Words Dept.: entry

Why is it that it takes a Daily Express journalist to go on the attack against survivors of Dunblane for everyone to suddenly realise what a complete piece-of-shit newspaper it is? And why is a bandwagon of outrage only gathering pace some ten days after the story was published?

Since the start of this week my Twitter stream (if you don’t “get” Twitter, I suppose you’ll find that phrase deeply annoying) has been filled with people expressing revulsion over the paper’s dismal journalism. It comes after one of its reporters befriended the teenage survivors of the 1996 Dublane atrocity on Facebook and then splashed with a poisonous article on March 8 2009 that claimed getting pissed and larking about was an affront to the memory of their friends who were murdered. In response, this link to a piece on Bloggerheads has been doing the rounds, while a blog post written by Father Ted and IT Crowd co-creator Graham Linehan has been widely circulated today.

I agree entirely that the Express piece is utterly objectionable and I’m not for one millisecond defending the nauseating outpouring of nonsensical bile it contains. But it’s not much worse than the wide range of biased, distasteful and inaccurate reporting published by the Express pretty much every day for the last ten years. The tabloid has a track record in causing offence, stirring up hatred and generally being nasty to asylum seekers, the parents of kidnapped children and indeed anyone who’s going through a hard time and might be unfortunate enough to end up on its front page. I guess what I’m asking is why not complain about that, too?

The explosion of post-event, blog-orchestrated indignation is beginning to resemble the Daily Mail-inspired furore over Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand. Something is broadcast (or published)… a web-based bandwagon begins to gather pace several days afterwards imploring people to complain… thousands of people who never noticed the original piece of content and thus were not offended by it in the first place do exactly that. Sounds familiar, no?

If we’re going to have a some kind of campaign of protest over the Dunblane story, perhaps we need to broaden it to include the Express as a whole. It is, as Roy Greenslade regularly points out, permanently offensive and almost wilfully awful – and has been for some time.

Meanwhile, more outrage seems to be brewing over OK! magazine’s tasteless “obituary” of Jade Goody, largely on the basis that she’s, well, still alive. And guess who owns OK!