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Posted by Jamie Sport
November 2nd, 2009
In my last post I looked at the effect controversial comments under articles on MailOnline might have on the brands advertised next to them. A number of advertisers had expressed concerns that unmoderated comments on the newspaper’s website might lead to issues with ads appearing alongside offensive comments. O2’s head of online marketing commented:
There’s always the risk with user content that our brand advertising may appear next to a comment we may not agree with or like. In the Mail Online example, we would want to understand the controls the media owner is giving to users of the forum so inappropriate content can be reported. If we’re satisfied with the processes then it’s likely we would consider advertising.
Currently the majority of comment sections on MailOnline remain at least partially moderated, yet, somehow, inappropriate content still seems to be slipping through. But have things improved since the last time we looked at the issue, when a torrent of xenophobic messages were left underneath a story about Asda stocking Asian inspired clothing? To find out, let’s look at today’s article about a man who died of asphyxiation after being trapped in a cramped and airless HGV compartment (thanks to Five Chinese Crackers for highlighting this).
Bear in mind that all comments appearing under this story have been pre-moderated (i.e., checked in advance by a MailOnline employee to ensure nothing ‘defamatory, malicious, threatening, false, misleading, offensive, abusive, discriminatory, harassing, blasphemous or racist‘ gets through) . The article was published at some point before 6.30 PM, at which time these 13 comments were publicly visible. At the time of writing (11.30 PM), the following comments were the highest rated:
If these are the highest rated, and thus most visible, comments, how does that reflect upon the “controls” and “processes” used by MailOnline to prevent “inappropriate content” appearing? Other comments not shown above include:
GOOD RIDDANCE……
I down, How many millions to go????
and
1 down and quite a few to go yet.
and
One less for us to worry about,
Is there a theme emerging? Yes, I think there is. This one sums it up:
One less to support for life.
while this one is more concerned about the cost of disposing of the fellow human being’s body
No doubt this country will be liable for disposing of his corpse.Dead and still costing us cash!
Even death is not enough to placate this pleasant chap’s distaste for asylum seekers.
Now seems like a good time to remind ourselves again that all of these comments ‘have been moderated in advance‘. Someone at Northcliffe House looked at the above comments and decided, ‘Yes, these are fine. Not just dismissing, or ignoring, or joking about, but celebrating the death of another human being is just fine with us. There is no conceivable way our readers and advertisers would find these comments defamatory, malicious, threatening, false, misleading, offensive, abusive, discriminatory, harassing, blasphemous or racist. They are perfectly suitable for publication.’
This also seems like an appropriate point to remember what the MD of planning and buying agency Diffiniti said before:
Advertisers need to be sure they’re in a suitable environment.
Currently, M&S, Channel 4, uSwitch, Zanussi, Kingsmill, Kaleidoscope, Barclays, Anglian Home Improvements, Axa PPP, American Express, Aviva, Job Centre Plus, Weight Watchers, O2, BMW, DFS, Virgin Media, Radisson Blu, Oral B, Kodak, Sainsburys, and RAC, all have display advertisments served to the page on which the above comments are hosted. Their brands appear alongside not just one comment reacting with glee to the death of an asylum seeker, but thirteen. In over five hours not a single comment has been published pointing out the tragedy of the case. The closest we get to sympathy is ‘Shame but I would be a hypocrit [sic] if I said I was sorry!’.
It seems unlikely, however, that not a single reader has not expressed any shred of humanity in reaction to the story. Not all Mail readers are cold-blooded bigots. Some would surely have left comments expressing horror at the miserable circumstances of the man’s death, sorrow for his passing, and shock at fellow commenters heartless remarks. So where are these comments? If thirteen frankly contemptable responses are waved through unedited, I cannot understand where the rest might have gone and how MailOnline can operate such lax controls on its own website. It almost seems as if, not only is “inappropriate content” appearing quite freely, but appropriate content is being suppressed. Whether this is because of technical or editorial reasons is unclear.
I am left wondering how many of the companies listed above, if they were aware of the lack of control MailOnline appears to have over its own readers, would be comfortable with their brand appearing alongside commenters celebrating the death of a man from asphyxiation? Would anyone regard that as a “suitable environment”?
Categories: Immigration, Media |
33 Comments
Posted by Merk
October 19th, 2009
The following post was orignially posted at Deeplyflawedbuttrying’s Blog and reproduced here with kind permission.
Jan Moir? Is this article really that bad?
So I read the article by Jan Moir, about the death of Stephen Gately. The thing I dont understand, is the absolute shock it appears to have caused.
Daily Mail publishes hateful, homophobic shit, callously exploiting the death of one person, to strengthen its hate towards a section of the public it despises? Its a bit like the Kate Moss ‘Supermodel does cocaine shocker’. Do the people who are shocked not read the Daily Mail?
When Rachel Ward died, Amanda Platell published one her hateful pieces. She outright stated that complete responsibility for the girls death, was with Ms.Wards friends. Before Miss Ward was buried, she outright accused Haydn Johnson, a friend of Miss Wards, of causing her death by ignoring an answering machine message(that apparently only existed in Ms.Platell’s head), pleaing for help. The only mitigation for Mr.Johnson, in her article, was the insinuation that Ms’Ward had caused her own death by engaging in immoral behaviour(well she had been drinking!). She attempted to be sympathetic to the girls grieving parents, by telling them not only was she empathetic to the plight of losing their daughter, but to their plight of losing their daughter after she dissapointed their middle class, moral upbringing, by abandoning any moral framework they had instilled, by becoming everything that was wrong with modern women. Which she helpfully illustrated with pictures of Ms.Ward, having fun, while she was alive. The story was removed from the site, after the father of her grieving friend, made a complaint to the PCC. Which did not result in apology from the Mail, but did result in removal of said article.
