FILTHY RAGS

FILTHY RAGS

How can it be that a disgusting filthy rag

Sees itself the fine upholder and guardian

Of all that is “decent” about British life

Yet lies through its teeth every edition?

Yet their readers believe everything they say

No matter what facts that they’ve omitted

When your moral compass points the wrong way

They’ll ignore every offence that you’ve printed

How can it be the same disgusting filthy rag

Is perceived as fine defender and warning

Against all that threatens “decent” British life

By those finding it on their doormat each morning?

You can trust what you read in the papers

They have more resources than you…!

Why do you think you know better than them?

One individual could not have a clue

How can it be such a disgusting filthy rag

Can disguise its own personal agenda

By pretending to preserve a form of British life

Yet not caring what hatred it may engender?

Take a moment criticising their loyal readers

It will be seen as a deep personal attack

Suggest there’s something wrong with any of them

And just watch those media empires strike back

How can a nation that once was quite civilised

Tolerate them all heading off the same way?

Pushing all their fear and hatred and loathing

Of a more understanding world every day

Their daily news agenda is all based upon

What they think their readers care about

Support whatever lies they want to believe in

Refuse to suggest any reasonable doubt

How can it be that these disgusting filthy rags

Have been getting away with this for so long?

Why do those who want a “decent” British life

Tolerate a business so fundamentally wrong?

Many things that they’ve printed are criminal

The most harmful lies ought to be treated as such

Papers and their owners wield far too much power

And they prefer to keep us all out of touch

How can it be that some once less filthy rags

Are posting clickbait to make advertisers pay?

Chasing profits and circulation won’t keep

A moral compass pointing the right way

Martin A W Holmes, October 2016

MAKING CUTS

I was interested to note that, for obvious reasons, a "beheading" sequence was edited out of a piece of Saturday evening entertainment last weekend, and, whilst various people might find this to be far too cautious, or "letting the terrorists win" I genuinely do think that, in this instance, it was the right thing to do.

You could argue until the cows come home about the validity of such a possibly violent scene being considered "entertainment" anyway, but that's not really the point that I'm discussing here. After all, such scenes have featured to demonstrate "mild peril" in all sorts of movies, TV series, and historical dramas over the years, but sometimes it's about timing, and the "family audience" at which this particular programme was aimed, perhaps ought not to be exposed to such a scene during these sensitive times.

After all, it's not "Game of Thrones" is it…? Just some harmless teatime family fun, and sometimes such things are deemed "inappropriate" even if the kids go off and hack at virtual warriors in their video games afterwards.

Regularly TV shows or showings of movies are pulled from the schedule because of some breaking news story, be it a plane crash, or a stabbing at a school, and in the majority of cases this is done purely because it is understood that it might be "too soon" for a work of fiction to be graphically representing something that is horribly real, especially as the families and friends of those involved in the unfolding tragedy may possibly be viewing.

You may think that this is wrong, that such excessive sensitivity is pointless, or that "art" needs to be "challenging" in some way and take risks, but I prefer to believe that sometimes it's just showing a kindness or a courtesy to other people's suffering, and it's actually quite pleasing that in these cynical times, someone in broadcasting circles is capable of just being nice…

The decision about whether or not top cut is never lightly made, but, in my opinion, it is always better to err on the side of caution in such matters, simply because you can never really be sure just how the scene is going to be received, and, whilst it is often the case that showing the very same programme or film at a later date shouldn't make such scenes any less shocking - art, after all does sadly often imitate life and help us to understand it better - sometimes it's about timing and judging the mood of the viewing public.

You should also try to imagine the reaction of an organ such as the "Daily Mail" if such a sequence had been shown just a few days after the second brutal execution of a journalist had been revealed to the world, and a similar threat was still hanging over another hostage.

The pious, holier than thou, "How very dare they?" headlines would have been leaping out at us all, especially as they appear to be just waiting for any excuse to go "BBC Baiting" these days.

That said, the press in general really have nowhere to stand when it comes to this particular matter. Despite the family and the Foreign Office pleading for the name of the hostage not to be released, the very next morning "The Sun" had both his name and a photograph plastered all over their front page, along with some aggressive rhetoric which really, really can't have helped cool the situation down or relax the threat to the hostage.

I wonder if they were pleased with themselves? I wonder if they congratulated themselves on their exclusive, or their "bravery" at daring to be so defiant from the safety of their offices? I wonder whether they genuinely believe that the only way to deal with such a threat is to stand so very defiantly when it's somebody else's neck on the line?

Cretins.

Happily, even those news outlets that normally publish the front pages of the various newspapers on their own sites had the wisdom not to show this one as a roundabout way of getting around the "problem" of not being able to use the name, but I'm sure that it's only a matter of time before they decide, much as during the era of those "Super-Injunctions", that the knowledge is in the "public domain" and it is ridiculous to pretend any more.

Would that the papers could show the same sensitivity and restraint that the TV drama producers are prepared to.

A WING AND A PRAYER

We all love a mystery, don’t we...?

Ever since that ill-fated flight MH370 vanished a couple of weeks ago, just about anyone and everyone in the world who’s taken an interest seems to have come up with some crackpot theory or other, turning a tragedy into something resembling a parlour game or an intellectual exercise whilst seeming to forget the real people behind the story and what they suffered and how they are suffering still.

From a complicated terrorist plot, or black holes, to a bizarre bullion robbery ripped straight from the pages of one of those brick-sized novels that they seem to sell, rather ironically, mostly in airport bookshops, and other more mundane solutions, just about every possibility has been raked over endlessly because, quite simply, at the time of writing we simply don’t know anything yet.

And, as human beings who now like to think we can micromanage every single aspect of our lives, we simply do not like that.

