Jim Fitzpatrick on halaal meat
There is a letter in this week’s edition of the New Statesman from Jim Fitzpatrick, Labour MP for Poplar and Limehouse, an east London constituency which includes a very large Muslim population (it is...
Category: Media
Carole Malone: a new low in victim-blaming
This was on “This Morning”, a chat show that goes out on weekday mornings on ITV1, earlier today (Wednesday): Carol Malone, a tabloid newspaper columnist, gave her judgement on the family of which six...
It’s not news, and it’s not fit to print
This was originally going to be a BADD post and I was writing it in my head on Tuesday intending to type and post it that evening after work, but work dragged on longer...
Disability benefits and the self-made mouth
This post has been republished at Where’s the Benefit as a guest post, and you can comment there or here. Last Saturday night, there was a debate on the Stephen Nolan show, a late-night...
Baby boomers didn’t cause all the world’s problems
Yesterday, on the Jeremy Vine news discussion programme on Radio 2, they were discussing the proposition that the “baby boomers” (the generation born within about 20 years after the end of World War II)...
Who is really Undateable?
Channel 4 has been advertising a forthcoming TV show titled “The Undateables”, in which they try to hook up various people with disabilities and disfigurements which might have been getting in the way of...
PCC fails to condemn misleading Mail article
Building for the Future Blog: The Daily Mail and the “Strict Muslim” – Part 2 The above article reproduces the response of the Press Complaints Commission, a deliberately toothless “self-regulation” body for the British...
RIP trolling isn’t the worst kind
On Tuesday night, the BBC broadcast two programmes about online bullying, one of them specifically dedicated to the phenomenon of “RIP trolling”, meaning the phenomenon of mindless idiots posting insulting messages, videos and doctored...
Social-worker bashers’ wilful blindness
On Monday night, BBC2 broadcast a documentary titled Protecting Our Children, the first of a series of three programmes which follows a social worker in Bristol as they deal with one of their child...
“One Born Every Minute”: learning disabilities, babies and marriage
One Born Every Minute is a series on Channel 4 (UK) which features women giving birth, and the nurses and midwives who attend to them. They feature two women (or couples, if the man...
“If Rod Liddle really wants M.E., he can have mine”
Yesterday, Rod Liddle had a venomous article printed in the Sun newspaper on page 13, which suggested that he might like to become disabled so that he could claim money off the state and...
Holby City’s ridiculous bone marrow transplant story
Last night BBC1’s Holby City aired a quite ridiculous storyline in which a 16-year-old girl with the skin condition Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) received a bone-marrow transplant from her sister, which is supposed to cure...
Will they bring the popular press to heel this time?
Recently, there has been much coverage of an inquiry, known as the Leveson inquiry after the presiding judge, into improper practices at a number of British popular newspapers. This started when it was revealed...
Daily Mail advocates waste of taxpayers’ money
Disabled benefit? Just fill in a form: 200,000 got handouts last year without face-to-face interview | Mail Online Throughout today, I’ve been receiving tweets with the hashtag #MyDLA, from people telling what the benefit...
BBC bashes benefit claimants two weeks running
I’m a little late writing about this, but I watched John Humphries’ programme on BBC2, The Future State of Welfare, a few days after it was broadcast (I was working a night shift the...
PCC throws out complaints over ME reporting
Over the past summer, a number of newspapers and broadcast outlets claimed that some so-called ME researchers had been receiving death threats from so-called militant ME sufferers, such that some had abandoned the field,...
BBC management to gut local radio
My favourite radio station is BBC London. I’ve been listening to it for years, and while there are a fair few presenters I don’t like, there are some highly interesting programmes about local issues...
Flather’s attack on Muslims is not brave
UK immigration: Polygamy, welfare benefits and an insidious silence | Mail Online This article by former Tory peer, Baroness Shreela Flather, appeared in the UK Daily Mail on Friday, and consists of a broad-brush...
Eurabian nightmare
The end of Eurabia – FT.com Ths image is from the Spectator, the British political magazine, and represents what passed for journalism on the European and American right during the post-9/11 era. The occasion...
Charges against saline case nurse dropped
BBC News – Stepping Hill saline deaths: Nurse Rebecca Leighton charges dropped Remember the case of the several people who died after someone spiked the saline at a Manchester hospital two months ago? And...