A Daily Mail columnist is salivating over someones death, willing to lie about them, to illustrate the breakdown of society -done before. Must be something else causing the shock? The homophobia in the article?
I instruct you to go to the Daily Mail website, read as they fight the corner of everyone who has ever been chastised for trying to mainating a status quo, where gay means ‘unnatural’. Go read Melanie Phillips tell you that gay rights, undermines marriage as an institution. Or Amanda Platell dismiss anyone who objects to not being able to pursue their life, without their sexuality used as a reason to exclude them from society, as a ‘gay zealot’. Read as they champion the people who refuse to bow down to hard won legislation, to prevent sexuality automatically meaning a presumption of immorality.
Maybe people rarely notice venom that isnt spouted at them? Are there any other groups who the Daily Mail hates? Lets look outside Jan Moirs current article- we have this recent wet dream of a Daily Mail headline. Narcissistic I may be, and therefore sensitive to the Daily Mails take on single parents. But seriously, there is no shortage of material.
Although, I was one of the Mails target ‘most wanted’ before my marriage ended, as a working mother. Helpfully told by ‘Femail’ that me choosing to work, was going to damage my child, and was ultimately responsible for the fracturing of our society into immoral little pieces. Oh wait, even before motherhood- the Mail didnt much like me. Type Rape, into the search engine of the Daily Mail, and read how they have interpreted the painfully inadequate framework of rape legislation, which has produced a 5% successful prosecution rate for rape. Lists of vitriolic stories, of girls who ‘cry rape’, and the heartbreaking consequences of women reporting such a piffling little thing.
Thank fuck am not black. The biggest bane of the Daily Mails existence is the fact that the BNP are so despised that they cant come outright and say they support them. Instead they have to treat ‘foul’ as a contested term, by placing it in inverted commas, while juxtaposing it against the revelation that the BNP have opened their membership to ‘non white members’.
With editorial about how the indigenous british people(read white, for indigenous) are constantly under threat, not just from the constant threat of immigration, but by being persecuted and not represented by british institutions. The very presence of people in the world who may have a different religion is alarming. The only time the Daily Mail champions the right of any woman, is to show how terrible those muslim types are- look at how they treat women who have children? Further evidence of this threat is shown, when we see how unfairly people who only want the right to be racist, are being treated.
So who is safe from the Daily Fail? Children? Well, children are safe if they are nice middle class children. But even then the Daily Mail isnt above causing them pain, and humiliation, in the course of a good story, as long as they can attack one of their other despised groups of people, in the process. Here is the transcript of an article the paper had to take down, where they stood a page size picture of a named eleven year old girl, alongside a feature about how her mother didnt love her. The feature was designed to illicit public reaction against her ‘unnatural mother’- the fact that an 11 year old girl was deeply humiliated, surely ok, because the end justifies the means? Feral children anyone, or maybe you just want to starve and hiss at the mothers? The Fail doesnt mind condemning children, if they are outside the nice white, heterosexual, christian, middle class dystopia they would like us to believe once existed, and will again.
Cries of ‘complain to the PCC’ have abounded, since the publication of Moirs article. Again, while admirable, am not entirely sure what people believe this will do. Have been complaining to the PCC for years about the homophobic, racist, hate mongering shit, this vile rag publishes- and it achieves nothing.
This may be the cry of a jaded left wing ranter, with an over developed sense of justice, and handwringing tendencies. But it is true, complaining to the PCC achieves nothing. The media is powerful, we know that the the editorial content of your average newspaper, affects more than the people involved in the article.-But unless its exceptional circumstances, your complaint about an article, not directly about you, will be binned. THe Chair of the PCC is Paul Dacre, for gods sake. Paul Dacre being the editor of er…The Daily Mail.
I would like to end this post, with a sense of ‘we must do something about this’- I certainly would prefer my journalists held accountable for constistently spreading vile homophobic, racist, mysogynistic shit- but there are few avenues to go down. We could do as this facebook group suggests and go straight to the advertising revenue that allows this shitrag to be published. Indeed, Marks and Spencer have withdrawn advertising on the grounds of the Moir article. But seriously, take action yourself. Stop buying this shit. Dont accept the flawed, bigoted premises, that underpin their editorial.
And for fucks sake, stop kidding yourself that this Jan Moir article is some kind of abhorration, in an otherwise lovely newspaper. Yes, the Jan Moir article really was that bad. In the context of the normal editorial line of the Daily Mail, it really wasnt that unusual.
Categories: Guest Blog, Media, Sex & Sexuality |
28 Comments
Posted by Esqui
October 14th, 2009
By now, we are all used to the Mail’s celebrity obsessions. From Angelina Jolie to Natalie Cassidy, the paper never seems short of bitchy non-stories to print about them, simply in order to comment on the large, or short, size of their bodies, type of clothing and who they’re with. But there’s one person who is constantly featured in stories that is quite worrying: Suri Cruise.
Now it’s quite likely, if you don’t read the Mail, that you’ll have no idea who that is – though you may recognise the surname. Suri Cruise is the three-year-old daughter of actors Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. She’s famous for….being the three-year-old daughter of actors Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. And yet the Daily Mail sees fit to print pictures of her going about her everyday life on a regular basis.
A quick check on the Mail’s website would reveal 8 stories in the last 3 weeks alone (2 on the 12th October !), featuring such newsworthy stories as Suri playing hide and seek and a downright disturbing article inviting the reader to scrutinise the child’s ‘kitten heels’. In fact, using the Mail’s own “Explore Suri Cruise” (the irony of the page name is not lost on me) reveals that in her three years, Suri has been referred to in no fewer than 81 stories.