So instead, in an age of “24 Hour Rolling News”, when not knowing anything has just as much currency as knowing something, expert after expert is wheeled out to underscore the latest theory, and repeat it hourly until yet another theory comes along which has just as little validity as the last one, and so it cycles endlessly until a more “interesting” or “newsworthy” story breaks.

Personally, whilst I hope that the story does find a satisfactory answer, I’m also hoping that it doesn’t, given that hope will probably have to turn to despair for the families and friends, and between the bittersweet satisfaction of finally knowing, and the heartbreak of finally knowing, we’ll have endless “I told you so” idiots claiming that they “knew it all along” in our day-to-day lives, whilst the rolling news juggernaut will have to comb over it all again in that “news porn” way they have of going about things nowadays.

Meanwhile, given where the search was finally taking place towards the end of last week, at the limit of all those huge ovals on the maps showing the flight’s maximum range and based upon those few photographic blobs which must have taken days to distinguish from all of the other blobs on those satellite images (and picking them out is a highly-skilled and laborious, time-consuming job, by the way) we cannot rule out an aircraft simply flying along on autopilot until the fuel ran out.

Mundane, I know but there you are.

The problem is, of course, that we all hate a mystery, don’t we...?

This awful realisation that we can just fall off a radar in this day and age and nobody, but nobody, would know quite what happened to us. After all, in this age where almost everyone we meet insists on being in almost constant contact with everyone else they know, and nobody wants to be anonymous, many people seem to be wondering how this is possible.

Yet we forget that people disappear every single day and, quite often, not through their own choice. Also, despite being a small world, it’s a great big world out there into which people vanish all of the time, and that’s only on the land.

Once you consider the vast, inhospitable emptiness of those huge oceans, massive unforgiving open spaces into which sailors have been able to get lost for years over the centuries, it’s suddenly far easier to understand, especially when you realise that signals and radar contacts can fade once you disappear over the horizon, and that mobile phone masts aren’t dotted around the seas like some people would have you believe.

From the Daily Mirror
(NOT to scale)

Ah yes, the sheer vastness of the oceans. To read that fount of all unknowledge, the mighty TwitWorld, you'd think that some believe the graphic of the plane and the graphic of the world behind it on all of those news items are actually to scale and that the sea is naught but a rockpool in which to look.

However, they’ve still not found Glenn Miller and he was only crossing the channel…

Meanwhile, part of the sad reality of jet travel is that the only reason we know where most of these flying aluminium tubes are most of the time is because they are able to transmit a signal and be seen by other airliners. If, for whatever reason, that signal stops and there’s nobody around to see what happens next, everything else is just extrapolation and hope.

They call it “A Wing and a Prayer” for a reason, you know…

Still, the press loves a mystery and they can fill page after page or hour after hour of conjecture and speculation and they know that we, the readers and viewers, will lap it all up as we struggle to come to terms with something unknowable, rant and rage about not being told anything by people who don’t know anything, and fill the void with ever more ridiculous conspiracy theories in lieu of anything resembling an actual fact.

Because the press hate a mystery and so, instead, they turn every plausible theory and barely tangible fact into a news story in the hope that they too, like the pub bore, can finally tell us that they “knew” all along, or that they had “heard a whisper” about something which was too dangerous to reveal before everyone else knew it anyway, which is always the “get-out clause” of the totally ignorant.

Still, it is unusual for anyone to admit in this day and age that they don't know anything, which is why every bugger's got a theory, but until the (presumably) sad conclusion of this tale is revealed, we really do need to remember that nobody knows anything, and everything else is just idle and ignorant speculation.

And the world needs to start thinking more about the people involved than the intellectual puzzle they’ve left behind them.

FEWER OR LESS

I really ought not to listen to the news…

On Monday evening an Ofsted inspector had me shouting at the radio as I waited in the railway station car park, mostly because of the incongruity of his bleating on about standards whilst allowing that most irritating of errors to slip from his own lips…

"In schools where there are one hundred and fifty pupils or less…" he burbled, before being immediately drowned out by my sharp intake of breath as I impotently raged "Fewer… fewer… FEWER!!!" back at the receiver.

I like the supermarket "Booths" up in the Lake District for this, by the way, and its insistence on having a "ten items or fewer" checkout always pleases me whenever I'm there…

Anyway, when my Beloved arrived, I asked whether this was an unreasonable response before sneaking away to Tweet about it as she had her shower after we arrived home.

Please write out 100 times "Schools with one hundred and fifty pupils or fewer..." ;-)

I mean, I know I'm not perfect when it comes to matters of grammar (I have acquaintances on FizzBok who seem to delight in pointing out my errors in that regard…) but then I suppose that, as a non-professional, I don't really have to be, do I…?

And I am most definitely never going to be asked to report upon the competence or otherwise of someone else like, I don't know, an Ofsted inspector might be...

Meanwhile, what is it about some of the astonishing women with the long, dark hair that sometimes makes them so very self-destructive…? During that particular news programme, the tragic news from New York about L'Wren Scott was breaking, which, given that a friend of mine who, I believe, actually rather resembled her, died in similar circumstances quite a few years ago now, it actually dredged up a bad memory or twelve...

And Ms Scott was the same age as me, too, which always puts a poignant thought or two into my head.

And all of those front page pictures of Mick Jagger the following morning, they weren't at all intrusive, were they? Such things really do make me sick of the whole news media profession, whether it's the paparazzi who took the picture, the journalist who wrote the copy, the editor who approved it for publication, or the publishers who put out these rags.

They ought to be utterly ashamed of themselves, and just saying that it's what the people want is really, really no excuse, in my, most irrelevant opinion.

