Full of crap and racist. Who knew?

Just in case you missed it.

I've said it before, but being able to tell what the tabloids are going to do is a rubbish super power. It's like having a power that lets you eat your dinner.

Earlier this week, some stats were released that were guaranteed to get the tabloids in a lather, and I went out on a limb and said they would get the tabloids in a lather. Ooh, those lathered up tabloids.  Always with the foreign workers and the too many ethnics.

The Sun - your super soaraway source for crap propaganda

Years ago, when I had too much hair, wore too much black and listened to too much Nirvana, around about the time of the first Gulf War, my cousin's boyfriend passed me a creased bit of paper that was beginning to fall apart around the folds in it. "Here, Crackers," he said, except he didn't because my name isn't Crackers but you can imagine him saying a real name like Trevor or something, "have a look at this".

Racism by proxy

What do you do if you want to say something that might be you know, a bit racist, but are a bit nervous that you might get called out on it? It's a tricky one.

Tried and tested solutions include the old dog whistle, where you say something that can clearly be interpreted in more than one way. "It's not racist to talk about immigration - are you thinking what we're thinking?" - that sort of thing. Of course, it is racist to talk about immigration if what you say is 'there's too many blacks', which is probably what a lot of the people looking at those infamous tory party posters were thinking.

Yes yes, hundreds dead blah blah blah. Are any of them British?

Blast from the past

Last year, looking at the Mail's coverage of the Haiti earthquake disaster, I blatted this out:

It's so common in comedy shows that it's a cliche - major disaster happens in foreign country, UK news agencies only take notice if British people are involved. Submit a script with that situation in and someone's bound to say, "Do we need to include that tired joke? It's been done about eight-million times before."

Yes, it's a tired gag, but one that's so accurate. Today's tabloids show this brilliantly. Most papers have included news of Libya and Gadaffi's speech yesterday on their front pages - it is a little bit relevant to the UK, people in countries across the Middle East in revolt against the largely UK-backed oppressive regimes that rule them, with one of the most infamous despots vowing to fight against a revolt that has already killed quite a number of his citizens - but the tabloids have splashed with the headlines that count.

Tabloid bullshit of the month award December 2010

Break out the tinsel, jingle bell music and strong, strong booze - it's time for the December 5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award.

A bit of a disappointing field this month, what with a couple of numpties providing the tabloids with juicy quotes about banning Christmas so they didn't have to make shit up themselves. Maybe uponnothing's excellent demolition of the Winterval myth had something to do with that. I bloody well hope so.

We did have the Mail worrying about the number of black and brown people in the country and then having to point out it's not racist or anything; the same paper pretending Blue Peter had burnt something it hadn't; snow PANIC; the Star pretending some shit about Jordan again. That's the sort of thing.

The winner had to be Guy Patrick of the Sun with 'Al-Qaeda Corrie Threat'.  There's no link because it's gone already!

What sort of pansified lefty elitist wants to stop locking up innocent children?

Nick Clegg anounced a new policy today that you'd think would send the tabloids into paroxysms of rage. From May, he claims that children of failed asylum seekers will no longer be kept in detention centres, and the family unit of Yarl's Wood will close. Perhaps a bold move for a government hat seems as beholden to Sun and Mail readers as the last.

Tabloid bullshit of the month award November 2010

Yes!  It's here!  BE excited, B E excited!  It's...

November's 5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award.

Start the marching band and tickertape parade!

It's been quite a tough competition this month.  I actually thought I might have found a winner on October 31st, so there was a lot of catching up to do from all the papers in the following weeks.  The British tabloid press were well up for it though.

'Muslims tell British: Go to Hell!' Should Bill Maher be alarmed?

In yesterday's post about how Bill Maher seems to have been suckered by the less than honest UK press, I wondered:

Imagine reading the British papers without knowing the main aim of most of them is to rile people up for no reason, or that they frequently lie through their teeth. Jeez.

Today's Express front page is reproduced there on the top left, with its screaming headline reading 'Muslims tell British: Go to Hell!'. It's enough to make anyone frightened and want their mummy.

'Debunking the 'Islamisation' myth' could have debunked other myths, too

Edmund Standing has produced a report, 'Debunking the 'Islamisation' myth', which is well worth a look.

Now, I might have problems with some areas of the report (like cousin intermarriage and congenital birth defects, and perhaps the overall tone) but I won't be going into those here. Of more interest to this blog is section headlined 'The myth of Muslim power in Britain is largely fuelled by sensationalist and inaccurate media reports'.

What would the Met get in return for not looking hard at News of the World phone hacking?