But surely it’s all innocent fun, right? After all, she’s only a kid – isn’t the Mail simply reporting on the frivolities of the daughter of two famous actors as she tries to go about a life within the shadow of her parents’ fame? Sometimes, this is true. A number of the stories are along the lines of “Doesn’t she look like her mother?”, such as here in what is, by the Mail’s standards, a rather reserved story about the girl. But those stories are generally outnumbered by the ones that focus on what Suri is wearing, complete with an unnecessary amount of pictures, some of which are in dubious taste. For example, you can almost hear the photographer calling out to a young woman just out of her teens: “Show us a bit of inside leg!” “Now let’s see you with something all over your face”. But Suri Cruise is not that. She’s not even of schooling age yet.
This highlights another area of Mail hypocrisy. Whilst the paper, in one breath, makes a story about this particular three-year-old wearing high heels and designer dresses – note the suggestive comment: “How soon will it be before she gets her first boyfriend?” – in the other breath, they are berating Heelarious high heels for young children for turning infants into sex objects. The fact is, they are in danger of turning Suri Cruise into exactly that. One can only assume that the intensity of the articles will increase as she gets older and closer to adulthood, when the stories will lose a little more reserve. Take a look at this story about Emma Watson published when she was just 17, or this article about Mick Jagger’s daughter, Gerorgia – again, 17.
And then there are sometimes stories which are inexcusable. Take a look at this. Is it really necessary to publish a story about a three year old girl bursting in to tears because she’s bored? To me, making ‘news’ out of pictures of a child in distress is far beyond what the Mail should be publishing.
But how much blame lies with the Mail itself? After all, do parents not have to give permission to have pictures of their children published? The Mail itself decries such a rule, presumably for this very reason. So, surely it would seem that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes would have to agree to the publication? Maybe so, but let’s not forget that the Mail is not taking these pictures, but merely buying them from an agency. In most cases, this is BigPicturesPhoto, a company that specialises in paparazzi photos. So while Cruise and Holmes may agree to allow them to use a certain set of photos about Suri, they’ve got no way of knowing what stories will pop up surrounding them. But it would seem that they don’t mind at all. Tom Cruise was quoted as saying, to the Australian Grazia magazine:
“’I have to say some of those paparazzi shots of my daughter are incredible. As a parent you protect your children but Suri is a very open and warm child and she will just wave to people on the street. She is such happy, fun girl. It is certainly different these days with the media, but people have been very good to us and do give us space so I am not going to be difficult”
Maybe it’s because I’m not used to a level of fame like Tom Cruise, but the level of material published about his child doesn’t strike me as the media being good to them and giving them space.
I suppose we should pay heed to the PCC code of conduct, which has guidelines on involving children in published material. Clause 6 (excluding paragraphs which refer exclusively to school pupils) states:
ii) A child under 16 must not be interviewed or photographed on issues involving their own or another child’s welfare unless a custodial parent or similarly responsible adult consents.
iv) Minors must not be paid for material involving children’s welfare, nor parents or guardians for material about their children or wards, unless it is clearly in the child’s interest.
v) Editors must not use the fame, notoriety or position of a parent or guardian as sole justification for publishing details of a child’s private life.
And under the section on privacy:
i) Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life, home, health and correspondence, including digital communications. Editors will be expected to justify intrusions into any individual’s private life without consent.
ii) It is unacceptable to photograph individuals in a private place without their consent.
Taking these as they’re written (and the commission, being mostly made up of those involved in the printed media would do exactly that), the Mail is technically doing nothing wrong. Clearly, they’ve managed to wedge themselves in a place where what they are doing is morally on rocky ground, but legally and under the PCC code of conduct, absolutely fine.
It seems even the readers are getting wise to it. Looking at the comments on the story about Suri bursting into tears, we have:
“maybe shes sick & tired of having her photograph taken for newspapers everyday !!!!!
- zoe, uk, 3/10/2009 14:43”
“This is getting weird, why is this family in the news virtually every day? Leave this little girl alone to have a childhood!
- Jenny, Dorset, 3/10/2009 13:00”
And even:
“PLEASE TAKE YOUR CAMERAS OUT OF HER FACE AND LEAVE THIS CHILD BE.
WHY ARE YOU STALKING HER?
- mark, Manchester, 3/10/2009 13:50”
But while the Mail publishes stories like this, they will get comments like this:
“If you don’t like Suri or don’t want to read about her, just don’t open this page and don’t comment on it, it’s just simple! no one force you to read. I want to see her picture because she’s the cute one delight me, nothing to do with her parents, and my friends like her too…that’s why i read about her all the time.
- wantMOREofSuri, Melbourne, 14/10/2009 15:17”
A spoof? Maybe. But is that likely to stop the Mail’s continuing search for ever-more-creepy stories about Suri Cruise? She may be the offspring of famous people, but she is still a three-year-old child having pictures of herself being printed almost daily, many of which invite readers to scrutinise her clothing and appearance. If this is the case, you have to fear for the kid’s future.
Categories: Media, News |
12 Comments
Posted by Jamie Sport
September 14th, 2009
Last month, the Mail created a minor stir in the media industry by announcing that it would soon be introducing unmoderated comments under articles published on MailOnline. Most newspaper websites employ comment moderation in some form or another, checking comments before or after publication to weed out defamatory or libellous scribblings from armchair sages to protect both their own and their advertisers’ brand identities. Discriminatory, offensive, and inaccurate comments reflect badly on the content provider, regardless of whether or not the provider actually wrote them themself.
The announcement caused a bit of a fuss. Mark Trustum, director of e-commerce for Specsavers which advertises on MailOnline, said the firm would not continue to pay for advertising next to unmoderated, contraversial or offensive comments:
Unmoderated user content falls into this category and is a grey area for advertisers. It’s vitally important for us to protect our brand reputation and, therefore, as soon as we were made aware of any such content being present alongside our advertising we would immediately ask for our ad to be withdrawn.