All that I know is that when that friend of mine died in those really not dissimilar circumstances a few years ago, I don't think that I'd have reacted too kindly to having a camera shoved in my face at the very moment that I was told about it.

This may be an old-fashioned view in this modern era, but I think that some moments deserve a little bit of privacy and dignity no matter how enormous a celebrity you might be, and I genuinely believe that I would respect the photographer more if he'd stood back and said "Do you know what? This really is not the moment for this…"

What public service is served? What good does it do to intrude into other people's grief in such a crass and thoroughly unpleasant manner…?

Just to see, presumably, if they could get an unguarded reaction or an even more gut-wrenchingly awful headline about inappropriate behaviour or a crack in the facade something equally unsavoury.

Sometimes I wish that I could just tell these wretches to just go away and think about what they've done… but I don't suppose that it bothers them one jot.

Then again, perhaps it is just as scuzzy of me to reprint their headlines here to try and explain what it is that I'm getting quite so worked up about, or does the fact that I hid the photograph in question excuse that if it also reveals those scumbags working at the tabloids for what they really are…?

Not that we didn't already know, of course…

TWITNEWS

Just the teeniest, tiniest of rants of the day, today...

Whenever there's a news story nowadays, the "online" version (and sometimes even the main bulletin) always seems to be full of celebrity Twitter quotes about what the "great" and the "good" "reckon" about whatever the situation is, the finding of which seems to be what passes for journalism in the modern era.

Nowadays it seems as if the "profession" of Journalism involves spending your day on the various social networking sites looking for the various impressive tid-bits that other people have written. I've lost track of the number of times I've read a few interesting comments in TwitWorld only to find that some hack has bundled them together into some kind of "non-story" on tomorrow's news feeds.

Perhaps this is the price we pay for having this almost voracious need for "24 Hour Rolling News"...? After all, with so much time and space to fill, the exceedingly trivial, and things that are 'trending" become ever more desperate reasons to seek out anything that resembles a "story" no matter how banal and pointless, or how much of a press release for a new, miraculous "Wonder Product" (usually Snake Oil) that it might actually be...

And in a society (I nearly said "culture" there but had to stop myself) where what everyone "reckons" about pretty much is now deemed to be so very important, this means that translating the banal and pointless into "News" has become something of an art form...

If you consider copying and pacing a few random comments to be "art" of course...

Also, so-called "Journalists" always seem to be trawling for their "non-stories" on fan sites and concocting fake scandals speaking about "outrage" about some trivial matter or other (usually involving football, celebrities or telly programes or, on occasions, the special madness reserved for the users of "Mum's net") when in reality there's just one lonely voice who's feeling "outraged" about some trifling issue and who's got into a trolling slanging match with another poor wretch, or, more alarmingly, found another similar spirit who agrees with them and has decided to assist them in their plans to reshape the world in their image.

But it's the celebrity quotes that seem worst. Especially when another celebrity has passed over into that exclusive VIP Lounge in the sky. The once noble art of the obituary writer has now been transformed into a ghastly "cut and paste" parade of what a list of celebrities posted on Twitter as they sat watching the news that morning...

"So sad to hear about..." etc.

Someone needs reminding that a whole list of other people's "OMGs" does not add up to an actual story, a reasoned debate, or a proper "tribute" to anyone, and the truly great and memorable pieces of journalism that have been written over the years have been down to sheer hard graft and knowledge of the craft that the profession, I'll grudgingly admit, once used to have...

MEDIAPEEL 0.1

I’ve always enjoyed a good Alfred Hitchcock movie. For many film fans he remains “the guv’nor” despite the fact that all of his work predates “Star Wars” and therefore, for a lot of film studies courses, simply fails to register on the radar any more. This, to me, is like teaching history whilst discounting everything that happened before the Second World War, but I suspect that there’s a fair amount of that going on nowadays, too.

Over the course of his long career, Mr Hitchcock directed a huge number of classic movies in both Britain and America starring the kinds of iconic actors whose names can already leave people from the generation following mine feeling nonplussed, and leave the rest of the room glancing at the ceiling in disbelieving silence. Cary Grant (“Who?”), James Stewart (“Nevvo-erred-ov-im”), Grace Kelly (“You wot?”) and Doris Day (“Are-u-avvin-me-on?”) are already names fading from the general recognition of the public to be replaced with such luminaries as “Beyonce” and “Justin Bieber” or “Vin Diesel” and that bloke from the “Twilight” movies. Such, I suppose is the fleeting fickle finger of fame, and their stars too will inevitably happen to fade to nothing one day, to be replaced by the next wave, whoever they might turn out to be.

Sadly the grand master shuffled off to the great editing room in the sky before the video age really took off in the domestic market, in the days before the idea of VAM (Value Added Material) on viewing platforms was a glint in the glowing red eyes of a marketing specialist, and before even home-viewing itself was really thought of as being a likely and affordable prospect. Back in those days, you used to go to the cinema to watch a movie and, once it had finished its release run, you might very well never have seen it again until that new-fangled television nonsense started buying them up cheap to fill the massive wastelands of airtime. Even then, you had to make the choice to go to the cinema and probably miss forever that TV show you enjoyed watching because that’s the way things were.

When it comes to the dawn of things like “extras” in the video age, I do remember a friend of mine buying a set of 2 videos of “The Usual Suspects” – one that was just the film and a duplicate tape which had what we would now call the Audio Commentary instead of the soundtrack. I seem to remember that I didn’t think it would catch on, but that option was soon overtaken anyway by the coming of the shiny disc and before you know it all sorts of added fun was being attached to your feature film, wonderful “extras” like “animated menus” and “chapter selection”, but things soon sorted themselves into the sorts of stuff we now recognize as being standard today.

