From Catherine Bennett’s column in Thursday’s Grauny:
Readers of the Daily Mail are used to being frightened out of their wits, usually by you-couldn’t-make-it-up announcements to the effect that Tony Blair is developing plans to hand out morning-after pills to war veterans, or to sell sick puppies into the white slave trade. But the most hardened readers must have been shocked, yesterday, to find the paper resorting to outright threats. “Free Christmas Cartoon DVD”, it announced on the front page. Adding, in the spirit of we-know-where-you-live: “Collect yours from WH Smith today, or we’ll post the whole collection to your home”.
Of course, we like making jokes about Johnny Frenchman just as much as he likes making them about us. But our jests are underpinned, always, with a respect for the place and its marvellous culture – the fabulous countryside, the superb food, the magnificent wines, the soaring cathedrals and all those actresses.
Simon Heffer, the Daily Mail:
Our economy is far stronger than [Chirac’s]. We are best friends with the Americans, whom he also hates. We do not surrender to the Germans every couple of years and do not settle our political differences by rioting.
One month ago today, Roy Greenslade wrote a very interesting piece in the Grauniad about the Daily Mail’s increasing populist approach to reporting, and its increasing obsession with celebrity as it strives to overtake The Sun as this country’s best selling daily.
It began by listing some recent Mail headlines:
Can you guess the daily newspaper that ran these headlines last week? “Rod’s daughter, Rachel and a new love triangle”; “Just what is tormenting Toyah?”; “Becks’ little boy”; “Prince Harry on patrol”; “Rio in trouble again over stag-night rampage”; “Christmas baby for Penny and Rod”; “Go-go have a shave: George Michael at 41”; and “Big bucks Becks.”
This approach, in combination with moves like stealing Littlejohn and increasing the sports pages almost certainly help the paper to appeal to a broader base of people. But can it ever overtake The Sun? Most people think not. I’m not so sure.
Clearly, the Daily Mail has a narrower appeal than The Sun. But in an age of declining sales, my general feeling is that Mail readers will be more faithful than Sun readers. Particularly if newspaper prices are forced up by the OFT’s plans to open up distribution lines for newspapers and magazines, as seems increasingly likely. A larger core of the Daily Mail’s readers would probably be willing to pay a little more for the paper than Sun readers, who I think would be more likely to desert the paper if prices rise significantly.
So my instinct is to say that there’s a distinct possibility that the Daily Mail’s new direction could lead to it’s sales figures exceeding those of The Sun, but only by it’s sales declining more slowly, rather than a surge in circulation. Time will tell.
I know editors have it tough when there’s not much to report, but today’s Mail is so unintentionally hilarious that I feel the urge to share it with you.
Page 2 has a big mug-shot of Littlejohn (apparently not a recent one), and a report that he is rejoining the Mail. Somehow, they completely fail to mention that he’s joining them from The Sun. Clearly, they don’t want to be seen as a newspaper that accepts The Sun‘s castoffs.
Then we have ‘Complaints may force a change in the weather’, a bit of a moan about the BBC Weather, that contains no real news, but just a rehash of last week’s articles, even repeating the syndicated quote by Bill Giles, as if it is fresh. And a complaint about ‘digitally generated rain’ – so presumably they want us to go back to magnetic symbols.
Next, we learn that the word ‘cost’ has finally disappeared from the Mail lexicon, with the headline ‘Delays that rip off customers to the tune of £370m will go, eventually’. Unfortunately, that particular headline is wrong on so many fronts as to be completely false, and contradicts the article completely. That’s one subeditor that needs firing, then.
Then there’s an article by some moaning teenagers who think they’re hard done to because they go to private school, are predicted three A-Level ‘A’ grades, and yet have still been rejected by all their chosen universities. Apparently, they feel like they are being treated as second-class citizens. Have they not considered that A-Level grades aren’t the only thing that is considered when applying to university? Frankly, if they moan as much as they do in this article, I wouldn’t want them in my university either. One of them is a propective medical student, who applied to three London colleges and Brighton and Sussex. Everyone who applies to the London colleges has, at bare minimum, three ‘A’ grades. That’s the very least you’d need. So to find he’s been rejected should not come as a surprise, particularly as he’s only studied two sciences. And he thinks people should be chosen purely on grades. Well that’s probably exactly why he’s been rejected.