Ben Wood, Managing Director of digital planning and buying agency (the guys who actually spend the money and buy advertising space for companies) Diffiniti agreed, saying he wouldn’t buy space for clients alongisde unmoderated comments. He explained succinctly:
Advertisers need to be sure they’re in a suitable environment.
A chorus of other media and advertising types (the people the Mail really cares about) echoed this sentiment; ad placement is a major issue in protecting brand identity. In May, Tesco and Vodafone pulled advertising from Facebook after ads were served on Holocaust denial and BNP group pages. More recently, advertisers deserted Glenn Beck’s rabid paranoid Fox News screamshow after he claimed Obama was ‘racist’. Why would any brand pay to associate itself with racism, xenophobia, and intolerance?
Why would, say, Marks & Spencer wish to advertise its Autograph Cotton Blend Trench Coat on a page that contains comments like ‘The islamic colonization of our country shows no sign of slowing down, infact [sic] it’s gathering pace as the tipping point approaches‘? Would uSwitch or Cotton Traders be happy to promote their services alongside bigoted rants such as this:
So, no patriotism allowed, no free-speech allowed, don’t mention the BNP, don’t complain about green-belt building to accommodate the influx, don’t dare say you’re a Christian, don’t complain that your local church is now a mosque, don’t be alarmed if your local town now looks like Islamabad. For Gawd’s sake, is there no end to the destruction of Englishness? When I shop in an English shop, I want to see English things ?
Unless their target market consists solely of angry xenopbobic white people, I doubt they’d be too pleased to see their brand on the same page as such bizarre outpourings of racially motivated bile.
Aside from advertising, another distinct part of the marketing mix is public relations. PR companies often send press releases to newspapers and magazines announcing new products or services in the hope of some free publicity. For example, Asda have just launched a new Asian inspired clothes range in selected stores, and you can see the resulting PR trail here. It’s not a hugely interesting story, so most newspapers have limited their articles to a few lines, rewritten from the original press release. Here’s the Guardian’s piece and here is the BBC’s version. You can tell when an article is based on a press release because all of the quotes are the same, from the same people, and it mentions specific products like the ’sequinned embellished Salwaar Kameez (or traditional suit) along with pricing. Press releases are what’s known in industry circles as dull.
Things are a little different when it comes to the Mail, however. The article itself is nearly identical to all of the others, but the major difference is found in the comments. While most other versions of this press release found on other news sites either haven’t received any user comments or don’t even have a comment section available (because it’s a boring press release, what’s to say?), the Mail has notched up 120 comments at the time of writing – two of which I’ve already mentioned above.
120 comments on an article about some new trousers and a couple of dresses.
Now, bearing in mind that Asda’s own PR company have issued this press release to newspapers to generate a bit of interest and publicity around their new clothing range, and also remembering that comments on this particular article’s are premoderated, do you think Asda would be happy to promote their brand alongside comments such as:
Roll up roll up. !! Get your Prayer mats and korans here. Britainistan 2009.
why? there are enough asian clothes shops in the asian no go ghettos
Would a supermarket chain in Pakistan start stocking levi’s and wonderbras if it was the other way around? I wonder whether in a few years’ time we’ll be seeing people putting burkas in their shopping trolleys?
Why? When our local Asda often cannot supply organic milk and free-range chicken for their regular customers!
Notice especially ‘Britainistan’, apparently a witty reinterpretation of Mail columnist Melanie Phillips’ own creation ‘Londonistan’, the association of ‘asians’ and ‘ghettos’, that symbol of tyrannical Islamic oppression the burkha, and the lament for ‘regular customers’, which presumably excludes anyone from Asia and the Indian sub-continent. More, you say? Ok:
I have no objection to ethnic fashion, except on those streets of some of our major cities that have gone completely to the other extreme, stocking little with any appeal to the indigenous population. Wiltshire Resident [another, pro-Asda commenter]should try Bradford if she loves Asian Fashion. She may even feel completely at home there, apart from the fact that large parts look and feel like a foreign country.
Excellent use of the ‘If you love it so much, why don’t you go live there’ argument, alongside a swipe at multiculturalism, and (bingo!) inclusion of BNP buzzword ‘indigenous’. Ok, ok, one more:
Sorry, but isn’t ASDA aware of the existing social problem of Asians failing to integrate ? I believe that this is an ill conceived idea, as our Asian residents should be adopting western clothing as the norm whilst living in the UK.
Ah, the imaginary bugbear of any self-respecting racist, social integration. Because Asians are clearly a problem group when it comes to integrating into British culture as, say, Freddie Mercury (born Farrokh Bulsara), Konnie Huq, Dev Patel, Amir Khan, Melanie Sykes, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Meera Syal, Hardeep Singh Kohli, Cliff Richard (really!), James Caan (previously Khan), Sanjeev Bhaskar, Monty Panesar, Parminder Nagra, Nasser Hussein, Shobna Gulati, and several million more could testify (apologies to those I may have missed). Bonus points given for calling for ultra authoritarian legislation on foreign residents’ clothing – Asian residents should be forced to wear ‘Western clothing’, whatever that might be precisely. Jeans, probably. Very British.
To their (perhaps dubious) credit, the Mail did simply rehash Asda’s press release just like all the other newspapers, without adding any of their own editorial bias. But to vet, approve and publish comments such as the above is irresponsible at best, and must surely worry companies such as Asda, M&S, and uSwitch, whose brands appear next to poorly informed readers’ bile. Asda, especially, must be worried that a perfectly innocuous press release could be so utterly twisted by commenters, not only to be used as an excuse to express vile, reactionary comments about indigenous this and integration that, but also a reason for a number of commenters to announce an immediate boycott of the store altogether.