This does very little for poor old Mr Hitchcock, of course. He can hardly be resurrected just to share his thoughts upon flinging dead birds at “Tippi” Hedren, although, because he was a master at self-promotion long before it had the name, there is a certain amount of material around that has been salvaged and added to the various releases of his surviving films. I say “surviving” because his career was so very long that it dated back to the earliest days of cinema when such things weren’t preserved with quite the vigour there would be in later years, and some of his early works are, it seems, lost forever.

The reason this all came to mind was because of an interview with Madonna I saw on TV at the weekend. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Hitchcock used to publicise his films by doing interviews on film. The studio would ask questions and he would answer them on film  and (this is the clever bit) local news stations could splice in footage (from the days of its proper meaning of length of film strips, not what Kate Humble refers to home video clips as being…) of their own interviewer asking those questions and, as far as the viewer was concerned, it would look just as if your local “Tom, Dick, Harry or Jeremy” was interviewing the great man in person.

From the structure of the Madonna interview, and the way the reporter was intercut whilst sitting against similar looking wallpaper, but never appearing in a two shot with her, and the way he started every question with “Madonna…” in that way that you really wouldn’t if you were in the same room at the same time, I had my suspicions that this ancient art was being practiced again, and we should, as discerning consumers, remain on the alert for such things.

I remember the old story of the reported being sacked over the chess tournament piece he did because when he was congratulated on the good luck of just happening to find two old men playing chess in front of the tournament venue he admitted that he’d set it up, and given them a chess set so he could film it. He was fired because “You don’t fake the news!” and I think of that every morning when I see the various “spontaneous” tricks and gimmicks employed by the reporters on Breakfast News and which just goes to show how much times have changed.

OH GOOD GRIEF!

Sunday Express 14 August 2011

Yesterday, I pulled into the petrol station on a typical Sunday afternoon and was rather dismayed to see the headline “Bring back national service” screaming out at me from the piles of newspapers on the forecourt. My first reaction was “Oh, good grief!” at seeing the almost knee-jerk clichéd response of the “hang ’em, shoot ’em, flog ’em!” brigade writ large before having a shudder of fear at the number of people probably nodding in agreement that morning as they read their newspaper over their breakfast table.

We are now living in an era where we want the “quick fix”, the one “sound bite” idea to answer to our society’s problems, where the pronouncement of the average Westminster taxi driver is more likely than ever before to influence immediate policy change, which is not necessarily the wisest course of action, but does lead to the kind of short and pithy headlines designed to keep the masses happy enough that we won’t spot that our lords and masters really don’t have much of a clue how to solve any of our problems and calms us down just enough that we won’t demand their immediate resignation so that the other bunch of jokers can have a go.

Notwithstanding the basic sense of madness at training a load of hooligans in guerrilla tactics and how to use assault weapons properly, there’s the more fundamental sense of where would you draw the line anyway? Whilst I accept that two years of an aimless life given a bit of shape and discipline, a sense of duty and a moral compass sounds a very tempting idea, the basic problems that lead to last week’s rioting would not go away simply because you took two years out of anyone’s own future plans, however limited those plans might actually be.

Not only that, but the people currently being dragged through the courts to face whatever limited punishments we may eke out upon them are from a whole spectrum of society, male and female, employed and unemployed, and a whole age range according to reports from eleven to forty-seven at least. How are you going to choose which of these groups are the ones to be dragged into a life of military service? Is everyone under fifty, even those already on some kind of career path, to be made eligible? Or is it just anyone unlucky enough to be unemployed? Is it merely anyone leaving school at sixteen, or anyone at all who is claiming benefits? Instead of dragging the youngsters off into a life in service, perhaps we should consider making the parents who are shirking their parental duties do a bit of  National Service themselves? But then, of course, who would be left at home to provide an “example” and keep their “feral” children under control?

The devil, as they say, is always in the detail when you want a “one size fits all” solution to your country’s problems. In this era of mass instant opinion it was very encouraging to see the number of people prepared to stand up and say how unacceptable the situation was and then go out and get on with trying to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. Equally, it was noticeable how many were prepared to trot out some angry remark from the safety of their keyboards without really trying to understand that using expressions like “scum” and “animals” really isn’t going to make any difference, apart from to make them feel just a little bit better, but might just have ignited an even worse response from the people they were criticising.

Some people really will wear that “scum” badge with pride.

I believe that the problems that lead up to last week’s troubles are much more fundamental and will take a lot longer to solve than this rather excessive “quick fix” and it will require time and money and hard work to undo the damage done to large sections of the community which might take decades to put right.

Meanwhile, I’m not even sure that an organisation that prides itself upon being the best trained army in the world would want a load of sociopathic layabouts who really didn’t want to be there anyway being added to its numbers. They are not the country’s babysitters. National Service was never the mysterious “cure all” that people claim it was, and neither is a life in the armed forces. Far too many ex-servicemen already find adjusting to civilian life a great difficulty, which is why far too many of them are living amongst the ranks of our homeless.

No solution is perfect, no matter how many journalists and politicians may think they can persuade us it is, and when you pick up such a heavy hammer to crack that tiny nut, you tend to find yourself having to swing it for far longer than you thought you might have to, at a bigger cost than you ever imagined and end up carrying it around with you for a very long time.

These so-called “simple” solutions can be both very complicated and very, very difficult to get rid of once you’ve crossed the line into putting them in place. It’s much like any of the basic freedoms we enjoy. If you give them away too easily, once you’ve lost them you really miss them, and it can be tricky as hell to get them back again.

