Newspapers

Thursday

Alex Massie

Hey, Jaycee Dugard! Here’s the sports news you missed while you were being raped!

This is perhaps the single worst column I’ve read. Ever. Anywhere. I have absolutely no idea what Mark Whicker thought he was attempting when he wrote this. But that the editors at the Orange County Register would then actually see fit to publish it is utterly incomprehensible. Mr Whicker begins: It doesn’t sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page. Box scores were not available to her from June 10, 1991 until Aug. 31 of this year. She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably hasn’t high-fived in a while. She was not allowed to spike a volleyball. Or pitch

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Daniel Hannan & Enoch Powell: Spectacular Media Stupidity Guaranteed

If a politician expresses admiration for Winston Churchill do you immediately think that he’s a great fan of, among other considerations, casual indifference to the Bengal famine, the use of chemical weapons in Iraq or the pulverisation and total destruction of German cities? Of course you don’t. But when a politician says he admires Enoch Powell it’s as if he’d decided to fill the Tiber with blood by scurrying around the country and slaughtering the children of every immigrant in the land. This is, as you might expect, also nonsense. But, lo and behold there’s a mini-rumpus and a song and dance over some comments made by Daniel Hannan to

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Welcome to Guardian Country…

From the Guardian’s Comment is Free today: 1. Cuba is an inspiring country for Americans like me to visit – and going there is an important act of civil disobedience 2. A Swedish report about supposed organ-harvesting by troops in the West Bank isn’t antisemitic – it’s just bad journalism. 3. Meerkat forces? Not good enough. Yup, Peter Jones complains that a car insurance advert featuring Meerkats is racist. This is not a spoof. This is Guardian Country. Imagine how ghastly living there must be… [Hat-tip: GM, via Facebook]

Thursday

Martin Bright

Meet the New Political Editor of the Jewish Chronicle

I was delighted, not to say honoured, when Stephen Pollard approached me to become the political editor of The Jewish Chronicle. It is a great publication with a long tradition of campaigning for the Jewish community in this country. But above all it is good old-fashioned newspaper with all that this entails, including, of course, having an eye to the future. I was pleased to discover that the paper has an active NUJ chapel, which is welcomed by the management. All very progressive – as indeeed is the decision to appoint a non-Jew as political editor. I am really looking forward to working with the fine team of journalists in the JC newsroom and, from time to time, finding my

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Revisionist Labour Market History: Ulster Division

This Reuters piece on hostility towards immigrants in Northern Ireland contains the, well, oddest paragraph I’ve read today: Historically, it was economic migrants from the largely Catholic Republic of Ireland who stirred up sectarian trouble in Protestant commmunities. The south, a “Celtic Tiger” until the credit crunch kicked in, is now the euro zone’s weakest link. Mind-boggling, dizzying stuff, you’ll agree. The Pleasures of Underachievement puts it nicely: “I was wondering where all those economic migrants from the Republic were going all those years from 1922 on. Looks like it was one long border raid.”

Alex Massie Alex Massie

You Can’t Believe Everything You Read in the Swedish Press Either…

So, in addition to everything else the Israeli Defence Forces are organ-hunters, feasting on the livers and kidneys of murdered Palestinians? From Haaretz: A leading Swedish newspaper reported this week that Israeli soldiers are abducting Palestinians in order to steal their organs, a claim that prompted furious condemnation and accusations of anti-Semitic blood libel from a rival publication. “They plunder the organs of our sons,” read the headline in Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, the left-leaning Aftonbladet, which devoted a double spread in its cultural section to the article. (Click here for the original article in Swedish) The report quotes Palestinian claims that young men from the West Bank and Gaza

Thursday

Alex Massie

Burning Issue: Does Hogwarts Have A Drinking Problem?

Lord knows there’s almost no idea too dumb to appear in a newspaper, but this recent effort from the New York Times is a cracker: Does Hogwarts have a drinking problem? As Harry Potter fans crowd movie theaters to catch the latest installment in the blockbuster series, parents may be surprised by the starring role given to alcohol. In scene after scene, the young wizards and their adult professors are seen sipping, gulping and pouring various forms of alcohol to calm their nerves, fortify their courage or comfort their sorrows…recreated on the big screen, the images of teenage drinking are jarring. Previous Harry Potter movies have shown drinking, but this

Thursday

Alex Massie

Worst Hat-Bashing for Years: 16/7/39

No-one who has done time at one of this country’s more expensive educational institutions will be surprised by this account of the aftermath of the 1939 Eton vs Harrow match at Lord’s. It’s a scene of carnage that could be lifted from the pages of Wodehouse or, more darkly, Waugh. Note too the attitude of the police and the frankly suspicious-but-far-too-good-to-check reference to Hitler. This, then, is the Sunday Express’s account, noted by George Orwell in his diary entry for the 16th of July, 1939. Worst Hat-Bashing For Years Our “Gentlemen” Enjoy Themselves Harrow beat Eton at cricket yesterday, at Lord’s, for the first time for thirty years, and then

Monday

Alex Massie

Circumnavigating Manhattan For the First Time

A lovely, gentle, mildly nostalgic piece in the New York Times by Gay Talese, recounting his maiden trip aboard one of the tourist cruisers that sail around Manhattan. It’s as elegant and neat and finely-constructed as you might imagine: Atop a cliff on the Manhattan bank of the Harlem River stands the 185-foot Highbridge Water Tower, which resembles a medieval minaret and housed a carillon that chimed tunes thrice daily until it was destroyed by arson in 1984. Across the river, within view of Yankee Stadium (or stadiums, both old and new), two young boys hurled stones toward our vessel, failing to reach the mark but prompting Captain Weber to

Friday

Alex Massie

Midget Wrestlers Murdered by Fake Hookers

I defy you to find a better story today. Sad, obviously for the tiny wrestlers and their fans, but pure, unadulterated, newspaper gold for everyone else. We need more details but, by the looks of it anyway, this has the potential to be the story of the year… Two professional midget wrestlers have been found dead in a low-rent hotel room in Mexico City. La Parkita (Little Death) and Espectrito Jr – in real life brothers Alberto and Alejandro Jiménez – had been entertaining two prostitutes on the night of their death. Police beileve the women gave the pair, both 35, a fatal drugs overdose before fleeing with their belongings.