Bloggers are all too aware of the onorous responsibility they bear not just for their own posts, but for the comments that appear beneath them. Anyone who writes on the web must accept that, thanks to British libel laws, what’s written by others but hosted by you is your responsibility. If some anonymous commenter libels somebody else, and the target is of a litigious nature, they won’t go after the commenter, they’ll probably sue you.
Most newspapers are aware of this too, and take care to add clauses such as ‘The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline.‘ The Mail also have two whole pages of House Rules and Terms & Conditions, forbidding ‘defamatory, malicious, threatening, false, misleading, offensive, abusive, discriminatory, harassing, blasphemous or racist‘ comments. Presumably, then, the comments quoted previously are none of the above, and are perfectly acceptable. But, while they may not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline, I can’t help but wonder whether or not advertisers feel that they create a ’suitable environment’ for brand building.
Categories: Immigration, Media |
49 Comments
Posted by Tim Ireland
September 10th, 2009
Hi, folks! I’m quietly readying myself for a return to the blogosphere, but I just got this wind of this via an anonymous tip, and it seemed to be an ideal warm-up exercise:
Do you remember Julie Moult? You should; it was her idiocy that finally got me fired up enough to get our little group of Daily Mail watchers together here at Daily Mail Watch.
Here’s Our Julie’s latest scoop, and it’s whopper.
Demi snubs Sarah the Twitter fan and ignores her message
By Julie Moult
Her contacts book may be bursting at the seams, but it appears not everybody wants to get to know Sarah Brown. The Prime Minister’s wife has successfully wooed U.S. socialite Paris Hilton, supermodel Naomi Campbell and America’s First Lady Michelle Obama. However, Demi Moore seems rather less interested. In fact, the Hollywood actress has just delivered the internet equivalent of the cold shoulder…
Miss Moore and her husband Anton Kutcher were among the first celebrities to help make Twittering an international craze. So who better to help Mrs Brown publicise a book documenting the plight of women in the developing world? On Tuesday afternoon a series of Tweets popped up on Miss Moore’s page from Mrs Brown’s Twitter account telling the actress to ‘Spread the word (in the U.S.A)!’ that ‘Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristoff & Sheryl WuDunn comes out 2day’. The response from Miss Moore? Very little, apart from a nonplussed silence. In terms of Twitter etiquette, it’s rather like being ignored at a social function.
(read full article)
This absurd and pointless pop at the PM’s wife would have earned a place on Daily Mail Watch regardless of what I’m about to reveal, as Demi Moore (mrskutcher) has just under TWO MILLION followers on Twitter, and it absurd to suggest that any failure to respond to any tweet sent her way is a ’snub’, as anyone with over a few hundred followers (*cough*) will readily tell you.
But it gets better… hold onto your sides:
Sarah Brown (SarahBrown10) did not tweet an RT (re-tweet) appeal at Demi Moore; quite the opposite, in fact.
It all started when Demi Moore posted the original message:
Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristoff & Sheryl WuDunn comes out 2day- http://bit.ly/AaNkX Amazing & inspiring book !
(mrskutcher: 11:25 AM Sep 8th from TweetDeck )
About half an hour later, Demi Moore then RTed this response after being alerted to the idea that she should include some sort of RT appeal in her message:
Spread the word! RT @GTproductions: Just bot it! RT Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristoff & Sheryl WuDunn comes out 2day- http://bit.ly/AaNkX
(mrskutcher: 11:40 AM Sep 8th from TweetDeck )
Then Sarah Brown kindly responded to that appeal, with this, which is clearly an RT of Demi Moore’s second tweet on the subject:
RT @mrskutcher Spread the word (in the USA)! RT @GTproductions: RT Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristoff & Sheryl WuDunn comes out 2day-
(SarahBrown10: 1:51 PM Sep 8th from web)
She has added “in the USA!”, but this is in brackets (standard etiquette for comments in RTs) and either way the message begins with a dirty great ‘RT’ followed Demi Moore’s account name. Even if Julie Moult had only seen this single tweet by Sarah Brown, if she knew anything about Twitter she should have immediately recognised it as an RT by Sarah Brown in response to an appeal from Demi Moore.
But no.
Further, while she actually managed/bothered to conduct enough research to scan Demi Moore’s Twitter page for any ‘response’ to Sarah Brown’s ‘appeal’, she failed to recognise that what she was looking at was the original tweet and appeal:
On Tuesday afternoon a series of Tweets popped up on Miss Moore’s page from Mrs Brown’s Twitter account telling the actress to ‘Spread the word (in the U.S.A)!’ that ‘Half The Sky by Nicholas Kristoff & Sheryl WuDunn comes out 2day’.
You could tweet a million messages at Demi Moore, but nothing would not turn up on her Twitter page unless she tweeted it herself. There’s also the minor matter of Sarah Brown’s tweet being published some three hours after Demi Moore’s, but a certain someone had difficulty wrapping her brain around that, too. And yet here she is writing as if she’s some sort of authority on Twitter, while portraying Sarah Brown as an outcast and wannabe.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call an Epic Iain Dale.
To paraphrase Our Julie, in terms of Twitter etiquette, it’s rather like grabbing the wrong end of the foot and sticking it in your mouth. Or something like that.
Julie Moult is an idiot. Fact.
If the Daily Mail are going to continue to employ her, they should probably go back to checking her work.
-
Postscript: The only ‘Julie Moult’ on Twitter is jem1973, who currently has 6 followers and only follows this feed from a rival newspaper. (Not that I’m judging anyone… over anything but their idiocy.)
Categories: Media |
8 Comments
Posted by Jamie Sport
September 2nd, 2009
Remember James Slack’s misogynistic travesty of an excuse for a newspaper article last month, bewailing Harriet Harman’s plan to integrate ‘lessons about wife-beating‘ into the National Curriculum?