Whilst we should all be doing our level best to work together to solve the problems that are obviously running so deeply through our culture at the moment, we really must resist the simple, easy and lazy “quick fix” solution, now matter how hard they try to sell it to us. We should remain aware that there are years of real hard work ahead of us, and resolve ourselves to that instead of just nodding over our Corn Flakes on a Sunday morning. These politicians really need to earn the money we pay them to work on our behalf, not just throw us a few phrases that they think will keep us quiet. Me must continue to test them and ask for proper answers to the really hard questions we are asking if we aren’t to find ourselves knee deep in the rubble of our own society.

THE WORD WEASEL STRIKES AGAIN

It’s been a busy old week for those wicked old word weasels, but I don’t want you thinking that we haven’t noticed what’s been going on over here in Lesser Blogfordshire, and that our word-weasel radar isn’t functioning properly. We know what you are doing, oh you crafty weasels, and, as usual, we can see right through it. We always do. You’re dealing with minds that are so mind-snappingly cynical nowadays that we can spot a bit of weaselage almost as soon as it pours from your mouth or your pages. There’s no longer anywhere you can hide from our stupendously finely tuned radar any more, because we can hear you and we know precisely what you mean, even if you don’t realise it yet yourselves.

Basically, we know that if we can see that the weasel’s mouth is flapping, then we know that there are lies coming out of it.

I will therefore make no excuses, or spin my own reasoning in order to try to please you or persuade you otherwise, when I find myself once more returning ever so swiftly to the subject of those weasel words once again today. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder whether our musings and mutterings might, at last, have found their purpose in exposing the word weasels and their web of weasel words for precisely what they are. Feel free, if you so choose to do so, my loyal pair of readers, to expose any further word-weaselry you discover that fails to knock upon the edges of my perception, and expose them upon these very pages, for the discussion will be more than welcome.

For the weasels are on the run at the moment. Toad Hall is to be perhaps freed of the weasels and the stoats and the ferrets, at least for a time. Of course, we can be utterly sure and know for absolute certain that they’ll regroup and come back stronger and harder than ever before, but in the meanwhile we should rejoice in our slight victory over the weasel wordsmiths and take whatever comfort we can whilst we can.

It’s been interesting to see the pack turning on itself and, in the process, revealing to us its own weasely underbelly. The inference being that they thought “We might be bad, but we’re not as bad as they are…” before indulging in a lot of fence-sitting until they saw what the majority of the ordinary people had to say and then deciding that they’d better go along with that. The weasel quisling always instinctively knows which way the battle is turning and knows upon which side his bread is buttered. He knows that to be seen to side with the wrong side will find him tarred with the very same brush he wields so purposefully (My! My mixed-metaphors are on fire today! It must be all those tabloid headline writers dashing for cover…). However, can it really be believed that one particular smaller-sized paper of a notoriously right-wing hue (although without a red top…) is taking the moral high ground mere days after itself cynically blaming the teacher’s strike for the tragic death of a young girl? Surely not…

Because one of the most robust strongholds for the warriors from the ranks of the word-weasels has been smashed to ruins. The people have decided that they will not tolerate an organ that trumpets its support of our brave soldiers, cries weasely tears over the tragedies as they unfold and then allegedly spies upon their grieving relatives to get more juicy stories, more scandalous tittle-tattle and more outraged and outrageous headlines. We know your real agenda. We know what you’re about. You can dress it up however you like, but we can see beyond your weasel-worded façade and see the pretence hidden oh-so-poorly behind it. The second of two-weasel-faces disguised by the mask of the first. We know what you did. You pretended to care, but you couldn’t care less. Profit is everything, moral value less so. As long as you got to feed your own wicked ambitions it didn’t matter who you stepped over to get there. But now you’ve been caught by your own traps, by the same kind of deviousness that you once so proudly executed yourselves. You are tangled in the very weasel-webs you wove and those of us tiring of such brash and blatant scandalmongery must now rejoice for a moment in the fact that these empires built on exploitation of human misery might very well be beginning to crumble and a brave new world might be upon us, even as we already start to be appalled at the means and manner in which it came about. We’re nothing if not even-handed over here at Weasel Watcher H.Q.

However, those of you who, it seems, so nobly exposed the heart-rending tales behind the victims of bombs, as long as we never asked you what your sources were, or gave false hope to the parents of the missing when it was your own activities which helped to convince them that she was safe and well somewhere, you still get little sympathy hereabouts. We shall not easily forgive you pretending for all that time, for all those years, and throughout all those other tragedies, that you gave a toss when all you really cared about was saying what you thought people wanted to hear in order to sell your spite, whilst sneaking around behind their backs trying to get more gossip, more insight, more of that most precious of newsroom commodities, the spiteful tittle-tattle to share in the so-called “public interest”.

But then it is also we ourselves, that very interested public, all of us who inhabit this sordid society, who are also to blame. We encouraged you with our constant yearning for more and better insight. We bought your oily rags. We consumed your ill-gotten tales. We lapped it all up and rarely asked ourselves how you had found these things out. Rarely did we say “enough is enough” rather than “tell me more...” We kept on demanding more of you, and more, and more to feed our own dark and hungry souls. It’s interesting that so many are now claiming to hate the tabloid press, but somebody’s obviously been buying the things for all those years. Still there’s one less now, but its replacement is all ready to pounce.

A fresh lick of paint, a new name, and a whole new stack of weasel words just waiting for the public so desperate to fill that newspaper-shaped hole in their Sunday mornings with something much the same.

As if we’d forget… but the sad thing is, we probably will.

That’s the pity behind the power of the word weasel. How can something possibly be “exactly the same” when it’s obviously dressed up so differently? You can justify anything to yourself, and convince yourself that you’re totally in the right if you simply choose to ignore the wickedness beyond the surface detail. A nice glossy, shiny new look can hide a multitude of old sins if you can persuade enough of us that it didn’t really matter, did it? We will believe you, because we do. People, I’ve said it before, can be idiots. They’ll tell you that they can understand the problems people had with that paper, and why people are getting upset, but still decide that it doesn’t really matter because they only get it for the TV guide anyway, and “what harm can it do…?”