Thursday

Alex Massie

What is Middle-Class Elitism? And What’s Wrong With It?

The Guardian is a great* newspaper but also an uncommonly infuriating rag. Take, for instance, this paragraph in what was an otherwise unobjectionable article about Elizabeth David: Now I should be quite clear from the outset that I’ve always been a little ambivalent about David. She famously moved food writing out of the dark didactic corners of domestic science and began to write beautifully and poetically about food as a sensual experience, but she also in her early career wrote unashamedly for the posh and focused attention away from British cuisine and on to Mediterranean food. I find it hard to read her work without enjoyment but it also defines

Alex Massie Alex Massie

The Washington Post’s Humbug: Business as Usual in DC

Perhaps because hypocrisy and mendacity are such open and prominent features of the British press, no-one is terribly surprised when newspapers live down to everyone’s expectations. Newspapers behaving badly is a dog bites man story. They do things differently in America where the Cult of Credentialism and an absurdly-inflated sense of their own importance has made most American papers nigh-on unreadable. The astonishing thing is that it took the public so long to realise this and abandon their worthy, inky morning muesli. So, who can fail to be amused by the revelation that the Washington Post is whoring itself to the highest-bidder, promising to arrang useful access to Obama administration

Monday

Alex Massie

Iran Coverage: New Media vs MSM

I agree with James’s view that this New York Times’ blog is doing an excellent job of keeping one up-to-date on the turmoil in Iran. I’d also recommend Andrew Sullivan’s site. What happens next is, frankly, anyone’s guess. But something is happening and the situation is so fluid that it’s difficult for newspapers to keep up. That is, the internet and technology – Youtube, Twitter, blogs etc – is transforming the way we follow breaking news and permitting one to have a better, if still necessarily imperfect, understanding of what may or many not be going on. It’s sometimes said that the internet rewards certainty at the expense of nuance

Thursday

Alex Massie

Department of Denial

Responding to today’s Telegraph story which quotes Major-General Antonio Taguba as saying that the unreleased interrogation photos show “torture, abuse, rape and every indecency” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had this to say: “I want to speak generally about some reports I’ve witnessed over the past few years in the British media. And in some ways, I’m surprised it filtered down,” Gibbs began. “Let’s just say if I wanted to look up – if I wanted to read a writeup today of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champion’s League cup, I might open up a British newspaper. If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Telegraph’s Secret Agenda!

Nadine Dorries is at the end of her tether: Does the DT [Daily Telegraph] have an agenda other than the desire to perform a public service? Why would they expose this fiasco at the start of an election campaign if the priority was not to destabilise the main political parties and to drive votes towards the minority parties? Really, this presumes that newspapers are vastly more cunning than tends to be the case. The Telegraph is motivated by something rather quaintly old-fashioned: a story. Like anything else in the paper this is designed to serve two ideas: make money and b) inform the public. Just occasionally (oh, happy day!), it’s

Thursday

Alex Massie

Chipmunk Hunting

Amidst the public riot over parliamentarians’ expenses, the story of Hazel Blears remains oddly fascinating. And story is the operative word, given that she appears to be the sole cabinet minister singled out for opprobrium despite the fact that several of her colleagues have enjoyed equally shady and profitable dealings with the Fees Office. Since she’s had the gall to criticise the Prime Minister you can see why Downing Street is Chipmunk Hunting, making it clear that her actions were “unacceptable” and all the rest of it. But if Blears is guilty – or guilty enough to be forced out of the cabinet – then surely Alastair Darling and Geoff

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Expenses Backlash Extra! Guilty Party Named!

The problem with being a newspaper columnist is that you have to keep finding new stuff to say. New is more important than better, you understand. So when everyone is outraged (and, hell, justifiably so for once!) by the spectacle of MPs’ outrageous abuse of the spirit, and often the letter, of their expense arrangements then, sure as eggs is eggs, you know some columnist is going to take the contrary view and argue that it’s all a lot of fuss over not very much. David Aaronovitch has nobly decided that this is his role this week, inviting us to cool our passions and admire his sagacity as he scolds

Friday

Alex Massie

Monarchies vs Republics and the Importance of Cynicism

Christopher Caldwell’s* diary in the latest edition of the print magazine is good fun and I look forward to reading his new book. This part was especially entertaining: For many years, the ingenuity of the British press in exploiting the Brown-Blair rivalry story amazed me. What a gift the papers had for conveying that, this time, it was really about to blow. It was good to see last week that this old journalistic warhorse can still be saddled up, with the help of Hazel Blears’s remarks about the Prime Minister’s ‘lamentable’ failure to communicate. To an American audience, Blears’s insistence that she was 100 per cent behind the prime minister

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Swine Flu and Decentralisation

Actually, Tuesdays are now the best day for the NYT’s op-ed page since in addition to Ross there’s David Brooks. His column today is a good one, making the point that the response to the swine flu outbreak offers a fresh example of the debate Brooks frames as: Do we build centralized global institutions that are strong enough to respond to transnational threats? Or do we rely on diverse and decentralized communities and nation-states? Gordon Brown is, you will be shocked to discover, in the former camp. Brooks, sensibly, puts himself in the latter. This is not, you’ll appreciate, merely a question of how best to deal with an infectios

Wednesday