The Mailscience reporter Robin Yapp files a report on ten questions that find whether you’re blessed with that special charisma magic. Including, of course, the predictable picture of Diana.
There’s a fascinating double-page spread on pop stars who look a bit like rock stars. Amazing. Oh, and then there’s the equally amazing story of a small person who – get this – had a small flat! Hilarious! Followed swiftly with another double-page spread about Jamie Oliver’s wife’s experiences of giving birth. How much did she get paid for that?
A ‘leading doctor’ – by which they mean someone who no-one’s ever heard of who works in that world-famous Leicester hospital – suggests that parents should not be told the sex of their babies before they are born in case they decide to have an abortion based upon that knowledge. Except that’s almost certainly not what he said.
‘I had surgery to pin back my ears. Then one fell off.’ You couldn’t make these headlines up.
And the depressing thing is that I feel I’ve had to pick-and-choose from the ridiculous stories, otherwise I’d be sat here all day. So, if you want a laugh, go and buy today’s Mail. Or check the website; current top story: “I let my girl have sex at 11, admits mother “.
A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The forty-second post of a series.
A great post on the LRB blog this week by Liam Shaw makes the fundamental point that “prescribing a course of antibiotics shouldn’t be an isolated consumer transaction; rather, treatment should be part of an integrated system with continuity of care”.
On one of its front pages this week, alongside a headline reporting that “Truss was a disastrous dalliance who served only to remind us what a real leader looks like,” the Daily Mail claimed to offer “unrivalled reports and analysis.”
Only 79 days previously, one of their headlines informed the readership that “Liz has the boldness, vision and strength of conviction to build on what Boris began.”
Only 45 days previously, their banner headline celebrating Liz Truss’s selection by the Tory membership screamed, “cometh the hour, cometh the woman.”
Only 27 days ago, their front page proclaimed the disastrous mini-budget to be “a true Tory budget” offering the “biggest boost for 50 years.”
There’s only one way in which these reports and analyses are unrivalled: their distance from reality.
“The possible return of this unscrupulous leader who damaged the moral credibility of the Conservative Party is causing a lot of concern,” says Cécile Ducourtieux in Le Monde, with understatement.
Still traumatized by the shock of Brexit and the never-ending negotiations and extreme division it brought about, the UK is struggling to point to its exit from the EU as the trigger for the downgrading and destabilization impacting the country. Growth and investments are at half speed, with exports slowed, and there is the renewed risk of secession by Scotland and Northern Ireland. For a while, Covid masked the damage of Brexit, which has become the elephant in the room that few people, even those in the opposition, want to see. From this perspective, Ms. Truss’s time in office, which claimed to “take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit,” looks like a terrible crash test.
Learning the lessons will be long and painful. But it is hard to see how the UK can return to stability and prosperity without escaping from the denial and silence about the consequences of a decision that has isolated it and cut it off from neighbors and natural partners on the continent.
Since Brexit, the nation has had more barriers with its largest trading partner, the European Union, business investment has been lackluster and companies have lost easy access to a large pool of workers. The National Health Service is overburdened, and the immense backlog of patients needing care is keeping many of them out of work.
In addition, like many nations, Britain is enduring the highest pace of inflation since the 1980s, taking the momentum out of consumer spending and economic growth.
While Britain shares some economic problems with other advanced economies, its outlook for inflation is particularly painful. Consumer prices in the country rose 10.1 percent in September from a year earlier. with the annual inflation rate returning to its fastest pace since 1982.
Tom McTague in The Atlantic, even before this week’s events:
For the first time in my adult life, there is a genuine sense of decay in Britain–a realization that something has been lost that will be difficult to recover, something more profound than pounds and pence, political personalities, or even prime ministers. Over the past three weeks, the U.K. has been gripped by a crisis of crushing stupidity, one that has gone beyond all the turmoil of Brexit, Boris, even the great bank bailouts of 2007, and touched that most precious of things: core national credibility.
None of this is fixed by changing Prime Minister. It’s hard to imagine our country side-stepping some kind of fundamental constitutional reform after this level of destruction, probably beginning with the break-up of the nation.