The TV guide, and all those nipples on show, obviously.

Maybe this is why my own failed experimentation with mocking the tabloid press failed so spectacularly recently. How can you possibly spoof something that’s already a tragi-comic spoof anyway?

Nevertheless, as I said at the start, the word-weasels have had a busy few days. The whole “Opera North” fiasco has weaselage plastered all over it. I start to doubt the sincerity of everyone once my weasel-radar is pinging, and it now leaves me wondering about whether it was all just a bit of a publicity stunt, but I cannot just dismiss it as another storm in a teacup. Not yet. For that way the weasels win.

“Oh, it’s not really important! You can just ignore it!” they cry, and their biggest, most powerful weapon remains the apathy of the rest of us. Meanwhile, the corporate weasels of  BAe and Bombardier and their political weasely allies are still weaving their own weasel-words to justify the ruination of so many livelihoods, and the illegal downloading weasels are trying to maintain their innocence in committing what they see as a “victimless” crime. Even my own pension plan has been touched by the weasels this week and found to be buried in another web of words.

We must remain on our guard, weasel spotters, because they’re everywhere.

Keep ’em peeled!

WEASEL WORDS

I remember starting to write these thoughts on “Weasel Words” months ago, but the idea sort of got away from me, but when I saw the Health Minister using his “management speak” flummery to try and justify the cancer treatment “postcode lottery”, the train of thought came flooding back, and I found that this song was dancing in my head again, as it once did on a dark morning in the bleak midwinter. The times had moved on, and the mornings had brightened, but the same old faces were spouting the same old bunkum and twaddle, and everything was still the same.

Words are wonderful things, they can make you laugh and dance and sing, share a thought, share a memory, tell someone you care. Of all the things in this big old world we share, I think that it’s an appreciation of word-wrangling that is the thing that makes me the most chuffed. Oh I can be moved to tears or the heights of joy by a piece of music, and I can be massively impressed by a work of art or a performance by an actor that has me transported to a world far beyond myself, a breathtaking view will naturally take my breath away and fill me with awe and wonder at its impressive majesty, yet equally, a tiny bird pecking at some seed in my own front garden will amuse and delight me, or a fine meal will give me pleasure beyond imagining. All these things are part of the magnificence of simply being alive, but it is the well-chosen word, or the beautifully formed phrase, or the story satisfyingly told that still gets to the very emotional heart of being me.

So why these shallow, selfish, mind-numbingly self-interested, career-saving nonentities want to tangle and spin them into such inane banalities in an effort to avoid telling us the fundamental truth that they try so hard to deny is a crime against every one of us, whether we even notice it or not. Most of us lurking in this strange world that I now like to call Blogfordshire have a love of words. We venture into the world of Bloggerage with an intention to seek out and consume the thoughts and words that others choose to put out into the great miasma in an effort to provide some light, some momentary entertainment, or just an attempt, however ham-fisted it may be, to share what they think of as their own sense of what is something resembling rational thought with the world beyond themselves. So many may fail, but they are at least trying to communicate with their fellow human beings. All of us, everyday, to a lesser of greater extent, be it in the factory, the pub, the family home or the internet want to do is share our thoughts and words with our fellow travellers, those who share this mad, sad little planet of ours, as it spins us away to our individual oblivions. An ability to use words is what raises us up above the other animals and gives us thing we like to call civilisation.

Yet, words can also be completely divisive. They can cause fights, feuds, and even wars, just because of a misplaced or word or an ill-thought-out phrase. Somebody says something about someone that gets overheard by someone else and reported back to someone else who takes offence. People have died because of less.

Words on a page can have many interpretations. I may well mean to be saying one thing in a light-hearted and tinkling vein, but you might read those very same words so playfully meant and take umbrage and deep offence and storm off into the farthest corners of cyberspace and never darken this lovingly crafted corner again. Email seems to be one of the worst for this. There’s no nuance in the average email, no subtlety. A “harmless” phrase can turn the recipient into a mass of rage or a quivering wreck if not chosen carefully or sensitively enough.

Context is everything.

Nuance is vital.

Assume that everyone will read between the lines, even if, in the end, they choose not to read all the lines you wrote for them. Be careful what you write, and how you write it. Be careful what you say, and how you say it. I knew someone once who used to say the most terrible things, and for once it actually isn’t me I’m talking about. Such spiteful, horrible, ill-thought-out things would pour out of her, but it didn’t matter because she would notice your frown, and just as your mouth was forming the phrases to admonish her she would swiftly say “Only joking!” as if that absolved every barb and hurt. I still maintain that some of the worst humiliations and crimes committed by one human being upon another have been done in the name of “Having a bit of a laugh…”

“What’s wrong with you? It was only a bit of fun…”

One person’s idea of “a bit of fun” not quite matching up with your own never quite seeming to register with the jolly prankster or the japing jester, as their victims slink away to wash away their tears at the thoughtless words so artfully and heartlessly woven.

But all these small, petty crimes against humanity pale into insignificance against the word-weasel. The perveyor of “spin”, the weaver of lies and half-truths and phrases designed to hide the truth behind a barrier of plausible amiability, designed to wrong-foot us and send us away contented at having been told a lie in such a way as we might even thank them for doing so. It happens all the time when the “sound-bite” is more important than the obvious truth, when the uncomfortable facts need to be hidden behind a barrier of bonhomie, or the question is neatly swerved away from or ignored altogether in favour of staying on message, when the people must be told what you’d prefer them to hear, and what you think they would like to hear rather than that slippery fellow, that we couldn’t possibly be worthy of (in case it sullied your precious career or made us think you unworthy of the high office you are so obviously besmirching), the absolute truth.

