Monday 30 November 2009

News: facts not necessary

This one has been brewing for a while.

I've taken a bit more of an interest of late in the sheer unbelievable cheek of the mainstream press. Everyday I sit on the Tube, watching people reading the Metro, the Mail and the Express. This morning I was reading The Sun over someone's shoulder and wanting to just snatch it out of his hands. He was tutting over some completely made-up story about banning Christmas, or schools making all the children dress in burqas, or some other fanciful rubbish.

The problem I have with these newspapers - which I will henceforth refer to as papers, until they actually start reporting facts - is not ideological. Granted, anyone who knows me knows that I'm not exactly sitting square in the Mail's target demographic. I think immigration is a good thing, I wish Parliament would bloody well hurry up and turf the Royal Family out of government, I understand that you vote for the party not the PM and I actually quite like wheelie bins.

Chances are that even if these papers were the bastion of journalistic integrity, I would find much to disagree with, but that's not the issue. I think it's a good thing that there are papers that promote both sides of the argument, that focus on different issues. I think it's great that The Guardian wants a liberal government, and I don't have a problem with other papers pushing for a conservative one. There's only one thing that I really care about in journalism and, rather cornily, it's the truth.

Like reporting facts honestly. Being open about your sources. Not just making stuff up. Unfortunately on these fairly basic points both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express fall flat on their faces. Other papers aren't exactly in the clear either - watch The Times spectacularly missing the point of the current "Don't Label Me" campaign by referring to the children in the advert as 'Christian children'. Look at the smug point-scoring and ask yourself: is this meant to be the news? Is this delivering the facts to the readership, or just leading them down the editorial line?

Bias is inevitable. I mean, even by selecting stories to cover there is selection going on. However, that can be done without being dishonest. Bloggers have been speculating for a while now why the Mail worked itself - and its readers - up into a hysterical rage about the student who pissed on a war memorial while blind drunk, but has said absolutely nothing about the repeated, deliberate desecration of graves in Manchester. Is it too far to speculate that this is because they are Muslim graves, and that this story wouldn't go down well with a readership already whipped up into a frenzy about immigration?

Immigration is a good topic to discuss actually, because in reality it seems only newspapers like The Guardian are willing to be adult about the issue. Search the Mail's archive for 'immigrant' and see what I mean. Yeah, fear-mongering much? A conspiracy of silence! £30,000 pay-outs! There's nothing wrong with a rational, evidence-based discussion on immigration, but neither the tabloids nor their readers seem to want that. Richard Littlejohn has been caught lying time and time again about this - about how much immigrants get on benefits (he doesn't actually know), about how most of the crimes in the UK are committed by Eastern European immigrants (he made it up) or about how a judge who made up a load of bollocks about immigration figures was being persecuted over his 'sensible' stance on the issue (he wasn't, he was just an arse). And that's just one columnist. I won't even get onto Jan Moir or Melanie Phillips here (who has the time?)

That's not even touching on their insane fucked-up relationship with sex and (oo-er) 'flesh'. That simultaneous celibate attitude whereby sex is something scary and dirty that good, moral upstanding people entirely repudiate. It's so bad, what this person has done (worn a strappy top, kissed a person of the same gender in public, slept with a few people) that you need to see full-size gloriously-coloured HD images of it! It's a weird self-hating attitude that screams of protesting too much. It takes some real balls to print this and describe it was 'disturbing' and then print dozens of stories a day about how healthy-looking celebrities are 'fat'. Hell, let's just look at Natalie Cassidy, whose revelation that the pressure of staying in shape for the tabloids almost led to her developing an eating disorder didn't stop them printing this revolting piece of shit just a few months later.

The bottom line is this:

The Mail, The Express, all of those trashy right-wing papers, lie. They make up figures, they deliberately fail to convey the truth behind stories and most of all, they fucking lie. They do it shamelessly, cheerfully, and all the while claim they're just telling it like it is. All the fucking time. The worst thing is that people swallow their poison, totally without question. If you're reading a paper like the Mail and just believing in it without doing your own research, you are doing it wrong. Critical thinking, rational inquiry, scepticism: without employing these while reading the news you may as well just be sitting under Rupert Murdoch with your mouth open.

For example, take a look at this superb take-down by Tabloid Watch of the Express' ridiculous headline about breakfast. Turns out the study that indicates that breakfast is, like, totally super-healthy was funded by cereal manufacturers. The independent expert they pulled in to confirm the story has done work for them very recently. Oh, and by the way nutritionist is not legally protected; I could call myself one apropos of nothing - it's that prestigious a title. This is no isolated incident: most of the 'science' stories you read in the papers are little more than trussed up PR exercises for companies looking to shift more products. The papers love using science as a shiny meaningless bauble, which is probably why this patently transparent rubbish makes it unadulterated into print, while the LHC, vaccines and global fucking warming get an absolute mauling. As soon as something is more significant than a minuscule lifestyle improvement it's dangerous and scary. Honestly, this attitude - this fear of progress - totally baffles me.

Actually, just for good measure take a look at this, because it's classic Mail: it starts with a leading headline that sounds like a definite conclusion, which is hugely reinforced in the first few paragraphs with phrases like "something terrible, unimaginable, was amiss..." They then back up the insanity with what they fondly imagine is science: "a small - but not zero - chance" that it will "rip apart the entire universe". They even refer to the absolute mentalists (or "twats" if you're Brian Cox) who think that this is at all likely as "maverick scientists". Maverick's a great word: it implies that you're going against the grain but that, ultimately, you'll be right. You're Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day, you're Dennis Quaid in The Day After Tomorrow, you're Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park! Then, right at the bottom, the last three lines - the last three fucking lines, after all the talk of doom, and the massive pictures of black holes destroying the Earth and tearing the universe apart - there's a bit from the scientists, who treat the idea with total derision. Whether or not there are any scientifically literate journalists at these papers is a good question but whatever the answer, it's pretty clear that there are no scientifically literate editors.

What else can I say? These papers have no ethics. They lie, they cheat, they even pay immigrants to break the law so that they can write stories about how immigrants break the law

There is no sound argument to be had in favour of them being anything other than opportunistic vultures who distort the truth and whip people up into terrified balls of hatred who are impotently angry that their country is going to the dogs even though the only 'evidence' of it is within the pages of the Mail. So when I attack the Mail, or the Express, it's not because I'm a liberal who can't stand to hear the 'truth', or even an opposing viewpoint. It's because they are not offering an opposing viewpoint. If you have to outright lie to make your point, then your point is bullshit. The sooner people realise that, the better, because at the moment the thought that the Mail is the second most widely-read newspaper in the country makes me feel sick.