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The Wiki Man

Rory Sutherland

Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

A fortnightly column on technology and the web

I am still waiting for an enterprising research company to publish honest readership figures for British news-papers. Not the boring stuff about what we read at the breakfast table or flourish at our desks, a decision driven by badge value. No, what I want to know is which papers people reach for in private when they find themselves on the loo with a full selection of news media to hand. You see I’m happy to bet that, in such circumstances, even Paul Johnson or A.S. Byatt reaches for the Sun or the News of the World first, and the Pope keeps a sneaky copy of Bild tucked behind the cistern. So I’m sure a few Spectator readers have by now furtively watched the Max Mosley film online.

Having done so you probably felt, as I did, that the paper’s decision to publish this film was a mistake. Intended to support a public interest defence, that to engage in alleged Nazi role-play is in itself newsworthy, it has instead had the unexpected effect of rallying (unfortunate verb) people behind Mr Mosley.

First, it prompts in us the fairly obvious objection that (to paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke) there isn’t a man alive whose sexual fantasies involve hiring five girls from an escort agency and asking them to dress up as Liberal Democrats. (‘Listen, luv, I’ll just watch you two loosen each other’s Birkenstocks one notch at a time while the other three complain about local street-light provision.’) Second, there’s the fact that tabloid video of this kind rarely works, because the banality of the reality is no match for the luridness of the original prose. And banal it is. Granted I have no experience of S or M (as my wife loses her house-keys four times a week, anything involving handcuffs would be foolhardy), but I have never seen pausing for a tea-break as being typical Nazi behaviour. That bit in Triumph of the Will when they all knock off for a brew? I must have been asleep at that point.

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