Words Dept.

I don’t really like Kelvin MacKenzie. He’s a loudmouthed, right-wing, rabble-rousing reactionary. He’s also someone who seems unwilling to recognise the universally accepted truth about the cause of the Hillsborough disaster which, as a Liverpool fan – and even simply as a football fan – I find both bizarre and abhorent. But regardless of all [...]

Since saying sorry has become really rather fashionable in the last week or so, perhaps it would be appropriate for the Sun to apologise to its readers for its misleading coverage of the story of 13-year-old Alfie Patten. Following a court ruling, it can now be reported that Alfie never fathered a child, despite specific claims to [...]

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 [...]

The first thing I thought when I heard about Alfie Patten, the “baby-faced” 13-year-old who has supposedly fathered a child, was: Where’s the evidence that he’s really the dad? Surely it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that someone might be seeking to make a financial gain by pretending the boy is the father and [...]

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) [...]

I notice Nike is encouraging people to “sponsor” one of the 22,850 steps they have worked out Paula Radcliffe will need to complete in order to finish the Olympic marathon, promoted via a text message-backed campaign in halfwit’s comic the Sun this week. The reason I notice this is because my dad has put his [...]

Now I wasn’t there and so I probably have no right to comment on the subject. But isn’t the purpose of a blog to prattle amateurishly about subjects one has no right to prattle amateurishly about? Well, exactly. To this end, I feel I must take issue with renowned man of letters Gordon Smart and [...]

Sunday Mirror columnist Carole Malone talking about Shannon Matthews, on the One Show tonight: The media reflects the public mood, and the public just haven’t taken to Shannon’s family as they did to Kate and Gerry McCann. Yes, it’s the fault of the public – the scum who read newspapers rather than the nice people [...]

The Sun reports today that “Junkie Pete Doherty has been banned from a PRISON gig – because he is a bad influence”. It’s an “EXCLUSIVE by Danielle Lawler”. Or, at least, it’s an EXCLUSIVE in the sense that the same story was in the Independent’s arts section last week. It was also here, and here [...]

Is it fair to say that coverage of the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the South East has been overblown as a result of the so-called “silly season”? According to Peter Wilby in the Guardian yesterday, the excitable tone of coverage, especially in the Daily Mail – which, a fortnight ago described a [...]