Remember how the term ‘wife-beating’ was put in quotation marks throughout the article to cast doubt on whether or not it really exists? And how The Mail managed to get through only three sentences before introducing some extremely biased critics to slam the relationship lessons as madcap feminism, pcgonemad and a waste of school resources?
Remember how they pointed out that men are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime and that women are ‘becoming increasingly aggressive’, next to one photograph of a chap playfully slapping his wife about with the caption ‘Feminist agenda’, and another of a feckless looking teenage girl SMOKING A CIGARETTE with the caption ‘Perpetrators’?
You may recall it all too vomitously, but The Mail appears to be suffering from amnesia. In a single month, they’ve left behind the medieval views on relationships that made them the target of such scorn a few weeks ago, and have finally caught up with the 21st Century. They’ve had a change of heart, and now agree that violence and sexual harassment of women and girls is indeed ‘disturbing’. Here’s the opener:
A third of teenage girls have been sexually abused by their boyfriends, disturbing new research has revealed.
In the most hypocritical about-turn since the Prada slipper-wearing Pope said Christmas had become too materialistic, they add:
The findings have led to calls for schools to help girls trapped in abusive relationships – and to tell them that violence and pressure to have sex is wrong.
Why…that almost sounds like…Harriet Harman’s relationship lessons! But I thought they were dreadful, man marginalising, militant feminist indoctrination?
It continues:
More than 1,300 youngsters across the country were interviewed for the research, which was carried out by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the University of Bristol.
One in four had suffered physical violence including being slapped, punched or beaten by their boyfriends.
One in four? Hang on, isn’t that the same 25% of women that James Slack so casually dismissed as inconsequential compared with the 75% of male victims of violent crime in the Mail’s seemingly now forgotten previous article. Then, of course, Slack failed to mention that the vast majority of those men who make up that 75% of victims had been assaulted by other men, while the majority of female victims of violence had not been assaulted by other women, but by men as well. He seemed desperate to convince us that, even if help were needed, which it wasn’t, it’s men who need it, not women. Now the Mail’s painting a picture of millions of young women living in fear of abusive boyfriends. Educating children about sexual aggression and violent relationships was agenda-driven politically correct nonsense 30 days ago, but is now something in urgent need of implementation.
Bizarrely, the two articles are based around very similar findings and discuss exactly the same thing (school lessons on domestic abuse), yet the angle has completely reversed. Nothing has changed except the editorial stance: in both instances, someone has said that domestic abuse is a problem and that the key to reducing it is education.
Quite right, too, and the Mail should be applauded for apparently waking up to the ghastly problem of domestic violence. But how can such sudden change of heart be reconciled with their past form? Was last month’s disgusting tirade against women and the dismissal of sexual abuse motivated simply by the fact that the issue had been raised by a female Labour MP and therefore had to be derided at all costs, but now the politically neutral NSPCC have said the same thing it’s acceptable to agree?
Devoid of a left-wing champion, the Mail can now fit news of sexual harassment and teenage violence into their interminable broken Britain narrative. Without Harriet Harman forcing Dacre and co. to blindly disagree with claims that women suffer as a result of male violence, they can frame the topic as yet another example of the licentiousness of the nation’s youth, which is, in Mail land, a result of the Government’s liberal approach to (ironically) sex education, erosion of moral standards, and Labour’s hatred of marriage and the family. The absence of the very same school lessons they campaigned against in August becomes evidence in September of the unwillingness of the state to nurture and protect its children.
While it may sometimes appear that the Mail has a set of rigidly defined conservative values, in reality it will abandon its principles as soon as a more convenient angle comes along – just so long as it can portray an image of Britain broken beyond repair, governed by idiots, populated by cretins.
Categories: Sex & Sexuality, feminism |
Tags: domestic abuse, harriet harman, NSPCC, sex education | 15 Comments
Posted by 5cc
August 31st, 2009
Usually, at this time of year, the Mail is busy writing up stories on the back of newly released immigration figures. Last year, we were treated to stories about how many white people were leaving the country, the year before we had big spreads about the number of UK citizens leaving while immigration figures were up. This year, though, the immigration figures were largely positive from a Mail point of view. More foreigners leaving, fewer arriving, fewer UK citizens emigrating and so on. The paper had to focus on the number of children born to mothers who were from overseas to frighten us with instead.
So today’s ‘One out of every five killers is an immigrant‘ looks a little out of place. That may be because it takes three weeks to get a reply from the police to an FOI request and the hack who wrote it was anticipating rather different immigration figures to be published when he made the request.
Whatever the reason for the story, it’s an example of a very common and very misleading tactic that the Mail (along with the Express) engages in when it wants to make us frightened of foreign criminals. You can see the same tactic used in ‘One in six rapes committed by foreign attackers, shock police figures reveal‘ from April this year (although that story was churned directly from the Daily Express) and ‘Foreigners carry out one in every five killings in Britain, police figures reveal‘ from April 2008. You’ll notice that the last article there reveals that the ‘one in five’ figure isn’t actually news, since it was reported over a year ago.
Here’s how the tactic works.
First, the paper contacts every police force in England & Wales and asks for stats showing how many of one crime or another has been committed by foreigners. Then the paper then calculates how this translates into percentages across the UK.
Here’s why the tactic is misleading.
1. Police forces don’t have completely reliable figures for how many foreigners commit crime. All they have is a box for ‘nationality’ on arrest forms, which are voluntary and never checked.
2. Not every police force responds, but the Metropolitan Police always does. The Metropolitan Police arrests more people – and more people who enter something other than British into the ‘nationality’ box on their arrest form than any other force. The current Mail article talks about there being 371 individuals accused of murder or manslaughter last year, with 233 of them being in the Metropolitan Police area. This will completely skew the numbers for the rest of the country, even if they’re proportionate for the London area.