You might not have noticed because most of the British press seems curiously reluctant to cover it, but earlier in the week, the New York Times produced some new evidence that the Conservative party's chief spin doctor Andy Coulson knew much more about the phone hacking scandal of 2006 than he was letting on. Maybe they were too busy covering allegations regarding William Hague's sexuality, and his emotional revelations about not being gay that came out at the same time, handily and totally coincidentally for the Conservatives' spin doctor. Ahem.

Distortions, doublethink and urban legends

Sorry - the headline was sneakily meant to disguise another post about flag bans.  I've gone all Paul Dacre!  I'll be saying the c-word and making stuff up a lot next!

It's always fun looking at Sun roundups of outrageous BANS to see how padded out with exaggerations they have to be in order to fill the space.

Those legendary Sun headline writers strike again

They're better than broadsheet writers.  They can condense hundreds of words into a pithy short headline that sums up the whole story with humour into a fraction of the space.

Except...no.  Are there cannibal cops marauding the country, probably on scramblers, with mohicans and ripped police uniforms modified with leather chaps, war paint and dog collars, terrorising small villages and frightening old ladies as they totter out of the library?  I think not.

Are England shirts being banned?

When I read about the Facebook group '...It's funny how our flag offends you but our benefits don't!!!...' last week via good people like Anton at Enemies of Reason, MacGuffin at TabloidWatch, Carmen who gets around and Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy, I dreaded opening my own Facebook account. I just knew I'd see a load of family members joining.

Happy, happy, happy!

So, the election hoo-hah is over and I have to confess that my reaction to the whole circus is - gaaaaaaah!

I want to go and climb into bed for three weeks and not come out except to eat ice cream while staring off into the middle distance. Maybe I'll occasionally go to the toilet.

Our press and television media showed themselves to be the horrible, inept den of slimy shysters they are, trying to influence the outcome on behalf of their monstrous, unelected bosses in order to help them stuff sticky fistfuls of cash into their gobs, distending their bottom jaws like pelicans in grey suits.

How left wing papers help push people away from left wing politics

Imagine a new health and safety gone mad story started doing the rounds, but it was pretty obvious that the right wing papers were farting about to make things look more crazy than they were. Yeah, I know - you don't have to imagine it - but if there was a new one, how would you imagine the apparently left wing papers would handle it? The Guardian, after all, is responsible for publishing the excellent 'Conkers, goggles, 'elf 'n' safety? You really could make it up' in response to David Cameron blarting out a speech based on some of this cobblers.

It's not Death Wish and you're not Charles Bronson

David Cameron's latest tabloid appeasing wheeze is to say that burglars leave their human rights at the door when they enter someone's house.  Wurrgh!  Tough, huh?  You could imagine him squinting a steely-eyed hundred yard stare as he said that, while chewing on a matchstick and growling.  Until you saw his stupid chubby posh face.

Predictably, the tabloids, never normally given to the abandonment of nuance in favour of the unrealistic cramming of everything into a simplified black and white worldview, love it.  'More please, Mr Cameron' says inaptly named John Gaunt.

Winterval: The beast that wouldn't die!

Winterval.  It's probably one of the most famous PC Gone Mad myths there is.  Just like every teacher told the story of someone at their last school who leant on the back legs of their chair and broke their back to scare us into sitting properly, the papers have used Winterval alongside classics like Baa Baa Green Sheep to scare us into not thinking about things like inclusiveness or bothering to be polite to people if they're not white, male, British, straight or able-bodied for over a decade.

Last post on Liddle (I hope)

In my last post, I promised to publish some stats I had from the Met police about whether Rod Liddle's claims about young black men being responsible for the 'overwhelming majority' of certain types of crime was true.  I wish I hadn't now.  Not because they prove Liddle's argument (they don't) but because in the fuss that's resulted from his dashed off 91 word blog post, we all seem to have zeroed in on the figures rather than the actual argument they were being used to support.

Still not banning Christmas

 A couple more, "they're banning Christmas," style stories from the Mail.  I've been prevented from looking at these by catching the dreaded swine flu, so you get two for the price of one in this post.  Lucky old you.

'Pull the other one! Christmas cracker gags to keep the PC brigade happy' is a story that has been picked up by the Express, Telegraph and Sun.  According to the Mail, this is what happened:

At least the Mail recycles

And it's not just Richard 'Smellyface' Littlejohn, whose column this week, 'Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Darling' in which he hilariously parodies a conversation with Alastair Darling by setting it in Dad's Army bears a striking resemblance to a 2007 column in which he imagined a conversation in the style of Dad's Army called, er, 'Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Darling'. Well done, Smellyface. You earned your next trip to IHoP with that one.