Wendy and I have been visiting someone in Berwick-upon-Tweed this week, in only our second visit to the town, despite speeding through on the train many times. We particularly enjoyed a stroll around the town walls, only a few weeks after I did the same in York. We also popped to Bamburgh on the way back, though the world-renowned majesty of the Northumberland coast was enveloped in fog, so really we could have been anywhere.
3: The economic generational divide in the UK is something that has played on my mind a lot over the years. It was one of my early pitches for inclusion in the CMO’s annual report, but as the health impacts are mostly in the future, it wasn’t something that was readily visible in surveillance data as yet.
We’re sailing toward an unprecedented crisis, with the burden of paying for the health and social care of the unusually large number of people born from the mid-40s to the early-60s likely to result in an unprecedented liability on those of working age: it’s simple maths.
Yet the same simple maths precludes an easy fix: there isn’t a democratic mandate for rationalising the approach as the median age of voters in the UK is 53.
This Propsect article gives a good overview of recent developments in how this has played out.
During the pandemic, 88 per cent of covid-related job losses affected Britons aged 35 and under, while employment among the more vulnerable over-50s rose.
It takes an average of 19 years to save for the deposit on a first home compared with three years in the 1980s.
“Deaths of despair” (those from suicide and addiction) strike each successive generation at a younger age, and their numbers are increasing. The proportion of young people with diagnosed mental health problems is roughly equivalent to the proportion of over-65s who are millionaires: one in five.
I think it is inevitable that this will lead to social unrest. It is surely impossible to avoid while choices such as triple-locking the basic state pension paid to millionaires while funding cuts mean that student leave university an average of £50,000 in debt. But social unrest only adds to our list of problems.
I have no idea how we can fix any of this. Even if older voters (and politicians) can be persuaded to propose and support politics against their immediate best interests, those very cuts might end up making this generation less healthy and (paradoxically) more costly: four in five aren’t millionaires, and even those who are don’t necessarily have liquid assets.
It’s hard not to imagine that this, along with privacy and climate change, will prove to be one of the dominant long-term societal challenges of the first half of the 21st century.
6: It sometimes feels like we’re in an extremely turbulent political period, but on one measure it is remarkably stable: in my lifetime, there have only been handovers between Prime Ministers from different parties twice (John Major to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to David Cameron). We haven’t had a similarly stable period in this regard since the 1700s.
11: Jonathan Rothwell’s blog post about the London mayoral election has sent me into a bit of a spiral of thought. “It does rub me the wrong way that there appears to be so little choice—and when there is more than just a binary choice between two ancient political parties, neither of whom appear to have your best interests at heart, the machinery of national politics is willing to snatch even that away.”
It makes me worry that I’m part of the problem. I have no desire at all to get involved in politics: I struggle to imagine anything worse than spending my time having to constantly defend my basic interpretation of reality. It makes me think of heart-sink meetings with anti-vaccine councillors. I completely understand the importance of having those conversations and explaining the science to people who are making local policy decisions, but I it isn’t something I’ve ever enjoyed. The idea of a professional life that involves a lot of that is unappealing. Adding a layer of party politics, in which one has to defend positions one personally finds indefensible simply because it is the ‘party line’, just makes the prospect even grimmer.
And yet: does this not make me part of the problem? If I’m not willing to engage, why should anyone else bother? Are people who enjoy party politics really the people we want making decisions on our behalf? Shouldn’t we all engage more for the good of society? Is “I don’t want to” just a selfish whinge? How can things improve if we leave politics only to those who can be bothered? Aren’t decisions made by those who show up?
12: Work has brought a surprising amount of discussion of stevedores recently, which is a delightful crossword word.
13: It feels like there must be a story behind the placement of this sign.
14: Last week, the MHRA and DCMO used some excellent slides from the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication (David Spiegelhalter’s stomping ground) to illustrate the risk of serious harm associated with receiving the AstraZencia covid vaccine.
This got me thinking: how does the risk of the vaccine itself compare with the risk of participating in the programme as a whole? In particular—given that most people live “within 10 miles” of a vaccination centre—how does it compare with a 20-mile round trip by car?
After much searching through evidence, my boring conclusion is that they’re focusing on absolutely the right bit of the programme, and the risk of serious harm associated with the journey is orders of magnitude smaller and probably negligible, even at this scale of rollout.