3. The paper does not compare the number of arrests of people who enter something other than British into the ‘nationality’ box on their arrest from in the responses they get to the number of people born overseas in the areas they have replies from. Instead, they compare it with the whole country.
To illustrate this with an extreme hypothetical example – London has an immigrant population of around 30% and arrests more people for murder or manslaughter than any other police force. Let’s say that in one year, the number of homicides in London that people who enter a non-British nationality in their arrest form are completely proportionate to the number of people born overseas in the area – 30%. In that same year, there are no homicides anywhere else in England & Wales. We now have a scary ‘Foreigners commit a third of killings in the UK but only make up 10% of the poplulation’ story. The trouble is – that’s completely proportionate in the actual area those killings took place.
Now, the paper does state that “In London, almost 40 per cent of those in such cases in the past year were from overseas, or of unknown origin,” which would be disproportionate were it not for the fact that the paper has decided to add everyone who didn’t enter anything into the ‘nationality’ box. As the article later reveals, including these people makes the total in London higher than the actual total across the country, which is impossible. Could it be that the hack has included this figure rather than the actual figure because the real one would make it too obvious that this article is misleading?
This ‘get an FOI request from police forces’ tactic will always return a scary looking overall average. Great for frightening the readers with – not so great for actually giving an accurate idea of how many crimes were committed by people from overseas.
Categories: Immigration |
Tags: Immigration, violence | 10 Comments
Posted by Jamie Sport
August 21st, 2009
Journalism and statistics go together like Dog the Bounty Hunter on a dinner date with Tolstoy.
Usually, statistics in the Mail come from some press release sent out by a company with a vested interest (if the story’s science related), from a ‘report’ (by the TaxPayers’ Alliance), or from an NGO, quango, or think-tank (if the figures suggest a rise in crime, for example). The figures are often based on Government figures which have been analysed, edited, skewed, and reinterpreted. Such data are processed and packaged into an easy-to-understand, journalist friendly document by one of the third parties mentioned above, that tells the hack everything they need to know, like this: ‘X has gone up by Y, meaning Z’. The journo, who is thankful that they haven’t had to wade through boring old figures themselves, will then pad their stats based article out with quotes and additional information to establish context – or, in most cases, to completely mislead the reader.
Sometimes, though, an ambitious journalist will tire of rewriting pre-compiled reports and studies and decide to go and look at the statistics for themselves. This is a risky thing to do because the journo is well aware of their lack of training in stats and the potential for time-consuming redrafts if they make a mistake. On the plus side, it makes it look like they’re actually doing some research and deserve to get paid. Luckily, Mail hacks don’t have to worry too much about errors because, should they make an appalling mess of things, nobody will actually notice (or care).
Such is the case with Sue Reid’s ‘SPECIAL INVESTIGATION’ on migrant workers and unemployment in today’s Mail, headlined ‘Revealed: The areas where there are more migrants chasing jobs than locals‘. Sue seems quite proud of her data-mining, as there’s a little photo of her looking pleased with herself next to the words ‘SPECIAL INVESTIGATION’. No expense has been spared on art direction either; there’s a picture of a Romanian builder photoshopped into an image of Britain split up into different coloured areas to indicate the number of foreign people looking for jobs in each district. There’s a long column of statistics, and even a pie chart.
The piece begins proudly, ‘The true extent of the huge influx of foreign workers into Britain is revealed in an investigation by the Daily Mail.’ In a line that wouldn’t be out of place in a BNP pamphlet, it adds, ‘The figure[s] expose as a sham the New Labour pledge of ‘British jobs for British workers’.
Sue helpfully explains the methods behind her SPECIAL INVESTIGATION and where she got her numbers from:
[The article] is based on information from each local authority based on two sets of official figures.
The first is the total in each area of National Insurance Numbers given to adult overseas nationals entering the UK during 2008.
The second set of figures is the claimant count for each local authority area in July, compiled from Government statistics released last week.
A claimant is a person on job-seekers’ allowance who is actively trying to find employment. Newly arrived foreigners cannot get this payout.
Unfortunately for Sue, her methodology is catastrophically flawed. She has taken the cumulative total number of National Insurance number (NINo) registrations for the entire financial year 2007-08, and compared it to the number of people claiming Jobseekers’ Allowance (JSA) in the single month of July 2009. Unsurprisingly, this has thrown up figures such as Edinburgh where supposedly the 10,022 ‘local jobseekers’ are outnumbered by 12,450 ‘new migrant workers’.
Basically, Sue has found that there were more foreign people looking for jobs in a 12 month period than there were local people looking for jobs in one month, which is hardly surprising is it? And that’s ignoring the fact that using figures from two different financial years, which were experiencing vastly different economic climates, is somewhat questionable.
Her second failure is to compare a cumulative, stable figure with an average, changing figure. She tells us that in 2008 there were 733,090 new NINos given to migrants, the number she uses to compare against the number of JSA claimants in July 2009. This 733,090 includes everyone given an NI number between April 2007 and March 2008, many of whom, obviously, will already have found work and therefore will not be competing with the locals looking for work in July 09 – a whole two years later. While NINo registrants will have been entering into work during that period, thereby removing themselves from the fluctuating pool of people competing for jobs, many of the JSA claimants in any given month will the same people who were claiming the month before, and, chances are, the month afterwards. It is quite clear that comparing the two statistics is completely and utterly redundant; you might as well compare the number of motorbike accidents in 1972 with global temperature increases during 1990-1995. The relationship is meaningless.
