daughter? In his mind is there anything wrong in a man of such wealth using his money to exploit women in this way?

Here’s ‘scantily clad Mel B‘. Would Dacre feel the same way, I wonder, if one of those women had been his wife or daughter?

Here’s Rowan Pelling in her undercrackers. Did Dacre give thought to her father’s reaction before publication?

Have some long-lens shots of one of Bob Geldof’s daughters in a bikini. Sir Bob obviously was consulted by Dacre before splashing them across a national newspaper.

Gentlemen, if you are in the mood for some self-appreciation this morning, the Daily Mail should be, once again, your one-handed destination. The images are of someone’s wife or daughter but don’t let that put you off your stroke. For wankers by wankers.

Via Anton we have this piece of utter scumbaggery from Express journalist Paula Murray:

DUNBLANE survivors have “shamed” the memory of their dead peers with foul-mouthed boasts about sex, brawls and drink-fuelled antics as they reach adulthood.

So, the survivors of an atrocity try to live their lives in as normal a way as possible only to find judgement at the hands of a gutter journalist trying to stir the pot of moral outrage.

If only the doctors and counsellors who treated the wounds and mental scars of those children all those years ago had had the foresight to say: ‘Now, children, you most now go forth and live the lives of angels, not only in tribute to your dead schoolmates who no doubt would have wanted you to live puritanical lives, but also to avoid the predations of journalists barely worthy of the name who, as soon as you turn 18, will ransack your private lives in search of cheap, revolting scoops.’ All this could have been avoided.

Paula Murray is an idiot.

Polly Toynbee, once again gearing up to urge us to vote for authoritarian war criminals, offers a prescription for better political engagement in Britain…

It needs a change of culture in political parties, in the media, among sneering intellectuals, among ranting bloggers, and in civic engagement.

One notes that it is only intellectuals and bloggers that she felt the need to prefix with pejorative adjectives. How very… engaging of her. One has, of course, never seen a ranting or sneering politician or journalist.

The purpose of the site is simple; editors will be quietly documenting outright lies peddled by the Daily Mail, and seeking to bring this culture of fear and falsehood to the attention of those Mail readers curious enough to use a search engine or browse the evil underground world of weblogs.

Go see. They’ve got a hell of a roster of writers.

In the Times today columnist David Aaronovitch goes to work on the popular idea that we as citizens are caught on CCTV camera 300 times a day. He’s tenacious, dogged and vociferous in his quest to debunk the misconception.

He should be congratulated on his little scoop. It’s worthy of a blogger, in fact. If only, however, he’d shown the same tenacity, doggedness, and vociferousness in chasing down the facts in 2003 when spurious statistics and misconceptions were left to fester in the public imagination without correction and ended up taking us to war.

If I remember rightly, Aaronovitch was quite happy then to take the peddlers of those spurious statistics and misconceptions at their word. Indeed, he crowed those false assertions from his column in a national newspaper. Afterwards, feeling a little sheepish, he said on the subject of Iraq’s WMDs:

If nothing is eventually found, I – as a supporter of the war – will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again.

Given his propensity to shovel down and regurgitate any amount of government say-so since he said that, we can only assume his promise of future disbelief was also a misconception of some kind. Would anyone care to chase it down with Aaronovitchesque tenacity?

I note the irony that Aaronovitch once won the Orwell Prize for journalism. Can anyone pinpoint the precise moment he went from speak to power to speaking for it?

In November last year more than 200 people were killed in central Nigeria in clashes between the Christians and Muslims communities. You won’t have heard about it. It didn’t make the rolling news headlines. Whitey wasn’t there and he didn’t lose anything in the conflagration. The video footage (not that there was any) wouldn’t have looked like the thrilling money shot from a Terminator movie.

You know, if I was the British Foreign Secretary this morning I’d be on my knees thanking God that a former prime minister has a racist daughter and that it’s still snowing like billyo. Today should pass for him without to much hoo-ha in the media, one would imagine.

I’ve said before that Catcher in the Rye is possibly the most over-rated book ever written and tome of choice for Beatle murderers and permanent adolescents everywhere.

However, after listening to I’ve Never Seen Star Wars on Radio 4 this evening, I might just have changed my mind. In an attempt to get the mighty Barry Cryer to embrace the book, Marcus Brigstocke suggested reading it in the voice of E.L. Wisty.

Trust me, it works. I’m off out to buy a second hand copy tomorrow.

Look at this bastard, January 2009:

BBC boss Mark Thompson has again defended the decision [not to broadcast a charity appeal for Gaza], saying it would jeopardise the BBC’s impartiality.

Look at this bastard, November 2005:

[D]irector general, Mark Thompson, has recently returned from Jerusalem, where he held a face-to-face meeting with the hardine Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Although the diplomatic visit was not publicised on these shores, it has been seized upon in Israel as evidence that Thompson, who took office in 2004, intends to build bridges with the country’s political class.