16: From Concretopia, I learned about Cumbernauld town centre, one of Britain’s most hated buildings. I’m amazed I haven’t come across it before.
17: Derwent Reservoir is spectacular in the spring sunshine.
And as though to prove that it’s spring, here are some ducklings.
18: People often talk to me about books, because they know I’m interested in reading and they follow me on places like Goodreads. I find these conversations difficult, never quite knowing what to say or how to say it. I had a moment of stunning clarity this week when talking to a colleague about this: their suggestion was that it’s easier to write about books because books themselves are written-word.
I think there’s something in that. I’ve always been useless at dictating because speaking isn’t the same as writing, and they need different parts of my brain. In the days when I did clinics, I was far faster at typing my own clinic letters than dictating for a secretary.
For the same reason, I got more confident at public speaking when I stopped trying to write presentations out and relied on freely talking around the key points instead. And, probably for the same reason, I find it hard when I phone a company and they ask for a security word (or whatever) that I’m used to typing instead.
So why wouldn’t the same apply to talking about books?
This conversation came back to me this morning as I read Courier Weekly: “One of the best parts about reading a book is getting to talk about it with other people.” Mmm, maybe not.
19: Fran Lebowitz says that “your bad habits will kill you, but your good habits won’t save you.” It’s possibly the most accurate public health aphorism I’ve ever heard.
20: The news that some teams want to play in a new football competition is dominating the papers and bulletins to an extraordinary extent—and no matter how much I read about it, I’m continue to struggle to understand what the problem is, mostly because I’m not really familiar with how football competitions work at the moment (and struggle to care).
For all the hand-wringing about President Trump’s destruction of any form of trust in Government communications, it seems no lessons have been applied to the UK government. When the judgement of the UK media is to disbelieve statements from the Prime Minister’s spokesperson and from his own mouth, we’re in a bit of a sorry (if entirely predictable) state. And, just like Trump, the liar remains popular with the public.
28: Starbucks has on the wall of one of its branches the claim that 99% of its coffee is ‘sourced ethically.’ I’ve been slightly reeling ever since I saw it: Who decided that acting unethically 1% of the time was boast-worthy behaviour? It seems like an active admission of guilt, which obviously doesn’t come as a surprise with that chain, but it still seems amazing that some corporate communications team signed it off. I half expect to see a ‘we’re proud to intentionally overcharge just 1 in every 100 customers’ sign in the next branch I venture into, or perhaps ‘99% of our baristas are paid in full.’ Baffling.
30: I have seen film posters with the line “in virtual cinemas now”—and I’m really not sure what that means. I thought it probably just meant available to stream, but then an ad for Truman & Tennessee said “in virtual cinemas and on demand now – book now” which seemed to rule that out.
André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name was an emotionally intense book about adolescent lust: a deeply passionate summer crush, perhaps love, between a teenager and a slightly older lodger. I found this moving, both for the sheer force of emotion in the early part of the story (which was so intense as to be a little exhausting at times), and for the more reflective, contemplative later parts. The characters in this book will remain in mind for a long time to come. I can’t imagine how anyone made a movie about this given that it’s mostly about thought and emotion rather than anything visual – almost makes me curious enough to watch it and find out.
I was predisposed to like Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills because I liked the other books of his I’ve read, but it turned out that I felt a little less certain about this one. Like his other books, this was all about life’s choices, how relationships change over time, and things that people live to regret. However, I found that the ending of this one left me with just too many unanswered questions, like a murder mystery left unsolved. I nevertheless enjoyed Ishiguro’s masterful prose as always.
The Richard Howard translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince was a pleasant enough fairy tale about a young alien visiting Earth. This was one of those books so frequently referenced in popular culture that I knew much of the imagery and plot before I opened it, and didn’t get a huge amount more out of it for having actually read it. It reminded me a little of Gulliver’s Travels, but with earnestness replacing a lot of the wit.
Benjamin Hoff’s 1980s classic, The Tao of Pooh, described Taoism through Winnie the Pooh and friends. My overall feeling was that this was “nice” – a bit too cutesy in parts, and I didn’t feel I learned much more about either Taoism or Pooh beyond reinforcing my general level of general cultural awareness of both. It was fine – but I can’t say that I fully understand why this has become a perennial bestseller!