This is why we should be very wary of those who use weasel words, those that dress them up in the verbal equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes, or try to hide the cold hard facts behind the razzle-dazzle of the latest manifestation of management-speak in order to cover up their own general inadequacies, or those things in society that are just plain wrong, and the part that they themselves have played in that wrongdoing. So many can, and so many do, try to bamboozle and confuse us into believing what they believe themselves to be the importance of whatever it is that they do, or, more importantly, do not do, and use their weasely, sneaky and squirm-inducing ways to persuade us that it’s not their fault it’s our fault and there was nothing that they could have done and, even though we know that there is everything that they could have done, we still let them get away with it.

Again.

It’s a nice word “weasel” got a good ring to it. Like “tulip” and “elbow” it has the air of  verbal perfection about it. So why it became associated with slyness and wickedness is anyone’s guess. I find them rather fetching creatures to look at, to be perfectly honest. I’m not sure I’d be too grateful if one ran into my house one evening, but, generally, they seem to be fairly aesthetically pleasing little bundles of fur. Maybe it’s Kenneth Grahame’s fault, with his image of all those stoats, ferrets and weasels infesting Toad Hall burning so brightly from our childhood storybook memories. Maybe, back in those darkest days in the battle for survival in the corridors of academia, I did have the air of the weasel about me which is why I feel a slight fondness for them now. Perhaps that is why my English teacher made me Chief Weasel in our schoolroom performances of A.A. Milne’s “Toad of Toad Hall”…

Beware the Weasel words!

A RANT ABOUT JOURNALISM

This particular rant has been brewing nicely on my own mental stove for quite a while now and anyone who has ever met me probably knew it was inevitable eventually, so I guess its time has finally come and I know that I’m probably going to hate myself for it afterwards. To be honest much of it was written months ago and I’ve resisted putting it “out there” for public consumption because I know that this sort of thing tends to be quite polarising, and might very well get me into trouble with one or two of you, and, to be fair, I’m normally too tired to want to get myself involved in an argument. Then the nation went and got itself involved in yet another grubby little conflict, and so, when I saw yesterday’s headlines, I thought, “What the hell?” and dug around in the dusty corners of the blog pile and dusted it off.

I don’t really know where what I suspect could even be considered to be a kind of prejudice against the business began. Maybe it comes from a sense of bitter disappointment with what it is becoming, because even I am prepared to admit that journalism itself can be a noble and crusading profession, but somewhere along the line it feels as if its lost its way, and this constant desire to feed a public hungry for the latest scandal and sensation brings the whole business down to a very common denominator.

The headlines in yesterday’s national press truly sickened me. As a nation, I thought that we were better than this. Those in the know say that we get the press that we deserve and that our newspapers are giving the people what they want, but, honestly, are the vast majority of us really, really all that happy when we see people being blown to kingdom come on our behalf? Are we really so immune to human suffering that we want to take some pleasure in it? I accept that sometimes the greater good is served by having to make the tough decisions (even if they never actually seem to be tough enough to actually make) but do we really have to seem to be so bloody smug about it all?

I know that in their minds, they’re probably only reporting what they see as being the facts, but it’s the way they go about doing it that truly bothers me. I really thought that this kind of überpatriotic jingoism and glorification of war had gone out of fashion thirty years ago with “Gotcha” and that this need to demonise individuals, no matter how out of control that they might appear to be to us, really should have stopped with the kind of anti-Hun headlines of a hundred years ago. When you see some of those headlines, all carried away with an enthusiasm, excitement and almost action-movie rhetoric that just feels distasteful to me, and some of which do little less than condone the idea of assassination as a legitimate tool of government, you really want to weep.

Don’t the people publishing these stories have any sense of responsibility? Do they not see how that kind of thing might be viewed in certain parts of the world? How it might feed the fires of resentment and hatred? Can they not understand that the headlines they will no doubt be printing after the citizens of our country pay the price for their recklessness will be partly down to their own irresponsibility? Don’t they ever learn that this kind of sensationalism almost certainly means this nation will eventually collectively have to pay a heavy price for their ignorance and bloodlust?

I accept that I do have problems with journalism as an occupation, but at least I like to think that I’ve always been consistent about it. I mean, my own profession’s hardly the noblest in that I need to encourage people part with money they might not be able to afford to part with in order to pay my mortgage, so I’m well and truly in the glassiest of houses (or on less than solid ground to risk mixing my metaphors) if I criticise it. I’m also willing to accept that there have been genuinely great crusading journalists in the past – John Pilger, Paul Foot, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to name a few – but I still feel that huge chunks of the profession still fall into the category of doing more harm rather than good. I suppose it’s because I believe that a lot of the daily business of the news media is built on a culture of opportunism over integrity every time, and I see precious little that convinces me of the opposite.

If someone, even someone working on a lowly local newspaper, sees an opportunity to get a story out that might propel them into the big time, it really seems as if they do not care who they have to walk over to get their story, or who the hell gets hurt along the way. In fact, it would seem that, if getting someone to cry about it helps to tell the story, then so much the better. I know that, ultimately, for most people it’s just a job they do, like any other. It might not even be a job they chose to do, just something they ended up doing, but it’s a job with responsibilities, a job with consequences, and I get the feeling that rather too often a lot of them tend to forget that.

