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.

I am genuinely terrified

OK, so looking at some pictures of Glenn Beck's "9/12 Project" protest I have come to a sobering and terrifying conclusion: the Republicans have gone fucking mental.

How I wish things could be the way they were! Sure the cynical, calculating evil of Cheney and Bush wasn't great, and the unabashed ignorance of the Palin-era incarnation of the GOP was pretty horrible too but this.... Jesus Christ.

Beck's '9/12 Project' in many ways typifies the kind of ideology these people espouse. His list of nine principles and 12 values, including steadfast belief in the nuclear family and God (presumably the Christian God). He makes a point of stressing that criticising the government is not un-American, although this kind of rights-conscious approach to political critique wasn't really in evidence when the Republicans and Fox were whining about people being mean to Bush as he was leaving office, or accusing people who said Palin was an idiot of misogyny. You only have to watch this promo video for it to see how ridiculous it is, Lord of the Rings music and all.

The popularity of the Project shows that a worryingly large proportion of the American people think he's got the right idea. And they just lap up his bullshit - from the whole ludicrous "birther" movement all the way through to the idea that recreating the Boston Tea Party is somehow relevant in 21st Century America. Worst of all is the belief - so overt in these protests - that America is under attack, that their rights are being trampled on, that the President is sitting in some ivory tower of anti-white racism and liberal superiority ignoring the will of the masses.

Well you know what Republicans? He isn't ignoring you. You just happen to be the most obnoxious and loudest people in politics right now. You lost the election. What that means for you is this: suck it up. By all means criticise and debate his policies but what happened to co-operation eh? Shouting him down in Congress, unscrupulously encouraging the spread of unfounded rumours about his birth and blocking him at every turn is not appropriate political engagement. All you're doing is alternately pulling faces and blowing raspberries, and throwing all your toys out of your pram in a series of ever-escalating hissy fits. Oh sure there are conservatives out there willing to act like grown-ups but these days they seem curiously quiet.

They're quite happy for their party to come across this way but I suspect had the roles been reversed and the Republicans were in power things would have been different. The Governor of California probably wouldn't have gotten away with threatening to secede from the fucking Union, and there's no chance in hell that a Democratic senator heckling the President in Congress would have been received with the same kind of calm rationality as Joe Wilson. There would have been calls for impeachments, resignations and a foot-stomping Hulk-out from Fox News. To be fair, it's not something particularly desirable. I like the way Obama has conducted himself with dignity in the face of tbe Republican's fuming ignorance and impotent rage, but it does give the nutters room to spread out and multiply. The '9/12 Project' is a clear manifestation of this growing lunacy in the American political system. It's as much a circle-jerk over the ol' days of living in fear and America The Conquerer dishing out righteous jugdement as it is any kind of protest agains the new president. To quote blogger Pareene on Gawker:

On 9/12, people in New York (and DC) did not feel as ‘great' as Glenn Beck, they just felt like shit. They felt scared and confused and depressed. Many of them were drunk. And only an idiot or an actual terrorist would want to always feel like it was 9/12/01... Eight years later, normal people, with brains and souls, have decided that some emotional distance from that disaster is healthier and wiser than trying to recapture the dread.

It does worry me though, that the people protesting against Obama this week are now the mainstream of their party; the opposition party of the most powerful nation on Earth. These racist, thick as pigshit, monstrously ignorant nutters represent a serious challenge for the presidency in 2012. They're undoubtedly stupid or at least, that's what I hope. When I see a picture like this, I have to believe that she's stupid, because the alternative is accepting that she thinks that advocating selling her black president as a slave is a funny concept.

The thing is, these protesters and Beckites have this idea that just because it's their opinion, it's valid. It's the same kind of thinking that goes with devout religious belief, but this time coupled with an amazing ability to absorb criticism in one ear and funnel it out the other, without it ever touching grey matter. It doesn't matter how many times you slap down their representatives on TV or point out where they're just empirically, factually wrong, they will go on thinking that Obama isn't naturalised, or that the NHS has death panels. They genuinely fear that they're going to be enslaved, that socialism is going to destroy the USA and that Obama is a Muslim.

Sometimes I do feel sorry for them, much as I feel sorry for the readership of the Daily Mail. It must be hard being pumped so full of hatred, paranoia and terror all the time. If they really do believe the kind of thing that O'Reilly, Beck et al are screaming about 24/7 then they must genuinely feel under siege. Fucking hell, if it's got to the point that children are harking back to the good ol' days of McCarthyism then how can you feel anything other than pity? To quote a wiser man than I:

You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.

Save your rage instead for Glenn Beck and his friends over in the Fox News Fortress of Evil. They are unapologetically fanning the flames of these hysterical idiots with misleading interpretations, backwards views on morality and and flat-out lies. I happen to believe that Beck at least - if not the entire Fox News crew - do wholeheartedly buy into the bullshit they spout, but there has to be someone somewhere making the decision to whip up the lunatics on the borders of American politics into such a frenzy. It stands to reason that you couldn't run a company with the kind of mindset that makes you filter out the truth and replace it with your own little fantasy world (at least, I hope that's the case). Somehow having the whole show run by cynical, money-minded hypocrites abusing the stupidity of their audience is more reassuring than the idea that Fox and the conservative media are basically passengers on a runaway train destined to hurtle over the cliff into anarchy and madness - and taking us with them.

But what can they do now they've put the lunatic, teflon-coated ultra-conservatives in the centre of the American political stage? You can't put them back in their box! Glenn Beck et al created this rabid, raving mob of ignorant prats, crazed with fear and loaded up on guns. I don't even live in the USA but I'm still terrified. I am really really scared - in the pit of my stomach - that someone is going to shoot Obama, that one of these things is going to spill over into violence, that democracy and politics in America is going to be irreparably damaged by people who can't grasp the concept of a birth certificate, or that if you lose an election that's not the same as tyranny. It's fucking scary. They're all psychopaths and there's nothing we can do over this side of the pond but watch the whole self-destructive scene play out. We can only hope it's a passing phase and that the mature, intelligent Republicans are just waiting for the mob to thrash itself to exhaustion so they can sweep it back into the dirty corners of American politics where it belongs. Then maybe there'll be a serious debate about healthcare reform and financial relief.