The Beast, by Alexander Starritt, was a satire set in the offices of a caricature of a self-important British tabloid newspaper: The Daily Mail in all but name. I struggled with it. It was full of stock characters and cliché, the predictable plot played out far too slowly, the prose is pretty clunky, and – worst of all – it just isn’t very funny. The insight of the degree to which fear can often lie behind irrational hate was well-observed, but that wasn’t nearly enough to sustain the book.
I was disappointed by Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. I found the arguments mostly unconvincing: there was lots of comparison between targeted social media advertising and mass media ads, made the classic popsci error of setting up falsely dichotomous groups. There has been advertising that is targeted and manipulative and actively harmful for a very long time, from tricks to convince gamblers into voluntary financial ruin to hooking people on addictive substances to pyramid schemes to timeshares. All of this context was missing and it made for a very thin set of arguments. The author used a lot of language which seemed to be intended to shock, from “shitposts” to “assholes” to branding particular sorts of websites as “bummer”, but (perhaps with the exception of the latter) without adequate definitions. So while I agree with some of Lanier’s conclusions – particularly around supported investigative journalism – this book really wasn’t for me.
Hans Rosling, the popular Swedish medical statistician, does a great line in pointing out the degree to which most people’s perceptions of the world are just plain wrong. My short recommended read for this weekend is much the same sort of thing, but based on a very recent survey.
This month, Ipsos MORI has been conducting a 14-country survey to find out people’s perceptions of the make-up of their populations and the scale of social problems. On most questions, the population of each country was way out of whack with reality. My recommended read is Zach Wener-Fligner’s snappy blog post about some of the key findings – but if you have time, it’s worth exploring some of the detail of the survey on the Ipsos MORI site, too.
Or if you haven’t got the time for that, here’s an infographic they put together with some interesting findings:
Of course, there are lots of interesting implications here for democracy and social norming, and some interesting thoughts about responsibility, too. Though, before getting into this, we should take a moment to recognise that Great Britain did pretty well in the survey ranking, for all that we criticise ourselves for this sort of thing.
When articles have been published about similar surveys in the past, many commentators have reacted by blaming the media. I disagree: I don’t think that non-Public-Service media has any implicit responsibility to inform the electorate. I think their responsibility is to their shareholders, and if distorting the truth without breaking the law increases profit, then sobeit.
This is why Public Service media is so important, and so valuable. Public Service media outlets should, indeed, have a responsibility for educating and informing. This is a difficult task against the torrent of inaccurate information from elsewhere, especially when those outlets choose to pursue large audiences at the same time as giving entirely accurate information. I would challenge the existing industry assumption that Public Service media should obtain a large audience. Does it matter how many people consume BBC News, for example, provided it is understood to be a reliable source in times of uncertainty?
But then, I guess, there’s a reasonable counter-argument that if it doesn’t pursue an audience, the widely understood social narrative will likely deviate further from reality.
It’s a complicated problem – and shouting about the Daily Mail doesn’t help.
Guardian Angel is an autobiography penned by Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips. In an interesting conceptual move away from the traditional autobiography, it is focussed on only two aspects of her life: her changing relationship with her parents, and her political shift from writing for the left-wing Guardian to the right-wing Daily Mail. As it happens, I think that’s a pretty good concept. The way in which relationships with parents change over the course of a lifetime is a deeply personal yet universal topic, while the political shift is perhaps the most interesting public aspect of Phillips’s life.
If this book was fiction, it would quickly become a literary classic. It would be a tragicomic character study worthy of Ricky Gervais, but with a subtlety in the detail revealing the flawed perspective of the narrator worthy of any classic author. It would represent a fusion of the tools and techniques of some of literature’s greatest works with a modern storyline and sensibility. I, for one, would be raving about it. And so, perhaps I should review it in those terms.
The narrator has a virtually messianic opinion of herself, which lends itself readily to the tragicomic form. The book opens with the narrator grandly describing herself in the third person:
The child lay tensely in the darkness, in a bed that was not her own. A crisis had placed her there, and impending and unimaginable horror which only one person could prevent.
The “unimaginable horror” turns out to be the death of the child’s aunt: no doubt a tragic event, but hardly “unimaginable”. This third person drama continues for some time, before the predictable, but no less comically dramatic, dénouement of the opening passage:
I was that child.
