Quotulatiousness

October 7, 2011

“The entire Occupy Wall Street movement needs a ‘[citation needed]’ footnote”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

Robert David Graham does some independent reporting of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests and finds the mainstream media is being remarkably superficial:

It’s the quality of the coverage, not the amount that’s the problem. It’s been on the nightly news every night for the past week, but there has been little “serious” reporting.

By “serious” reporting, I mean such things as contacting the park’s owners asking for an official statement. The protesters are occupying Zuccotti Park, owned by the same company (Brookfield Office Properties NYSE:BPO) that owns the adjacent skyscraper. An obvious step would be to contact them asking for a statemen, but I could find no journalists that had yet done so. Well, if “journalists” aren’t going to do this, I can do this myself. I sent an email to their VP of Communications. I got a response, which I posted to my blog. When I posted it, I also Googled the sentences from the official statement, and found no results. I was indeed the first one “reporting” on this. Since then, others have mentioned the official statement, probably by picking it up from the #OccupyWallStreet Twitter hashtag that links to my blog.

[. . .]

In many ways, the press treats this protest the way they treated the Tea Party, completely distorting the story. Journalists ignored the mainstream of the Tea Party and instead focused on the fringe. Instead of showing the hundreds of signs calling for smaller government, reporters instead focused on the one sign showing Obama as Hitler. In the end, this reporting became self-fulfilling. The Republican fringe disaffected with the establishment were convinced by this reporting, believing that they, too, should join the Tea Party, thus derailing it.

[. . .]

In that way, it’s like the Internet. When the Internet appeared on the scene 20 years ago, it wasn’t like anything that predated it. Yes, you could define it in terms of the old, as a digital library, as an electronic form of mail, or as a communications network, but none of these descriptions captures the essence of what the Internet really is.

In particular, there is the problem with the “filter bubble”. While the Internet can expand a person’s universe, it gives people the power to shrink it. People create a “filter bubble” around themselves, using tools of the Internet to pass only those things they agree with. For example, Google watches what people search for, profiling them, and sorts the results for that individual. They see their own small universe reflected back, rather than the big universe.

[. . .]

I get the impression that the entire Occupy Wall Street movement needs a “[citation needed]” footnote. Wikipedia uses this technique to allow anybody to challenge an unsupported assertion. Anybody can insert this footnote, expressing to the reader that (as yet) the assertion isn’t supported. Anybody else can find supporting evidence, and replace the [citation needed] to a footnote pointing to a reliable source. If no citation can be found, the assertion is eventually deleted.

October 3, 2011

Occupy Wall Street activists fail to persuade

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:12

Brendan O’Neill says that the “teenage moralism” of the protesters makes him “ashamed to be Left-wing”:

Occupy Wall Street, the gathering of angry actors, graphic designers and various other hipsters in the financial districts of New York City, might just be the most degenerate Left-wing movement of recent times. Its weird demands, plastered across tongue-in-cheek placards and on super-cool, self-pressed t- shirts, capture the descent of the modern Left into the cesspool of victimology, conspiracy-mongering and disdain for mass society and its allegedly dumb inhabitants. Far from representing anything that I, a Leftie, would recognise as progressive and humane, this gaggle of rich kids spouts little more than snobbery and fear, seemingly incapable of deciding whom they loathe the most: greedy fat bankers or the dumb fat public.

Occupy Wall Street claims to be a mass workers’ movement, but it’s nothing of the sort. It is in fact a tiny, self-selected group of self-righteous, mostly middle-class activists who have failed to win over large sections of the American public to their “cause” — which isn’t surprising when you consider that on the rare occasion that these trendy banker-bashers talk about the American public, they do so with a metaphorical peg on their snouts. An article on the Occupy Wall Street website claims “the working class in this country has been brainwashed by MSM, Fox News and the Right-wing propaganda machine”. It says everyday Americans, being stupid, do not understand what socialism is, because “they have been emotionally brainwashed against it”. And so it falls to the cool, fashionable, oh-so-enlightened activists of Occupy Wall Street to help “de-programme people against the brainwashing they’ve experienced”. That is, the oiks must be re-educated by the hipsters. The little people must have their minds cleaned out by their moral and fashion superiors. Occupy Wall Street mashes together the outlook of Kim Jong-Il with the politics of Susan Sarandon, giving rise to a weirdly hippyish yet authoritarian gathering of slackers-cum-elitists.

October 1, 2011

More on Assange’s “unauthorized” autobiography

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

Patrick Hayes reviews the autobiography (draft) recently published against the wishes of the author:

The folks at publishing house Canongate must have thought they’d hit the jackpot when they secured the rights to the memoirs of the person whom the Guardian had compared to Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa. The so-called ‘spectral’ Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, apparently living the life of Jason Bourne, was to give an unprecedented glimpse into his formative years as a freedom fighter and the events that led him to found Wikileaks, the whistleblowers’ website. Hollywood wanted in, as did dozens of leading publishers around the world. Even better, Assange’s book was to be ‘part memoir, part manifesto’ — something like A Long Walk to Freedom and the Communist Manifesto rolled into one. What could go wrong?

Pretty much everything, that’s what. In a matter of months, the liberal commentariat fell out of love with the silver-haired whistleblower extraordinaire. The oft-dubbed Silver Fox had proved to be a skunk and the Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel, which had all secured deals to publish Wikileaks material, couldn’t distance themselves fast enough from him. Fevered speculation about who would play Assange in an upcoming movie — Neil Patrick Harris? Paul Bettany? Bill Hader? Tilda Swinton? — abruptly stopped. Not only that, but Assange, who seemed to have only reluctantly agreed to pen the book in order to cover legal fees, bolted midway through the project, declaring ‘All memoir is prostitution’.

However, Assange no longer had his advance, so he couldn’t break the contract and, to recoup costs, Canongate went ahead and published a draft anyway, billing it as an ‘Unauthorised Autobiography’. On publication day last week, Assange revealed that the title itself was a half-truth, announcing that he had not written a word of the book himself. Instead, it had been ghost-written by novelist Andrew O’Hagan, who was reportedly given £100,000 to write up 50 hours of interviews that he’d conducted with Assange. Many biographers spend a lot more time interviewing their subjects.

September 27, 2011

Reaping the (censorship) whirlwind

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Mick Hume points out that the recent threat of police cracking down on the press — the Guardian in particular — was illiberal and unjustified, yet quite in line with what the Guardian had encouraged be done to Murdoch’s media empire.

It was, as all liberal-minded people (and Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail) agreed, an egregious assault on press freedom for the Metropolitan Police to threaten legal action to force the Guardian to reveal its sources. So there was much celebration and not a little smug satisfaction in media circles when the Met, under pressure from within and without the legal system, dropped the action last week.

Where, the Guardian editors and their outraged high-level supporters demanded, did the Met ever get the ‘ill-judged’, ‘misconceived’ and ‘perverse in the extreme’ idea that they could order the Guardian to tell them who leaked details of Operation Weeting, the phone-hacking investigation?

It’s a good question. Where on earth could Inspector Censor and PC Prodnose have got the notion that it was their business to investigate, arrest and prosecute journalists, or interfere with the operations of a free press? Step forward the moral crusaders at of the Guardian and its allies.

For years they have been demanding more police and legal action against the Murdoch press and those allegedly involved in phone-hacking, inviting the authorities to police the media more closely. Then these illiberal liberals throw their arms up in horror when the authorities try to take advantage of their invitation to investigate the high-minded ‘good guys’ at the Guardian as well as the lowlife at the defunct News of the World. Their naivety is only exceeded by their elitism. Give the state a licence to interfere with the press, and you should not be surprised if it tries to exploit it — even if today’s spineless state officials ultimately lacked the gumption to take on the Guardian.

September 22, 2011

Telegraph: The great euro swindle

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

This is an interesting summary of the path to the Euro, and how some predicted the current situation at the very start of the project:

The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse.

Meanwhile, the pro-Europeans find themselves in the same situation as appeasers in 1940, or communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are utterly busted. [. . .]

The central historical error of the modern Financial Times concerns the euro. The FT flung itself headlong into the pro-euro camp, embracing the cause with an almost religious passion. Doubts were dismissed. Here is the paper’s Lex column on January 8, 2001, on the subject of Greek entry to the eurozone: “With Greece now trading in euros,” reflected Lex, “few will mourn the death of the drachma. Membership of the eurozone offers the prospect of long-term economic stability.” The FT offered a similarly warm welcome to Ireland.

The paper waged a vendetta against those who warned that the euro would not work. Its chief political columnist, Philip Stephens, consistently mocked the Eurosceptics. “Immaturity is the kind explanation,” sneered Stephens as Tory leader William Hague came out against the single currency.

[. . .]

Now let’s turn to the BBC. In our Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet, Guilty Men, we expose in detail how the BBC betrayed its charter commitment and became a partisan player in a great national debate — all the more insidious because of its pretence at neutrality.

