Words Dept.: entry

Fear and loathing, moral pomposity, confused lines of argument, unfunny satire, tastelessness and hypocrisy have all been on show as never before in recent weeks as the nation’s newspaper columnists wring their last buck from terminally-ill cancer victim Jade Goody. Here’s a compendium of choice quotes on the subject from the media Twatosphere.

Allison Pearson: The Mail on Sunday columnist commanded that we should all “look away now” in a piece on January 21, which was illustrated with a disturbing image that, in Pearson’s words, caused Jade, a mother of two young children, to resemble “a human sacrifice”. Unfortunately for the entire world, the columnist didn’t follow her own advice. Returning to the subject of Jade on 18 February, Pearson filled a few hundred more words on the subject, hypocritically thanking Jade for reminding her to get a cervical smear and “fighting like a tigress”.

Choice quote:

With her head covered with bald patches, her eyes full of fear and her arms wrapped protectively around her naked shoulders, Jade Goody looks like a human sacrifice… At what point do the cameras look away out of common decency? After years of gawping at inmates of the Big Brother house as they bitch, flirt, fight and have sex, does the concept of common decency even exist any more?

Martin Samuel: Writing in the Daily Mail on 5 March, Samuel made an irrelevant and utterly confusing link between Jade and the miners’ strike of 25 years ago (no, really), using the tale of “Bob” – a union organiser who joined a picket line at News International, lost his job and died of a brain tumour. Samuel reasons that because Jade has merely appeared on television and has never gone on strike in support of miners or newspaper workers, this makes her death “different” from Bob’s. He even invokes the ghost of Princess Diana in a column that, even by the Mail’s standards, is bizarre, cruel, nonsensical and stupidly pointless.

Choice quote:

The miners’ strike began 25 years ago yesterday. Few called the miners brave back then, whether working underground or gathered in anger around a doomed pit. These days, we have different notions of bravery. A 27-year-old mother-of-two from reality television dying of cancer in public, while her new husband contemplates his latest assault conviction and her publicist provides sound-bite updates of the latest setback, is one definition. How strange to destroy the principles of working-class Britain, and replace them with morbid sideshows, tragic little turns imbued with false significance. Bravery is about choice, and cancer forbids that. Jade Goody will leave a legacy of awareness, for as long as her story dominates news bulletins, but there was no design. She did not become ill to teach the world to have a smear test, any more than Princess Diana died to make sure we belt up in the back.

Carole Malone: The former Mirror columnist takes the award for Jade-related hypocrisy. As the Guardian recently noted, Malone has previously been vicious in her criticism of Jade, having variously described Goody as fat, talentless and thick. She even predicted that Jade’s kid would turn out to be stupid and hoped he would be “good at sport” because he had no chance of getting to university. However, Malone swallowed her words in order to churn out a simpering tribute in the News of the World on 22 February. If the money’s good, why worry about consistency, eh Carole?

Choice quote:

The truth is, I’m in awe of Jade Goody. I have been since I was in the Big Brother house with her and saw that for all her faults, her unfettered anger, her lack of education, this was a kind girl, a loyal girl, a strong girl… I don’t know why this young woman has touched me, touched us all, so profoundly — but she has. For me, it’s because I recognise I’m a coward and I know I couldn’t have fought this illness the way she has — with laughter, tears, optimism and always, till now, with the unerring belief that she’d be OK.

Rod Liddle: The Twatosphere’s founding father used Jade as a platform for his unique brand of comedy-free satire last August. In a monumentally distasteful article for the Spectator just days after Goody had been diagnosed with aggressive cervical cancer, Liddle wrote that the “coarse, thick Bermonsdey chav” might have specified the need for a diagnosis of terminal illness as part of a contractual arrangement.

Choice quote:

I daresay we will be told very quickly indeed if it has not been caught early and there will be cut-out-and-keep diagrams of Jade’s cervix to help us all understand what is going on inside her. There may well be sidebar articles on the possible causes of cervical cancer and, in the rightwing tabloids, warnings about recreational sex to the nation’s young women — exposure to semen is suspected of causing pre-cancerous changes in the cervix and Ms Goody has had plenty of exposure to semen over the years, apparently.