This is a very effective opening to a character study. In a few hundred words, it gives the measure of the narrator, especially her propensity for hyperbole and drama, and the third person narrative structure strikes a strong note of ego. The tendency towards dramatic hyperbole is reinforced early on. The narrator describes her childhood dislike for her paternal grandmother’s “grim slum” – which she also, somewhat inconsistently, describes as a “fine Georgian terrace”. The narrator describes the house’s oval windows, and – such was her dislike for the property –
to this day I cannot look at upright oval shapes … without my heart lurching, absurdly, into my mouth.
The monstrous ego of the character is infused throughout the text, though is perhaps most obviously reinforced by two passages: one, which is far too long to quote, in which she lists a number of perceived personal insults from other journalists (as distinct from multiple passages in which she lists criticisms of her work); and another, in which she describes the magnitude of her level of understanding of “Middle Britain”.
There are issues on which the Mail and I do not agree. I myself seemed to have an umbilical cord to Middle Britain.
Another exemplary passage is this:
Without wishing to sound boastful, I believe that on issue after issues where the evidence is now finally in, I have been proved right.
This latter passage is made more amusing by her citation of global warming as an issue “where the evidence is now finally in”; evidence which, apparently, confirms her view that man-made global warming is a oil-company perpetuated “scam which has hoodwinked millions and cost billions”. Hence, the narrator is comprehensively established as unreliable, egotistical and deeply flawed.
This characterisation groundwork is quite crucial, as the opinions described by the narrator as her own offer a crescendo of offence. Had the character not already been established as a tragicomic creation, the humour in the illogic of the offerings would be overshadowed by the level of offence they contain.
Given the concentration of the book on her own relationship with her parents, it is unsurprising that the narrator proselytises extensively about family structures. There is considerable depth about her own difficult relationship with her father, which she claims inflicted “lifelong harm”. Her father was present, but disengaged. From this, the narrator draws the illogical conclusion that divorce is harmful to children. I hardly need point out that divorce and remarriage in her case may well have equipped the narrator with the strong father-figure she claims to have lacked, where a refusal to divorce removes this possibility. In common with the opinions expressed in the rest of the book, an initial expression of dissatisfaction with the state of “modern Britain” builds to a climax of breathtaking offensiveness.
In this case, the narrator is both “perplexed” and “appalled” by the simple statement of fact that there are circumstances in which it is acceptable for a mother to leave her husband, and thus become a single parent,
and more, that it is her ‘right’ to choose such a lifestyle.
Indeed, the narrator goes on to later describe divorcees and children born out of wedlock as “deviants”, despite undermining even the technical definition of the word by quoting statistics showing that almost half of British marriages end in divorce. Yet, simultaneously, the narrator claims not to be “judging individuals”.
With similar illogic, the narrator accuses the BBC of racism for considering the needs of “Asian and African-Carribbean audiences”, and – with particular poignancy given the publisher of this book – that mainstream publishers will not publish her work because it is too factually correct.
Hopefully, I have now given you a flavour of the structure of the book, and perhaps some sense of the way in which the layers of tragedy, comedy and farce interplay in a cohesive and rather engaging way. Yet there are two other layers to this work which raise it above the level of its peers.
The first of these two additions is the peppering of one-liners which encapsulate all three elements of the main narrative. Most of these are difficult to quote in a review, as they are heavily dependent on some length of preceding material, yet I shall try to give a flavour. There is a long section in which the narrator describes the negative reaction to one of her earlier books, in which she proposed sweeping changes to the British system of education. She then extensively quotes criticism of this work. In response to other writers’ accusations that her proposals went against research evidence, she writes:
So all the teachers, educational psychologists, government inspectors … parents and pupils to whom I had spoken were not evidence, merely ‘anecdote’
To end a defensive rant against her critics with a statement of such profound bathos is, surely, comic genius.
