Words Dept.: category

According to several newspapers yesterday, Kellogg’s is planning to use lasers to burn its logo on to individual corn flakes in an attempt to foil impostors. Metro, The Telegraph, The Daily Record and Marketing printed this as fact. Since journalists don’t seem to have realised that the story is made up by some PR people [...]

I feel like I’ve sat through both episodes of ITV1’s The Duchess on the Estate, an unimaginative piece of factual entertainment in which the Duchess of York spends some time on a housing estate in south Manchester and jabbers poshly for a couple of hours about “broken Britain”.
I haven’t, of course. But helpfully the BBC [...]

Look at this picture I captured from the news earlier. I’m surprised the BBC allowed Michael O’Leary, boss of “low-cost” airline Ryanair, on air in this get-up. The point is to publicise some new routes from Leeds to fifty miles outside a number of European cities. In the most shameless and embarrassing way possible.
I actually [...]

There’s something a tiny bit contemptuous about Asda’s response to the recent story that its £70 flat-pack bike is only slightly less dangerous than an un-earthed electric chair standing in a puddle downwind from Niagara Falls on a moderately blustery day.
Mark Brown, director of the Association of Cycle Traders, noticed that in the TV advert, [...]

The internet webosphere has been awash since Tuesday with the astonishing revelation that a 15-year-old boy and his friends don’t use Twitter. Since this apparently proves that teenagers don’t use Twitter, perhaps it’s time for a breakdown of who does use Twitter. (Yes, it’s another of those cantankerous lists that will offend almost everyone at [...]

I’ve got a question. How is it that people who are expressly employed to advise very senior politicians on “political” matters haven’t got the gumption to realise that by typing offensive words into an e-mail, there’s a risk that those words might be made public?
Damian McBride, a “special adviser” to the Prime Minister has been [...]

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 [...]

I’m not sure which is more irksome. Is it making an extraordinarily stupid video linking the proposed Greater Manchester congestion charge to a violent assault on a young woman, or is it sending out a mud-slinging press release that acknowledges the video has been withdrawn but still seeks to make political capital out of the sorry affair?
Well, here’s the [...]

It’s a month to go until the result of the referendum on the Transport Innovation Fund and peak-time congestion charging in Greater Manchester – and the debate is moderately warm!
Stockport council, led by Liberal Democrat Dave Goddard, is opposed to the TIF bid and has been a target of particular attention from the Yes campaign. [...]

One of the most enlightening pieces of journalism re the Russell Brand/Jonathan Toss incident was when the BBC’s David Sillito solicited the views of people queuing to watch the filming of the Alan Titchmarsh Show and compared them with the views of people queuing to watch Never Mind the Buzzcocks. The former group (old people) [...]