Words Dept.: category

I’ve just spotted Stephen Fry talking a load of arse, poo and widdle (bollocks, in other words) about the issue of MPs’ expenses on Newsnight (video clip here). According to Fry, MPs doing things like claiming £2,000 of public money to have the moats of their manor houses cleaned (Douglas Hogg), or £35,000 for a “second home” [...]

When Guardian Media Group’s MEN Media announced last month that it was cutting a load of jobs at the Manchester Evening News and closing several local newspaper offices, there was a feeling from the NUJ and some staff that one of the reasons for the severity of the cuts was to protect Channel M. As [...]

I keep reading that the new 50% income tax rate unveiled in the Budget on Wednesday is going to lead to a “brain drain” of which we should all be dreadfully afraid. Apparently, all the clever people who earn more than £150,000 a year are threatening to leave the country, with catastrophic consequences. The Telegraph [...]

Interesting to see the Sunday Express has focused specifically on “adult films” in its story today about Jacqui Smith’s abuse of her expense account. Amid a wealth of details about what the Home Secretary has spent public money on, late-night pay-per-view porn has presumably been flagged up for the headline on the basis that it [...]

Hopefully nobody noticed that until this morning I had a new post about the media’s coverage of Alfie Patten on this site. I really should have been aware that the reporting of new details of this case is forbidden thanks to a court ruling, something that was helpfully pointed out through the comments section. In my defence, the [...]

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 [...]

There’s a remarkable feature in today’s Observer. It’s a series of testimonials about the impact of Hillsborough, twenty years after the disaster. To spend time absorbing these unglossy, first-person statements from six people whose lives have been irrevocably altered by the events of 15 April 1989 is a desperately upsetting experience. Over the years there have been a number of public rent-a-gobs (the late Brian [...]

It’s come to something when a regional newspaper group thinks it makes business sense to close eight local offices and force what’s left of its depleted journalistic staff base to either work from home or commute miles into the city centre to get to their own newsroom. The idea of long-established local beat journalists fulfilling the basic requirements [...]

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: [...]

What is green custard? As far as I can see it’s a vaguely remembered school dinner treat, which, before today, rated about three mentions on the whole of the internet