Let’s be fair to Sue, because I can see what she was trying to do, and the Office for National Statistics website is a bit confusing. Let’s say the comparison between NINos and claimants is valid, and let’s assume that not a single new NINo registrant managed to find a job during Apr-Jul 07 (the first quarter of the 2008 financial year). In that period, the national total number of NINos was 166,133. The average national number of JSA claimants over that same quarter was 887,757*, meaning that, actually, there are five times as many ‘local people’ looking for work than there are migrant workers. If we look at the latest period for which data is available (Oct-Dec 08), the ratio of local workers to migrants actually increases to 6:1, and the number of NINos granted to foreign workers decreases to 134,800. Is this the influx mentioned at the beginning?
How about the particular regions in which migrants supposedly outnumber local jobseekers? (I acknowledge that I’m taking a rather liberal attitude to statistics at this point, but, when you’re forced to compare apples with oranges, somethings got to give.) One of the ‘worst’ named areas in the article is Brent, where the Mail tells us that 19,240 migrant workers were given a NINo in 2008. In that same year, there were, on average, 6,647 JSA claimants each month. If we divide that 19,240 total NINo figure by 12 we find the average number of new migrant workers in any one month – 1,603. Looking at an average month in isolation and assuming that the previous months new NINo registrants and jobseekers all found jobs, that means there are actually four times as many local jobseekers than migrants.
Even using her own massively flawed methodology, it’s abundantly clear that there are not more migrant workers looking for jobs than British people doing the same. Sue Reid is the blacksmith of statistics, bashing blindly away at data until it transforms into something else, unrecognisable from the original materials. The question is why, when migrant jobseeker numbers are actually falling, does The Mail want people to think they’re rising?
* ONS data from NOMIS. Let me know if you’d like an .xls copy of the figures (I can’t imagine why you would though)
Categories: Immigration |
28 Comments
Posted by Jamie Sport
August 19th, 2009
Political correctness.
Whether you believe it’s a tool used by the state to suppress freedom of speech and kow-tow to minorities, or think it’s just another example of different people forcing acceptance upon us, one thing is certain: political correctness is everywhere.
Well, it is if you’re a Daily Mail journalist and can’t think of anything to write about, anyway. All you have to do is take an utterly mundane, entirely innocuous event, twist it around a bit, add an agenda, misrepresent the details and – bam! a ready made tale of political correctness gone absolutely raving bonkers.
Such were the circumstances (probably) behind Master Daniel Bates’ storming piece of journalistic ineptitude ‘Blacklisting banned: Citizens Advice axes ‘offensive’ word and tells staff to use ‘blocklisting’ instead‘, which managed to slither itself limply onto page 3 of Monday’s Mail.
‘Blacklisting banned?’, you can almost hear Mail readers splutter with disbelief, ‘well that’s just politicalcorrectnessgonemad! For fear of upsetting the blacks, no doubt!’, they honk.
Bates has the scoop:
The Citizens Advice service has banned staff from using the term ” blacklisting” over fears that it is offensive and “fosters stereotypes”. The taxpayer- funded quango, which advises members of the public on consumer, legal and money issues, has instead replaced it with “blocklisting” to avoid appearing “prejudicial”.
‘Banned’ it, they have. ‘Replaced’, it has been. Pretty firm words. You can be sure that the word ‘blacklisting’ really has been done away with when such strong terms are used. Note the use of quotation marks around things that The Mail deems silly: ’stereotypes’ are silly, and ‘prejudicial’ is absurd newspeak. These are the crazy things that result in political correctness going mad and stop us talking freely. Also note the word ‘quango’. We all hate quangos, whatever they are, because they waste money and David Cameron said they were bad.
Bates adds wearily:
Critics branded it “daft” and “political correctness going over the top”, but the Citizens Advice has refused to back down, even though critics say it renders everyday communications unintelligible.
Notice how the traditional ‘political correctness gone mad’ has been replaced with ‘political correctness going over the top’. Presumably the politically correct brigade did away with ‘gone mad’ because it offended the mentally ill or something, and decreed that ‘going over the top’ would be an acceptable replacement. It’s political correctness gone mad.
But I digress. I wonder who the critics are?
John Midgley, co-founder of the campaign against political correctness, said: “This is just daft and another example of political correctness going over the top.”
A man who spends his time seeking out and decrying examples of political correctness is the source. Objective, I think you’ll agree, and I’m sure he was in full possession of all pertinent facts when Dan Bates called him for a quote.
In fairness to Mr Midgley, he couldn’t have been aware of the intricacies of the case because, in fact, our intrepid hack Daniel Bates wasn’t either. When we spoke to Citizen’s Advice, they told us that, actually, the word ‘blacklisting’ and variations thereof have not been banned at all, and that the whole story has a somewhat prosaic IT related explanation.
Far from being some meaningless new PC term, ‘blocklisting’ is actually a word commonly used in the IT industry referring to a list of blocked IP addresses or users. Apparently, the IT department at Citizen’s Advice issued a memo in July regarding spam emails, explaining that a number of them had been blacklisted. In reply, an employee pointed out that ‘blocklisted’ was probably a more appropriate word, and everybody forgot about the whole thing because it was really quite boring.
The ‘offending’ word was not ‘banned’, and there was no communication or policy asking people to use ‘blocklist’ instead of ‘blacklist’. Our contact was also keen to point out that, contrary to The Mail’s description, Citizen’s Advice is not a ‘quango’, but a network of independent charities.
None of which matters of course, to the Mail commenters who will add the hackneyed saga to their catalogue of examples of things banned in the name of not offending those different to them, who splutter such outraged responses as ‘Good grief!! And we’re paying these idiots’ salaries!’ and ‘Makes me wonder why anyone would go to these idiots for advice.’ Nor will it matter to The Star or The Telegraph, who picked up on the Mail’s enthralling tale of IT memos gone mad without bothering to contact Citizen’s Advice for comment, thereby ensuring the story’s continued presence as just another example of bureaucratic lunacy.
It’s journalism gone rubbish.
Categories: Political correctness |
25 Comments
