Ho ho ho! Happy Winter Festival!

Hello people. It's another one of those posts where I tell you I'll be away for a bit because I'm going on holiday. I am you know. At Christmas and everything. To a Muslim country. I am the PC Gone Mad daddy!

Comment moderation will be on for a week while I heathen it up. In the meantime, entertain yourselves with this Winterval related post at TabloidWatch.

Merry Winter Light Day!

Richard Littlejohn - Viz character?

I quite like reading the occasional Richard Littlejohn column.  They're like crappy old sitcoms from the seventies where someone says something, someone else mishears it and the whole episode is about them running around making an arse of themselves until their trousers fall down and they slip in some mud and the vicar walks in.  "Honestly Jerry, I said rearrange the flowers and cut off the buds - not loosen your trousers and dance in the mud!"  That sort of thing. 

They're really not for reporting the news

If there's a central point to this blog, something I constantly bang on about almost to the point of barking it at whoever's sitting next to me on the tube so they clutch their bag a bit tighter and shift their weight in their seat, trying to get as far away as possible without making visual contact with my boggling eyes; it's that papers, especially the tabloids, don't exist to report the news.  They exist to crowbar events into pre-existing narratives and create propaganda by trying to disguise editorial as information.  I bang on about it because it's true.  The voices tell me.

How to write a 'Christmas is under attack' scare story

Okay, imagine you're a tabloid reporter.  No - don't top yourself!  You can go back to being you after.

You're a tabloid reporter, and being a tabloid, your paper loves the 'Christmas is banned' scare stories and all that 'PC Gone mad' rubbish.  You come across a story that could be turned into an 'Oh my god why are they banning Christmas?  Won't somebody think of the children?' scare, but you're aware that it's most probably bollocks.  What do you do?

Bingo!  You write the story anyway!  Just follow this handy template and you're away.

Colour me suspicious

This morning, a story made my Crackers sense tingle.  Not to tell me that a tabloid story was rubbish, but to tell me that something behind a few tabloid stories was very fishy indeed.  there are wavy lines coming out of my head right now.

How the Mail reacts when one of its myths are exploded

A couple of weeks ago, Zoe Williams wrote this excellent piece about David Cameron's "watch in wonder as I shamelessly parrot tabloid fanstasies to stop them being nasty to poor little me, after all, I'm not going to be Prime Minister or anything" speech, in the Guardian - 'Conkers, goggles, elf'n'safety? You really could make it up'.  In it, she shows how most 'elf 'n' safety gawn mayyd stories are, well, made up.  Here's what she says about the infamous 'conkers are banned at school unless the kids wear conkers goggles' myth:

Last post on Liddle (I hope)

In my last post, I promised to publish some stats I had from the Met police about whether Rod Liddle's claims about young black men being responsible for the 'overwhelming majority' of certain types of crime was true.  I wish I hadn't now.  Not because they prove Liddle's argument (they don't) but because in the fuss that's resulted from his dashed off 91 word blog post, we all seem to have zeroed in on the figures rather than the actual argument they were being used to support.

Mail in 'defends Liddle' shock!

Via The Enemies of Reason, I've noticed that the Daily Mail has, unsurprisingly, published an article from a columnist defending Rod Liddle's racist couple of paragraphs I looked at yesterday.

Of course, Kwasi Kwarteng has defended Liddle's right to say what he wants without actually demonstrating that what he said was true.  Instead, he's moved the goalposts to talk about how black people are disproportionately involved in crime, which is not the same as showing that young black men commit most of certain types of crime in London.  For the best rebuttal of that idea, see this comment at Liberal Conspiracy (based on this document).

Rod Liddle - more racist than the BNP?

Lots of people have written about Rod Liddle's descent into overt racism, and Charlotte Gore especially points out how far of the mark Liddle's central argument is.  He says:

The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.

Quick answer to Sue Reid's latest question

'Eighteen years after an Act outlawing them... why are the devil dogs still killing our children?' asks Sue Reid in her latest Daily Mail masterpiece.  Well, I'll tell you.

It's because the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 was a rubbish, ill thought out piece of legislation that was hastily brought in to placate the tabloids, who had whipped up such a perfect moral panic that it's used in textbooks as a case study.  You know, the one that coined the term 'Devil Dogs' you're using in this new moral panic the tabloids are whipping up.  Now a question for you - is whipping up moral panics the best way to deal with problems?

Still not banning Christmas

 A couple more, "they're banning Christmas," style stories from the Mail.  I've been prevented from looking at these by catching the dreaded swine flu, so you get two for the price of one in this post.  Lucky old you.

'Pull the other one! Christmas cracker gags to keep the PC brigade happy' is a story that has been picked up by the Express, Telegraph and Sun.  According to the Mail, this is what happened: