You are currently browsing the monthly archive for February, 2008.
Gone to find some sunshine - back in a week or so.
This is much more like it from David Cox: (Bitching about Guardian Unlimited to date, here, here, here, here and here.)
What may appear disproportionate outrage about a minor act of nepotism perhaps reflects something deeper. It’s a feeling that those who occupy the public pulpit don’t altogether deserve the airs they give themselves. Any such feeling wouldn’t be without foundation.
Since the dawn of the mass media, its practitioners have enjoyed a peculiar degree of immunity from the complaints of those they address. Understandably, they’ve taken advantage of this, growing lazy, sloppy, self-satisfied, self-indulgent, nepotistic and arrogant. Readers have sensed this, but until recently have been powerless to do anything about it. Now, the internet has given them a voice.
Just how they use this voice is not something that media managers will be able to dictate. The people are under no obligation to be mannerly. They may be unruly and often are, but they’re also often right. Certainly, they’ve already shown themselves well up to finding the flaws in illustrious journalists’ output. And, right or wrong, they aren’t going to shut up now.
Politicians have long grown used to facing the wrath of the rabble. It was the vote that brought them to heel. Now, it seems, the web may subject journalists to similar treatment. We shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t like it. Priesthoods prefer quiescent congregations.
That actually makes the Max Gogarty affair feel like the start of something. Up the revolution.
Okay - so I get angry at The Guardian. I get irritated at it because, for the want of anything better, it’s my paper of choice. There are others you expect only (and this is in no way too strong a word) EVIL from.
Despite this lowly opinion of them, they occasionally still manage to behave in a manner so low that it very nearly takes you by surprise.
See below, with thanks from Liberal Conspiracy and The Enemies of Reason for the info and links.
Diana Appleyard - I hope your parents are very proud.
PUBLICATION: Daily Mail (Request for personal case study)
JOURNALIST: Diana Appleyard (staff)
DEADLINE: 14-February-2008 16:00
QUERY: I am urgently looking for anonymous horror stories of people who have employed Eastern European staff, only for them to steal from them, disappear, or have lied about their resident status. We can pay you £100 for taking part, and I promise it will be anonymous, just a quick phone call. Could you email me asap? Many thanks, Diana
HOW TO REPLY:
Email: mailto:dianaappleyard@aol.com
Liberal Conspiracy tells us that her website says she is a contributor to Women’s Hour and a member of the NUJ. Will they have a problem with this?
I believe the LabourHome was the first to publish this. Well done to the whistle blower. No doubt they were pretty close to the journalist in order to receive the mail.
Congratulations to them for doing the right thing and forwarding it to someone who could bring wider attention to this horrific behaviour.
More evidence, following the Max Gogarty blog, of the Guardian’s absolute disdain for its readers.
The message below was sent out as part of its football-based, Friday Fiver Email and was written by Barney Ronay and Barry Glendenning (yes it took two of them to write that snappy intro).
“Possibly after witnessing the cyber-monstering dished out to young Max Gogarty, 19, for the heinous crime of going travelling and agreeing to write about it for a travel website in exchange for bead and beer money, the Premier League has categorically dismissed reports that it will sue Fifa if it tries to stop its foolish plans to play Premier League matches abroad in exchange for TV and merchandising money.
“After all, who in their right mind would hop on a plane and if they knew it would send guardian.co.uk’s more malevolent and sanctimonious readers into a simmering self-righteous fury over … not much really when you think about it? Yep, us too.”
Serially updated. See unfolding story below.
Web 2.0 - can give it to you with both barallels. This is as funny as it is painful. Something tells me the travel editor has a lot of explaining to do.
Discovered via Bloggerheads - thank you thank you thank you. Suddenly I feel less angry towards the Guardian. I am now content just to join in with the laughing - no more slagging, only guffaws.
Max Gogarty Update 1: A Travel Editor Says Sorry (Almost) and gets yet more comment box abuse.
Max Gogarty Update 2: This fabulous comment to the above is spot on and ties in exactly with what I was saying in my last post, - see it wasn’t just me.
What’s simultaneously so marvellous and so awful about this story is what a paradigm it is for so much.
For how the interweb can explode a little story so quickly. For how much hatred there towards a perceived middle class London coterie who run the media. For how un-selfaware that coterie is about their own status. For how much funnier cruel stuff is than all that serious nonsense. For how easy it is to be vitriolic when blogging. And so on and so on.
It’s not Maxieboy’s fault that he represents such a terrible stereotype, but you’d think he might have had an inkling of awareness. Actually, not necessarily, I meet his type on a weekly basis and they are a staggeringly ill-informed bunch. And of course he must feel crushed that this little story has gone a bit nuts and he’s being laughed at for little more than writing a truly ballsucking piece. But you know what, I think he’ll probably survive.
The real issue here, as others have pointed out, is with the travel eds. I don’t think it honestly occurs to you - and when I say ‘you’, I mean London based journos on the nationals - just how often, how incessantly and how forcefully we are fed the stories of the lives of a small subsection of London society, how we can’t open a paper or magazine without hearing their bleating, self-important voices complaining about their nannies, discussing whether it’s OK to wear a mini skirt round the Portobello Road if you’re over 40, and yes, just what their kids did on their gap years.
It’s so dispiriting and depressing to find that there is LESS of a cross section of a society represented in the acres of newsprint that there were 30 years ago.
Like university education, the clock is turning back from the brave years of working class kids taking a step up. Unis are more middle class than ever and so are newspapers.
Now, Maximillian didn’t know he represented such a cliche (yes, they are there for a reason, boyo), and he might thus be astonished by the levels of anger on these blogs, but the sad fact is that the Max’s of this world don’t even realise they’re treated like the centre of the known universe - because they’ve already taken that fact for granted.Every word of his glittering prose is littered with that fact, along with a smattering of youthful bravado. Sure, it’s not his fault he’s a painful archetype, but by god, Guardian, didn’t any of you recognise this as an article that was going to get SLAUGHTERED by us mere provincial mortals?
No, you didn’t, because you too, stuffed to the gills with your Marinas and Cartner-Morleys, you just took it as read that he’d be accepted as the voice of youth. That’s how out of touch you are.
Yes, this whole thing has gone OTT, but don’t blame your readership for biting back for being so consistently and systematically excluded from your version of who the world consists of - and giving an article like that space instead. You got found out. Good.
Fantastic. Give that man a Guardian blog.
Max Gogarty Update 3: The Guardian/Observer is getting arsey and while the large proportion of the bile has been aimed at the paper and it’s incredibly short sighted Travel Editor - all commentators are now being labelled as cruel, heartless etc.
Well, it wasn’t us that put him in the firing line.
They could have featured him anywhere in the paper - that didn’t have the comment function if they really thought he was genuinely talented. But the Guardian isn’t humble and doesn’t learn - only blaming its big, bad readers.
The piece, which is incredibly harsh on its own commenters, includes this whinging - and redirecting of blame:
The director of digital content, Emily Bell, said the mood had changed after the intervention of Max’s father and the comments had become more critical of the website and its editors’ decision to commission and publish the blog: ‘They were much happier to give us a kicking instead of him.’
In her own online blog, Bell wrote: ‘We’re used to it, but it is still an absurdly awful experience for the individual on the end of the monstering, particularly if you are a relative novice.’ She added: ‘Perhaps an open blog post was not the best place to publish it.’contributors were uneasy over the tone of many comments. One wrote: ‘The amount of hate, envy and hypocrisy that’s been on display here is shocking.’
But others compared Max to Nathan Barley, a loathsome fictional twentysomething London media type in the Channel 4 sitcom of the same name. One asked, ‘Whose son is Max then?’, while another predicted, ‘Oh, Christ. This guy’s going to get an absolute hammering.’ Yet another added: ‘Don’t show Derek Conway this - he’ll be most upset.’
Still others urged him to continue the blog and answer the critics, but his father said: ‘We just want him to be left alone. It’s scary and the exposure is so horrible. He’s a strong kid and I think he is moving on. Max himself made the decision to pull it and I think it is a mature decision.
‘People have said “stay and fight”. But there is no way - whatever he writes next week, it would be pilloried. It’s a no-win situation. He has seen some of the blog. He has said to me that he doesn’t like the media world now. He doesn’t want to go into it any more.’
Oh pleeease. The Guardian, Emily Bell, Travel Editor, Andy Pietrask, travel writing Dad, Paul Gogarty and to a much lesser degree young Max Gogarty all come out of this looking bad.
Admitting publicly to lessons learnt might have been a big start - in reality you can’t help but think that it’s just way to easy to blame people from outside their cosy little media world. We still await from The Guardian: “We f*cked up. We have learnt”
Similar comments here, superbly put by Dan Wilson. More from Bloggerheads too.
Time for the Guardian to stop digging on this one.
When I lived in Vietnam it was always a source of severe irritation that I never read one international news report about the country that didn’t mention the war.
Even the ones that tried to highlight the new ‘nam would ultimately have to compare it with its war torn past.
Now back in Newcastle the same can be said. In today’s Guardian Stuart Jeffries pens a piece that is obviously supposed to reflect the new Tyneside. In his standfirst he talks of the area as a a “heartland of culture and science”. So far so good.
Scan through the article and we get to culture in the 15th paragraph and science in the 21st. In the meantime we get:
Shearer’s sports bar, Kevin Keegan, collapse of Northern Rock, ham and pease pudding stotties and the over consumption of alcohol.
In addition he’s done that awful thing of writing Geordie quote in, well, Geordie. No one ever quoted the Queen as saying “mey hesband and ey. You’re only ever written up in your own accent if you’re from North of London.
Funny, as I write this, a colleague has come in with a written version of the piece. It’s a nice spread - slightly ruined by the fact that, although the article references the wider Tyneside, it is about Newcastle - but the cover shot is…Gateshead.
Maybe the designers didn’t know the difference, but I guess we should be pleased that it’s not Newcastle Under Lyme. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Another point to dwell on:
In the above piece it states:
Not many Toon faithful are prepared to bare their wounds or rehearse their fears before a journalist from London. The representatives of the Toon Army have not responded to my emailed overtures, while Biffa (aka Mike Bolam), who runs the nufc.com fan site and is the author of an excellent book, The Newcastle United Miscellany, declines to be interviewed. He writes: “I’m afraid that I’m still quietly fuming about the recent written antics of the enemy within the Grauniad.”
It’s fair to say that the Guardian is not Newcastle’s favourite paper. On Tuesday their Fiver mailout started with an (honestly) 70 line pointedly nasty pisstake. The scornful abuse is daily - and the suggestion is that with at least two of its staffers, Louise Taylor and Barry Glendenning, being committed Sunderland fans there is a genuine bias.
I also receive their Northerner mailer. It always feels a little sneery and aloof - like way too much of the Guardian’s content when it deals with the North East. You get the impression it’s written by Londoners who think that the best way to please is to write as many patronising “northern” stories as possible. You find yourself looking for the whippet breeding pieces and the fashion spot on flat caps.
As a blogger I can only applaud their website and commitment to all things web 2.0. But the attitude of their writers to the North East stinks. If the heartland of the Daily Mail is the Home Counties, the Guardian’s, whatever they might claim about Northern public servants, is London media land luvviedom and they don’t seem to like us much.
As I have said before, the fact that Guantanamo is allowed to exist shames us all.
More guilty than most are our journalists.
After six years of illegal detention and torture does anyone believe that the whole Guantanamo affair will end with a fair trial? Is this really as angry as we get about this? Surely this demands media outrage on a level never seen before.
Surely, but no.
If you expected better from the BBC then you’ll be disappointed.
Not for the first time, I found myself nodding my head in agreement after reading the Enemies of Reason blog.
It’s take on the BBC coverage:
Just as nations get the governments they deserve, perhaps they also get the media their apathy warrants.
And the atrocities.
Can anyone make sense of this metaphor from the Richard Williams on Guardian sports pages:
I can’t work out whether he’s being rude to bloggers or not.
Update: This from Football365:
And sniff he does in his column in this morning’s edition:
Where else? Why the Guardian Unlimited Sport Blog, that’s where.
In 2000 - Keane the red and backer of the “hardcore” fan
In 2007, he’s still on the fans’ side and says:
Football has lost its soul and it’s definitely for the worse.
In 2008 - (now at Sunderland) he’s clearly in it for the money and is the first manager to praise plans to play Premier league games abroad.
It’s three years away and I think we should all be trying to be positive about it.
Meanwhile back in 2007 - Sunderland Chairman Che Quinn said:
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect any less crap from my own team Newcastle but it’s a clear reflection that all this “doing it for the fans”, community stuff was only ever PR bollocks.
An emotional post over at Cikgu Tans, describe Kenny’s run up to Chinese New Year, here in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Kenny is a Chinese Malaysian PHD student studying in Newcastle with his young family. His writing, in English is first rate and it’s fascinating to read of my home city from a foreign perspective.
Anyway, as Chinese New Year approaches he is understandably feeling home sick.
He writes:
Chinese New Year 2008 for my family in Newcastle (NCL) will be a quiet one and perhaps the coldest one. This will be my first time in my life not to celebrate CNY in Kuching with my parents and this will also be the first CNY for little Aidan. I wish I can be back at home to celebrate CNY together in Kuching so that I can bring my little Aidan to collect some AngPows and to show him to my relatives.
He adds:
I MISS HOME, I MISS MY PARENTS, GRANDPARENTS, IN-LAWS, SIBLINGS, NIECES, NEPHEWS and OTHER RELATIVES, CLOSE FRIENDS etc.
I also miss my dog (Lucky), my terrapin (Ah Hock), my ….what else did I leave behind anyway…well. I guess I only have 2 pets. I MISS LAKSA, KOLO MEE and KUEH CHAP.ARRRAAHHHH. It’s turning me mad. I can just smell the aroma… I want laksa, I want laksa, I want laksa…..If only someone is selling the Sarawak Laksa paste in Newcastle…
Later in the comments section Vrouw says:
Yeah Tan, I am also very homesick. Kuching is the best but then again a lot of people want to get out of the place to overseas and us being overseas want the opposite. Yeah, I still have two laksa paste with me, you didnt bring some over meh???
So, the long and short of it Kenny and his lovely family don’t have Sarawak Laksa paste for Chinese New Year - it seems that being away from his family and home is the big problem but a little SLP might just soften the blow.
Any ideas from anywhere? Can it be bought in Newcastle? Any local restaurants selling it? Is anyone living somewhere where it can be bought and can send it over?
All ideas welcome. The big day is Thursday, with CNY celebrations on Sunday in Newcastle. If we can find the paste then the sooner the better - even if it just means that Kenny and family have the paste to enjoy in the Year of the Rat.
Okay some pinging of Asian/Food Bloggers - please help if you can or spread the word.
Eating Asia, Masak Masak, Noodles and Rice, Chubby Hubby, Yummy Corner, Weird Meat, Noodlepie, Vkeong, A Whiff of Lemongrass, My Local Cuisine, Malaysia Best, Backstreet Gluttons, Eatinout, Malaysian Food Review, Kampungboy City Gal, My Sarawak, Kuchingfest, Sarawak Dot Com, Boy from Limbang, The Real Leng Luis, Mum Mum.
Lunch today was at Yo Sushi.
It seemed the best choice because I’ve been on a diet this past month and YS is just about the only place I can pig out without feeling guilty. There are only so many times a week that I can eat a chicken salad sandwich without sobbing in public.
So anyway, I ate sushi. So tasty. So healthy etc.
Now the place has only been open since June. Roughly around the time I returned to Newcastle. Seeing as my sushi-loving girlfriend was following me to these shores, I was delighted that the city had filled what had previously been a raw fish-free zone.
Now I don’t know if this is normal, but the YS in Newcastle is in the middle of a department store. The Fenwicks Food Hall to be precise. Sandwiched in between a Pret a Manger and various upscale delistuffs. Old people like Fenwicks.
Certainly, while various restaurants have dabbled in Japanese food, this is the first sushi restaurant, to my knowledge, that has opened in the city.
Now you Southern types might chortle in your lattes at this one (and if you do then you’re the smug tossers we always suspected you were) but this is something of a novelty for Newcastle.
There are other things we do have: fresh air, space, houses with more than one room for under half a million, no Boris Johnson, etc but this is a first.
So the triple novelty of the foodhall setting, food that moves and the whole raw fish thing, makes it something of a curiosity.
This lunchtime I was photographed eating on two occasions, had my shoulder peered over three times, but was, for the most part, just treated somewhere between an art installation and the inhabitant of a zoo.
All in all, I can never work out whether it makes me feel very cool and cosmopolitan or a bit of a prat.
A quick Google through the blogs and Meri Williams has had similar experiences:
…I evidently have a “ask me about sushi, I’ll explain” aura about me - every time we go NEAR the Yo Sushi in Newcastle I end up explaining what the food is and how the conveyor belt system works to every 50+ in Fenwicks …
Meanwhile, Jason’s been there too.
Slightly embarassing (from a North East perspective) is this picture here from Brown Brogues but I’d blame it on patronising Yo Sushi marketing people rather than Geordie ignorance.
If you want the full spiel then check Bloggerheads here.
But in short, turdish right-wing blogger Paul Staines aka Guido Fawkes is behaving like you’d fear horrible right wing people might, by metaphorically waving his shot gun around and shouting “Get orf my laand”.
Or to put it another way: he’s gone crying to his lawyer over a squabble with Bloggerheads man Tim Ireland.
Staines, for the uninitiated is not a good guy. His many Toryboy misdemeanours include this where he recounts his Tory youth (gosh what fun).
Well, albeit briefly, I used to live in Nicaragua, where the Contras once raped and pillaged. They undermined what was firstly a genuine people’s revolution which later became a real democratically elected government, all at the behest of Reagan and the USA.
I visited the places, where those guns that Staines had so much fun sourcing, were used.
But for the Nicaragua link I might have steered clear of this particular spitting of dummy incident but…
Bloggerheads - you have my support.
Since returning home I’ve been once more amazed at the quite obvious hatred the Southern-based media has for the North - and, in particular, the North East.
If it has always been bad, you might expect it would slowly improve as we pushed back the boundaries of ignorance, but it is getting worse and I don’t know why.
Below is from www.nufc.com and refers to football but it also applies to so many other topics.
North and South divide? It’s just London, it’s media and its government I have an issue with. I, like most other Geordies I have spoken too, would quite honestly prefer to chuck our lot in with the Scots. Expect more rants.
Now that the transfer window has closed…
…we’re out of the FA Cup, have no more trips to the Emirates or Old Trafford, have got rid of one boss, brought in another and made various other appointments of a non-Gosforth nature, can we just say:
Enough patronising bollocks from every man and his dog masquerading as news or comment on events in this region, this city and this club - you simply haven’t got a f**king clue what you’re on about.
Try reporting the facts instead of what you or your London masters would like to hear.
Try getting past the KK “Messiah”, “Second Coming”, “impatient fans” - all cliches invented by the media, not the supporters.
Try seeing past brain dead Vox Pops or meaningless online polls as spurious evidence that the lies you pen have any basis in local opinion.
Try hiding the regional prejudice that would see you branded as racist, were it to be presented as news about other nationalities.
For a club that isn’t “big” (whatever that means), it doesn’t half get a lot of coverage….
To anyone still paying money for The Mirror, The Sun, The News of The World, The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Mail, why not just read their continual anti-Toon tirades online instead of shelling out for the privilege of being insulted and/or patronised?
Exhibit A: The scandalous Sun and Mirror front pages this week with Keegan / £100m / Wise concoctions.
Exhibit B: The Mail’s allegedly funny Dennis Wise diary stumbles to day 3 here. Somebody is getting paid for writing that.
Exhibit C: Victoria Derbyshire, Nicky Campbell, Alan Green, Eamonn Holmes, Clem, Terry Butcher, Steve Claridge - you’re the shite, you’re the shite of Radio 5. Bigots all.
Haven’t once been a Geordie in Asia I’ve had a brief but enjoyable flick through the blog of an Asian in Geordieland. I like it.
Welcome to Newcastle, Kenny. Good luck. I shall be reading and if you’re missing Asia, well, you’re not the only one. Me too, but I hope you enjoy the Toon too.