For example, in the nine weeks leading to July 21, 2000, when the argument over the euro was at its height, the Today programme featured 121 speakers on the topic. Some 87 were pro-euro compared with 34 who were anti. BBC broadcasters tended to present the pro-euro position itself as centre ground, thus defining even moderately Eurosceptic voices as extreme.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

September 17, 2011

Rex Murphy: The failure of the media

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:34

This is not the kind of column you expect from a long-time CBC employee. It points out the huge failing of the major media in their reporting about President Barack Obama:

As the bad economic news continues to emanate from the United States — with a double-dip recession now all but certain — a reckoning is overdue. American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barrack Obama’s rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign — and it hasn’t reclaimed them since.

Much of the Obama coverage was orchestrated sycophancy. They glided past his pretensions — when did a presidential candidate before “address the world” from the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin? They ignored his arrogance — “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” And they averted their eyes from his every gaffe — such as the admission that he didn’t speak “Austrian.”

The media walked right past the decades-long association of Obama with the weird and racist pastor Jeremiah Wright. In the midst of the brief stormlet over the issue, one CNN host — inexplicably — decided that CNN was going to be a “Wright-free zone.” He could have hung out a sign: “No bad news about Obama here.”

On the plus side, however, he did let us know that there were 57 states in the union (although I’m still not sure of the names of the hidden 7).

September 15, 2011

National Post headline funnies

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Education, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

The article discusses a day planner that was distributed to students at a Toronto primary school. The planner included a printed version of an online “Days of Significance” calendar that had references to sex workers, female genital mutilation and Palestinian solidarity. The board agreed with the complaint that this material was not appropriate for a kindergarten-through-grade 5 audience (although they did not say whether the planners were being withdrawn). The National Post headline, however conveys a slightly different message:

Sex workers, genital mutilation not suitable for children: TDSB

I should hope that sex work and FGM would be considered unsuitable!

Johann Hari, sockpuppet master

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:39

An interesting post at Velvet Glove, Iron Fist details the many, many Wikipedia sockpuppets under the control of Independent journalist Johann Hari:

Johann Hari, the plagiarist and liar, has been allowed to keep working at the Independent despite being caught bang to rights as a fraudulent troll. I was barely aware of this fellow’s existence until his journalistic techniques were exposed a few months ago. They should have been enough to get him sacked. Instead, the Independent have let him off with a whining, self-serving apology.

More interesting than the shoddy journalism is the Wikipedia trolling. Rumours have abounded for some time that ‘David Rose’ — Hari’s number one fan on the internet — is Hari himself. This has now been confirmed by the bubonic plagiarist. He operated several sockpuppets on Wikipedia to make himself out to be, as Nick Cohen put it, “one of the essential writers of our time”. More seriously, he has also persistently edited the Wiki pages of people he dislikes, including Cohen, with libellous glee. This, too, is not a sackable offence at the Independent.

Nothing is deleted on Wikipedia and the entries of David Rose (or ‘David r from meth productions’) stand as a testimony to the extraordinary scale and range of Hari’s six year trolling campaign. Certain themes emerge. Much of his time was spent emphasising his own importance as a major cultural figure. He pushes to have his every award and nomination put centre stage. As a left-wing journalist, he is eager to downplay his privileged education. He consistently edits the pages of his heroes such as Polly Toynbee and George Monbiot to portray them in their best light. He repeatedly edits his enemies to make them look like racists, or thugs, or loonies.

H/T to James Delingpole for the link.

September 12, 2011

The easy way to be come a celebrity scientist

Filed under: Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Deevybee has the steps you need to take to become a TV science celebrity:

Maybe you’re tired of grotting away at the lab bench. Or finding it hard to get a tenured job. Perhaps your last paper was rejected and you haven’t the spirit to fight back. Do not despair. There is an alternative. The media are always on the look-out for a scientist who will fearlessly speak out and generate newsworthy stories. You can gain kudos as an expert, even if if you haven’t got much of a track record in the subject, by following a few simple rules.

Rule #1. Establish your credentials. You need to have lots of letters after your name. It doesn’t really matter what they mean, so long as they sound impressive. It’s also good to be a fellow of some kind of Royal Society. Some of these are rather snooty and appoint fellows by an exclusive election process, but it’s a little known fact that others require little more than a minimal indication of academic standing and will admit you to the fellowship provided you fill in a form and agree to pay an annual subscription.