The second exalting addition is the rich vein of unjust persecution running through the book. This juxtaposes the narrators abhorrent opinions with her own sense of persecution at the hands of others. There is one profoundly brilliant passage in which, in the context of her views on Israel, she claims
I could never relax when turning on the radio or TV, opening a newspaper or going to a dinner party, for fear of hearing some libellous accusation or other casual prejudice
The remarkable device of having this narrator complain about casual prejudice demonstrates the lack of insight possessed by the character in an exceptionally clever and highly amusing manner. This point is further emphasised by the inconsistency of opinion presented. Towards the end of her book, she claims
In my view, polarised thinking represents precisely the problem that no so bedevils politics in the UK and America. The left/right argument, which forecloses any balanced approach, simply wipes out any political space on which people can meet and discuss issues on the basis of reasoned debate rather than ideological name-calling.
It is hard to suppress a smile as the character is revealed as a brazen hypocrite, as she herself engages in something close to ideological name-calling:
The left is not on the side of truth, reason, and justice, but instead promotes ideology, malice, and oppression. Rather than fighting the abuse of power, it embodies it.
Of course, the problem with this interpretation of the book is that it is not fiction. This is a book written by one of Britain’s best-paid newspaper columnist, who credibly claims to have the ear of government. Her Gordian knot of inconsistent opinion, pseudo-mortality, and prejudice is what passes for sociopolitical commentary in one of the country’s best-selling and most influential newspapers.
There is some undeniable literary quality to this book, but only when judged beyond its own terms. Within its own terms – that is, as a non-fiction piece – it contains such odious opinions, repulsive arguments and factual distortions that I struggle to believe that it can represent the views of its well-educated author. It feels like it might be pandering of the worst kind, content written purely to falsely reinforce inaccurate prejudices.
As it seems only fair for my “star rating” to judge the book on its own terms, I’ve given it the minimum rating – one star – but hope that doesn’t detract from the qualities that this book does, albeit unintentionally, offer.
Guardian Angel is available now from amazon.co.uk in Kindle format only. Many thanks to emBooks for supplying a free copy for the purpose of this review.
In some ways, watching a dying industry attempt a caterpillar-like metamorphosis is as fascinating as following a nascent one. It’s genuinely intriguing to see the choices different players make about which parts of their former selves they retain, which they reject, and what new elements they add to their products. For this 2D post, I’ve picked out two articles which look at very different responses to those challenges.
The first is an article from the Columbia Journalism Review by Peter Canby about the fact-checking process at the New Yorker, and the way in which that process has morphed under economic pressure. I’ve never before seen such a clear admission from anyone – other than, perhaps, The Guardian – that mistakes happen.
Ultimately we make mistakes. I wish we didn’t, but they are inevitable and constant.
Admitting a problem is, as they say, the first step to addressing it. This article suggests to me the the New Yorker has invested a great deal of effort in working out how to minimise errors without maximising costs, and continues to do so.
At the other end of the spectrum, as Martin Robbins describes in the New Statesman, the Daily Mail has taken a rather different approach, seemingly involving a rather strong dose of hypocrisy.
The coverage of Kick Ass star Chloe Moretz at the age of 14 contains some classic examples: looking “all grown up” she was “every inch the classy young lady” at a film premiere, for example. All this comes from a newspaper campaigning vigorously against ‘sexualisation’ and its impact on children.
I personally find the Daily Mail‘s approach distasteful, but it’s hard to deny that it has been successful. Mail Online is now the world’s most popular news website (perhaps “news” should be in inverted commas), with almost double the number of unique browsers of the BBC News website. Vox populi, vox dei – or at least vox populi, vox argentum. If this is what most people want to read, perhaps we should be a little more respectful towards their art in our tone, even if we make the argument no less forcefully that the protection of the individuals concerned should be paramount. Or perhaps we should focus on the underlying problems of society, rather than the newspaper-based symptoms. I don’t know.
2D posts appear on alternate Wednesdays. For 2D, I pick two interesting articles that look at an issue from two different – though not necessarily opposing – perspectives. I hope you enjoy them! The photo at the top of this post was posted to Flickr by Jon S and has been used under Creative Commons Licence.
The content of this site is copyright protected by a Creative Commons License, with some rights reserved. All trademarks, images and logos remain the property of their respective owners. The accuracy of information on this site is in no way guaranteed. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author. No responsibility can be accepted for any loss or damage caused by reliance on the information provided by this site. Information about cookies and the handling of emails submitted for the 'new posts by email' service can be found in the privacy policy. This site uses affiliate links: if you buy something via a link on this site, I might get a small percentage in commission. Here's hoping.