I also accept that I have an utter incomprehension of what it is about a person that would make them want to appear in the news in the first place unless their own self-interest is being served, which might be excessively cynical but it’s the way I genuinely see it. Certainly seeking out an appearance in the press seems to me to be an utterly crazy thing to want to do, and yet some people, not even our so-called ‘celebrities’ seem to bend over backwards to get a photograph of themselves or their nearest and dearest into the local rag, little realising how the media suck you in, chew you up and spit you out, with little thought as to what becomes of you after the fact.

Some of the stories that do get covered seem fatuous at best, fluff pieces of nonsense just really there to polish the ego of the subject or worse, their children. Why anyone would want a picture of their child in the local paper with details of their name and where they go to school for example is quite, quite beyond me, especially as it might very well lead to the very same families crying for the cameras later on, when that information is used by the more unsavoury elements of society to target that child. Maybe I’m just overly cautious, but it wouldn’t half worry me.

Quite often, the press will put people who are inexperienced in the ways of how these things work into the spotlight and then allow the mob to come and pick the bones clean before walking away and absolving themselves of any responsibility. So many of those who put themselves naively into the spotlight seem completely taken by surprise when the tables are turned upon them. Surely we all know now how the system works? Or does everyone genuinely think it won’t happen to them? Why do lottery winners, for example, feel the need to be in the papers after they’ve won? Are you really that shallow? Do you need the world to know that you are now “considerably richer than me”? I’d just want to take the cash and run like a thief into the night.

Then there are the lives completely ruined by the scrutiny of the press. If tomorrow person “X” was completely erroneously accused of crime “Y” and arrested for it, the story would be splashed over the front pages whether or not it turned out to be true, and the press would take no personal responsibility for that, maybe saying that they have to trust their sources or whatever, but “X” would still find their life or career totally in ruins, and six months down the line, no matter what they may claim, the average person in the street would be saying “X”? Isn’t he the guy that did “Y”? People remember the headline for a lot longer than they remember the truth, and even if you’re totally exonerated, the old suspicion of “no smoke without fire” can stick to you forever, and any retractions are seldom published in the same front page banner typeface and six page special report format that the original story was when it broke.

I often think about those articles written – because they very often are full of bile - once someone has been found guilty of a particularly vicious crime. “Monster” this did “Vile” that. Sometimes the language used to describe the guilty party is ridiculously strong and almost pandering to the thirst of the mob for blood, almost as if the rage has been building up during a trial and the journalist needs some kind of cathartic release. Later on, of course, it has occasionally turned out that the person found guilty was not actually guilty of those crimes – like that solicitor found guilty of killing her children who turned out to be totally innocent - and I do wonder how much harm comes to them on the inside simply because of what other inmates have read about them in the paper, true or not. No-one ever seems to retract those “monster incarcerated” articles after the fact or ever bring themselves to say “Sorry, maybe our descriptions of you were a bit strong there.”

It’s in a similar vein that I get tired over gender stereotyping in the media in recent years. “Men do this, women do that” as if the boundaries are never crossed, because the truth is always more interesting than that. It may surprise you, but women can read maps, men can multi-task, women can exaggerate their flu symptoms, and men can be empathic. Everybody isn’t talking about EastEnders… or “Britain’s Got Talent”… or whichever World Cup is currently occurring. We don’t all care about the latest celebrity gossip or want the latest cars, or to play with all the “apps” on the latest trendy style of phone. Some of us don’t even want to have to have the phones themselves but now have to have because that’s the way our increasingly shallow and knee-jerk responsive society has chosen to define itself. It’s just lazy stereotyping that encourages conformity, discourages individualism and makes us all just a little bit less diverse in our outlook and diminishes everybody’s hopes and dreams and opportunities.

I do hope that clarifies my feelings upon this matter for you. Ultimately, I have to accept that having a free press is a good thing to have and is one of the cornerstones of living in a democracy, but I do wish that they took that responsibility more seriously and didn’t take the freedoms they have quite so much for granted. I’m sure a lot of actual journalists are lovely people, but the stuff that they churn out can really annoy me. Unluckily for you I’ve now become just the sort of person to publicly burble on about it and I’m running the risk of turning into Mr. Ranty very quickly. It’s for similar reasons that I’m unimpressed by this “www” idea that everybody’s voice is so very interesting in news media nowadays.

I know that I’ve mentioned this before, but I’d still rather hear one informed opinion than thousands of idiots “reckoning” they know best. Please, please just stop asking the great public mass what they think. Mostly we don’t think, that’s part of the problem. Mostly we’re just ignorant of the whole truth but “reckon” we know better! It’s awful, it truly is, especially when things like that can be used to shape public policy decisions. It’s not for nothing that they used to say that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.

The real problem I generally have with all this mouthing off in public by idiots like me is that it allows the idiots like me to draw attention to our opinions in a way that we previously couldn’t. In the past, if you had an extreme or dangerously idiotic point of view, you either wallowed alone in your madness or pretty quickly got told how much of an idiot you were being when you mouthed off in the bar. Nowadays you get to e-publish your extreme views and get your message across to another couple of idiots who are of the same mind maybe half a world away. Suddenly, instead of having your idiocy stifled at birth, you’ve got something that can very quickly develop into a movement, because instead of realising that you’re being slightly stupid, you can suddenly feel quite confident that there are other like-minded idiots out there who also think along the same lines you do, and the next thing you know fascism is rife across a previously reasonable nation, and there are pages and pages of “tuppeny-ha’penny” journalism where we are encouraged to “have our say” which you can go and have a look at and prove it. All that this proves, of course, is that I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about and that you really probably shouldn’t have read this nonsense today.

Can’t we just let clever people who know what they’re talking about give us a reasoned argument for and against something instead of resorting time and time again to this “sound-bite” culture, and start to learn again as a society to respect a bit of cleverness instead of applauding and venerating the cult of the idiot?