Newspapers are finally figuring out how to report these things properly: victims front and centre, and in the notable case of the London Independent, no mention of the gunman at all.
Also, Vicki Soto is a legend.
Update: The RTE report is perfect. Two separate reports, the first one four minutes long at the head of the show, with no mention at all of the gunman. Even the second report, about the police investigation mentions the gunman very briefly and centres the report on the victims.
“There’s no other way.”
There’s always another way. You might not like it, and there may be obstacles, but there’s always another way.
“Both sides are equally to blame.”
Drummed into us at an early age by busy parents and lazy teachers, this has infected our news media with a sickness where they refuse to put blame on one side of a conflict without putting some sort of blame on the other side. What’s the point? Just tell the truth. Yes, there are “two sides to every story”, but the truth is that most of the time, one guy is being an asshole.
“If you’re going to waterboard one of your guys, CNN…”
- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show
This is a public service announcement about Piers Morgan for people who don’t understand why sensible people (mostly in England) hate him. For instance, in the first episode of Charlie Brooker’s A Touch of Cloth, there is a great scene where a gory dismembered body doesn’t affect the police officers, but they are reduced to paralysing nausea by a photograph of Piers Morgan. Ian Hislop gave a brief summary of Morgan’s campaign of terror against him and his family on a show called Room 101, which is about things people hate.
Here we go.
As editor of the Murdoch-owned News of the World, he consistently and aggressively pushed the idea that people in the public eye for any reason had no rights to privacy. This mindset led to the mother of all smackdowns when the Leveson Inquiry berated Rupert Murdoch personally.
In one column for the Daily Mail, he boasted not only about being involved in hacking Paul McCartney’s cell phone messages, but (and this should damn him to hell forever if nothing else does) also about introducing him to Heather Mills in the first place.
As editor of the Daily Mirror, he bought thousands of dollars worth of shares (effectively all the money he had in his bank account (and his wife’s)) in a company just before the Mirror’s share analysts recommended them as a good investment. Apart from being an abuse of power, this is illegal. During the ensuing court case, it emerged that he asked witnesses to lie. Somehow he managed to get away with it, although the two business analysts were fired.
He was fired as editor of the Daily Mirror after publishing photos of British soldiers pissing on Iraqi prisoners which turned out, after a minimum amount of fact-checking, to have been faked.
In 2003, he wrote a column for the Daily Mail which included the following thoughts of George W. Bush falling off a Segway: ”You’d have to be an idiot to fall off, wouldn’t you, Mr. President?” and ”If anyone can make a pig’s ear of riding a sophisticated, self-balancing machine like this, Dubya can.” In 2007, Morgan was captured on camera falling off a Segway.
During a taping of the English version of Celebrity Apprentice, he got into a physical fight with Trinny Woodall, after he locked a chef she ordered for an event in his bathroom. Alaistar Campbell (upon whom the sweary, shouty Malcolm Tucker in The Thick Of It is heavily based, but he’s another fucktool and I don’t have time to go into Campbell’s crimes right now) was also involved in harassing Woodall, as you can read.
This is a small selection of the massive amounts of fail, fraud and fucked-up shit that this man has generated for the benefit of the American people who only know him from CNN and America’s Got Talent.
Now you know.
Winston Churchill, explaining in 1926 that there is no integrity to being impartial when one side is clearly on fire.
News media has a sick addiction to giving “both sides” of a story equal time if the material is in any way controversial. It’s especially evident in matters of religion, or stories about the crazy shit Israel gets up to.
