Indigo Jo Blogs

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The sick whore of Fleet Street

by · 21st March, 2009

That is how the Sun, which is of course a world-renowned upholder of journalistic standards, described the Daily Mirror when it printed pictures of the late Princess Diana working out in a gym, secretly obtained by the gym’s owner. It is a fitting title, however, for Richard Desmond’s media group, which include the Daily Express and OK!. I have published more than enough here about the Daily Spew’s vendetta against Muslims (they had it in for Gypsies as well at one point, particularly just before the 2004 EU enlargement), but this is not about Muslims for once; it’s about how spiteful the people who make the decisions at these titles are (this incident gives some clue as to what sort of person Desmond is) and the depths to which they’ll sink to sell copies.

I’m a bit late in taking up this story, but it’s been getting picked over by the media watch blogs (starting here) for the last couple of weeks: last Sunday, the Scottish Sunday Express, which is a Desmond title, published a “story” about how survivors of the Dunblane massacre (in which a man went into an infant school in Scotland in 1996 and killed several young children and a teacher before committing suicide) had supposedly disgraced the memory of the dead by boasting on their Facebook and Bebo entries about drinking to excess and having sex, and showing their tattoos. This behaviour is depressingly common among teenagers up and down the country, but what makes it different here is that, having been through a traumatic childhood experience, they are somehow expected to lead saintly lives, as this blog suggests. The clue as to why they printed this pointless story is in the second sentence of the article by some cow called Paula Murray:

A number of the youngsters, now 18, have posted shocking blogs and photographs of themselves on the Internet, 13 years after being sheltered from public view in the aftermath of the atrocity.

In other words, now that they’re adults, anything goes. Bloggerheads has an article exposing Paula Murray for doing much the same thing.

What utter garbage.

On which subject, even American readers might have heard of Jade Goody, famous for ganging up with two other petty “celebrities” on Big Brother in 2007 against the Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty and calling her Shilpa F**kawalla and Shilpa Poppadum, which led to her being vilified as white trash before somehow being rehabilitated in time to go on the Indian version, hosted by Shetty. Goody is now dying of cancer, and has sold her story to various newspapers to provide for her two sons after she goes (which is said to be imminent). OK! magazine, a Desmond title, has printed a “tribute” edition, complete with “1981-2009”, which it has published without waiting for Goody to die first. I always thought it was a journalistic faux pas to print obituaries before people had died - it doesn’t happen that often (although obituaries of really famous old people are often written before they have died, as was clearly the case with the Guardian’s obit of the late Pope) and causes some amusement (the one I remember was of David Swarbrick, the fiddle player formerly of Fairport Convention, in the Daily Telegraph in 1996). No publication worth its salt would do it deliberately.

But you know what really stinks about their behaviour in this case? Goody sold the photography rights to OK! for £700,000, but then banned one of her friends (and her biographer) from the party because she works for a rival publication, Heat. I’m not sure if this is common (and Marina Hyde in today’s Guardian suggests otherwise), and when a publication gets exclusive photo rights then they need to protect them somehow, but if most of someone’s friends are in the media, a course of action like this will make the party not much of a party. When they treat a terminally ill woman in such a petty-minded, spiteful fashion and then publish a “loving tribute” presumably hoping that she’d conveniently die before people read the magazine, well, hypocrisy doesn’t even begin to describe it.

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