(Via Anton and Lenin)

I remember hearing this on Jimmy Savile’s Old Record Club when I was a kid and thinking it was the most amazing thing ever. Finding it on the jukebox in the student union when I was at poly was a thrill. Me and mates took it on ourselves to torture the rest of the spotty herberts with it…

Bye Dave. ‘If Music Be the Food of Love… Prepare for Indigestion’ has to be one of the finest album titles of all time.

Patton Oswalt pays tribute to the greatest living Englishman.

It’s a brave move to be sure, swapping the pasty skinny white guy with stupid hair for another pasty skinny white guy with stupid hair. Quite the departure.

What’s wrong with this headline?

‘Eight civilians killed’ in surgical strike on truck

Can you see what it is? Or is it just me? And is it trivial? I don’t think it is but I’d like to know what others think.

On the bottom of the Daily Mail article where James Purnell and Chris Grayling duke it out over who’s the hardest when it comes to society’s vulnerable, there’s the story of the Ramond family:

Ray and Tracey Ramond have been branded Britain’s biggest beneficiaries from state handouts. The couple and their nine children hit the headlines three years ago when it emerged they received £39,000-a-year in benefits.

The headline to the piece is:

LIFE ON EASY STREET

And then you see the accompanying photograph:

Life is good!

I don’t know about you but when I saw it my first thought wasn’t ‘just where is this Easy Street and how do I get there? It does indeed look easy there.’

Apart from showing next to nothing worth watching this Christmas, the BBC excelled itself in two small but significant ways:

a) Scheduling the new Wallace and Gromit film to start at half eight on Christmas night so that small children are too knackered to watch it.

b) Ensuring said Wallace and Gromit film starts late so that anybody recording it for said small children will have said recording cut off before the end.

Tossers.

Update: It seems whatever it is that is draining the BBC of competence is not isolated to BBC1. Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe review of the year (on BBC4) was similarly truncated. Cheers. If the three episodes of Mark Gatiss’ ghost story I’ve got are in the same condition I may very well take it upon myself to haunt Mark Thompson.

Do it. Do it now. Let’s crash Cowell’s Christmas.

In other news, this is the last Saturday for a bit when I’ll be relegated to the back room while puffed-up ponces prance about in the front. Result. I’m about to extort 14 weeks of my own where I have control of the television on a Saturday evening. What shall I inflict on the rest of the family, do you think? Obviously I won’t be able to stretch to anything as ghastly Strictly Come Dancing. I wonder what an eight and four year-old would make of a Takeshi ‘Beat’ Kitano restrospective…

Take a look at the headline to Martin Kettle’s column in the Guardian today.

Why I still rate Blunkett

Now, how many people actually settled down to that thinking it was going to be an unmissable read, do you think? How many on the other hand, whether with the paper or the website, hurriedly turned the page or clicked the mouse?

You see this kind of thing a lot, particularly in the Guardian. Who is stuff like this supposed to appeal to? The audience for it must be miniscule. Those of us who’ve watched Blunkett over the years will roll their eyes at a hagiography by a New Labour hack. For those willing to overlook Machine-Gun Blunkett’s many failings, the column is equally redundant, isn’t it? By now there must be few who are going to be persuaded to change their opinion of Blunkett, least of all by Martin bloody Kettle.

I didn’t have any Internet access at the weekend and was therefore unwillingly subjected to what passes for Saturday night entertainment in this country right now. Here’s what I found…

1) Is the decision to have the winner of this year’s X-Factor sing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah – with it’s line ‘but you don’t really care for music, do you?’ – an act of supremely self-deluding arrogance or a staggeringly idiotic oversight by one of history’s greatest cultural vandals?

2) Who knew so many people guarded their pennies so jealously?

3) Is it just me or does Cheryl Cole look like an ironing board that’s been creosoted? Is that look supposed to be sexy?

On the whole, it makes you remember the years of Russ Abbot’s Madhouse as if they were Renaissance Italy.

Take a look at these utter bastards…

Two solicitors who took millions of pounds from compensation payouts given to sick miners have been struck off.

[...]

Beresford, 58, said last year to be Britain’s highest-earning solicitor, and Smith, 52, made millions of pounds from personal injury claims for miners under the government’s coal health compensation scheme.

Tribunal chairman David Leverton said: “If ever there was a group of persons who needed the full care and attention from solicitors, it was these miners.

“Mr Beresford described himself as an entrepreneur. Unfortunately, his attitude allowed himself and Mr Smith to put commercial goals before his clients’ best interests.

[...]

The compensation scheme was set up by the government because of British Coal’s lack of safety standards and led to hundreds of thousands of claims from former miners and their families.

[...]

Beresford and Smith’s joint earnings went from more than £182,000 in 2000 to £23,273,256 in 2006, the tribunal heard.

But Timothy Dutton QC, appearing for the Solicitors’ Regulatory Authority (SRA), said charging conditional or contingency fees over and above those set out in the scheme was “unacceptable”.

In one case, the firm deducted a “success fee” from the widow of a miner, leaving her with a total payout of just £217.73, the tribunal heard.

Beresford’s total payout bought him ‘a £1.8 million private jet and a string of cars including a Bentley, a Ferrari and two Aston Martins [...] a stately home and a racehorse’. The average payout to dying and chronically ill miners was two and a half grand.

Now, we’ve just had two weeks of the wannabe hardman Leader of the Opposition and attendant gutter press telling us that Karen Matthews was representative of benefit claimants. We’ve had a peacock Work and Pensions secretary strutting about the place telling us that the unemployed need to shape up or ship out. The most vulnerable in our society have been told, once again, that they are somehow lesser. The headlines have told us day after day that the shiftless and feckless underclass need taking in hand.

So, tomorrow, when not a single front page mentions how solicitors Beresford and Smith ransacked the public purse and cheated dying miners and dead miners’ widows of the insulting pittance they were entitled to – not to mention the faceless bureaucrats who thought the invoices reasonable and paid them – what are we to make of it? That this country’s media and political class are morally in the toilet? That would be a gross generalisation, wouldn’t it? We reserve those only for the poor.

You can bet there’ll be no editorial from David Cameron saying we must intervene with solicitors and their benefactors to prevent them becoming like Beresford and Smith. After all, Thatcher shafted the miners and then her spirit of entrepreneurship, nurtured by her morally vacant New Labour offspring, went back for seconds. You can’t expect the likes of Dave to examine his ideological heritage too closely for its moral failings.

Will we see hand-wringing from left-wing commentators and fire and brimstone from those on the right? Will James Purnell and his millionaire adviser be cruising TV studios tomorrow with a new government proposal aiming to drag something-for-nothing solicitors back into line? Sure, not all of them are robbing bastards but are there any votes in differentiating? There aren’t when it comes to single mums and the long term unemployed.

Tomorrow you will see the values (or lack of them) of a circulation-chasing media and a vote-chasing government and opposition. How much of either – newspaper sales or votes – can be extracted from the plight of dying and dead miners and their widows? Any advance on fuck all?

Update 12/12 @ 7.45am: Here’s today’s front pages. No inch-high screamers calling Beresford and Smith THE LAWYERS OF PURE EVIL. Call me less than amazed. Am I a cynic or a psychic?

A well-meaning yet deluded soul writes to the Guardian:

Could I suggest that all those many journalists who failed to see through the lies and evasions of Karen Matthews just pause and think that social workers responsible for child protection do have to make similar evaluations regularly in their work. We should support them more and condemn them less.

Yeah, right. And I might get a solid gold monkey for Christmas.

With bloggers and journalists failing to get anything near a straight answer out of The Evening Standard’s bang-to-rights sock-puppeteer Andrew Gilligan about his online activies, Tim Ireland took the matter to the doorstep of the Standard’s owner, Associated Newspapers.

He headed into London to launch a free newspaper of his own, The Ailing Standards.

Head over to Tim’s place for the full story, sizzling video action and your chance to download your own copy of the super soaraway Ailing Standards.

Following on from Richard Herring’s observation that the tabloid newspapers are some of the country’s biggest disseminators of ‘vile’, ’sick’ and ‘corrupting’ material and imagery, we have this (via Mike P) from the Daily Mail:

Fifteen council staff, including social workers, have been sacked or reprimanded after circulating a tasteless e-mail of reviled paedophile Gary Glitter carrying a child in a shopping bag.

And thanks to the Daily Mail, who reproduce a large copy of the image with the story on it’s website, tens of thousands of people – including children (will nobody think of the children?) – will now see the ‘tasteless’ image of ‘reviled paedophile Gary Glitter carrying a child in a shopping bag’.

Why were no Daily Mail reporters sacked or reprimanded after circulating the tasteless e-mail?

For those not in the know, a sockpuppet is…

…an online identity used for purposes of deception within an Internet community. In its earliest usage, a sockpuppet was a false identity through which a member of an Internet community speaks while pretending not to, like a puppeteer manipulating a hand puppet.

It’s a practice you see on the top blogs when their owners, unwilling or unable to defend their mistakes or arguments, appear in their own comment threads pretending to be other people. It’s a base cowardice really. Unfortunately, the example has now been set and the disease is starting to spread.

(more…)

Charlie Brooker on Sachsgate:

Richard Herring on the tabloids’ corruption of children:

I guess we’re always going to be stuck with self-righteousness, it just seems to me that the self-righteous do a lot more damage than the people they’re railing against. But I think the journalists are well aware of that. It’s a way for them to spread information that will prove offensive to people, without having to take any of the blame for the offence. Never mind if careers are being ruined or young minds are being polluted in the process. How does the print media manage to remain above criticism when they often do much more harm than the things they are criticising?

Have a nice weekend.