September 11, 2011

QotD: Comparing September 11, 2001 to December 7, 1941

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:52

On Dec. 8, 1951, the day after the 10th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, The New York Times‘ front page made a one-paragraph mention of commemorations the day before, when the paper’s page had not mentioned the anniversary. The Dec. 8 Washington Post‘s front page noted no commemorations the previous day. On Dec. 7, the page had featured a familiar 10-year old photograph of the burning battleships. It seems to have been published because a new process made possible printing it for the first time in color. At the bottom of the page, a six-paragraph story began: “Greater Washington today will mark the tenth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack by testing its air raid defenses.” The story explained that “the sirens are part of a ‘paper bombing’ of Washington” that would include “mock attacks by atom bombs and high explosives.”

The most interesting question is not how America in 2011 is unlike America in 2001, but how it is unlike it was in 1951. The intensity of today’s focus on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 testifies to more than the multiplication of media ravenous for content, and to more than today’s unhistorical and self-dramatizing tendency to think that eruptions of evil are violations of a natural entitlement to happiness. It also represents the search for refuge from a decade defined by unsatisfactory responses to 9/11.

George F. Will, “Commemorating the past to forget the present”, National Post, 2011-09-11

August 31, 2011

Despite media reports, Australia didn’t “screw up” torpedo purchase

Filed under: Australia, France, Italy, Media, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Strategy Page expresses a bit of contempt for the Fairfax media reporters who mangled a story to get a juicy headline or six:

Another good example of mass media screwing up a story on the military recently appeared in Australia. Fairfax, the largest media group in Australia ran a late August story asserting that the Australian Navy had mishandled the acquisition of new anti-submarine torpedo from France, and had to hire translators to turn the French and Italian user and technical manuals into English. The Defense Ministry quickly responded and pointed out that the Fairfax reporters had misunderstood the situation. The contract to purchase the torpedoes stipulated that all documents be in English. This is standard for such purchases, and has been for a long time. The Fairfax reporters should have known that. The Defense Ministry was hiring translators to handle additional data, not covered by the MU90 purchase, on some of the 200 test launches of the torpedo. This would save the Australian Navy a lot of money as some of their own test launches could be skipped, if the French and Italian tests covered the same situations. But the documents on most of those tests were in the language of the navy conducting them (French or Italian.) The reports were classified, but the two navies were willing to share them, although it was understood that Australia would have to handle translations. This has been standard practice for decades, but the Fairfax reporters didn’t dig that deep. This sort of facile military reporting has become increasingly common. It goes beyond calling all warships (except carriers and subs) “battleships” (a class of ship that went out of wide use half a century ago) or calling self-propelled artillery (or even infantry fighting vehicles) “tanks” simply because they all have turrets (but very different uses). The bad reporting extends to many other basic items of equipment, training, leadership, tactics and casualties.

The argument from the press is probably that the public doesn’t know — and doesn’t care about — the differences between warship classes or armoured vehicles anyway, so they don’t “waste their time” by being accurate.

August 26, 2011

Unexpectedly over-used

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

Jim Geraghty explains why the word “unexpectedly” has become a punchline:

For about three years now, conservative bloggers have chuckled at how frequently the unveiling of bad economic news comes with the adverb “unexpectedly” in media reports. As Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, Michael Barone, and others have often asked, unexpected to whom?

“I think it’s a combination of cognitive dissonance, the terra nova nature of the post-bubble economy, and a healthy dose of partisanship,” suggests Ed Morrissey, who has blogged about the ubiquitous adverb regularly at HotAir.com.

Perhaps the perpetual surprise reflects a media desire to focus on pockets of growth or prosperity — at least with a Democrat in the White House. In a widely diversified $14 trillion economy, one can almost always find some areas of economic improvement.

Certainly, a media that wanted to paint a more dire portrait of the economy would have no shortage of material to work with. There’s considerable evidence that America’s problems in job creation are much worse than the most widely cited numbers would indicate.

For example, President Obama spent much of the past year touting the number of consecutive months of private-sector job growth that the country had enjoyed. But that boast comes with some asterisks. Traditionally, the population of American workers grows each month, and while economists differ a bit on precisely how many new jobs are needed each month just to keep the unemployment rate stable, it’s often more than the figure Obama cites. The Heritage Foundation puts the figure at 100,000 to 125,000; some argue that any serious reduction of the unemployment rate will require adding 200,000 jobs per month. Only four months out of the past 17 have seen at least 200,000 jobs added; some months of growth have been minimal, such as January 2010, when the economy added 16,000 private-sector jobs,. Nonetheless, like a bloop single keeping a batter’s hitting streak going in baseball, meager months of job growth permit Obama to keep bragging about how many consecutive months he has presided over private-sector job growth.

August 24, 2011

The origins of the “perp walk”

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Tim Black outlines the Dominique Strauss-Kahn media drama, and explains the origin of the “perp walk”:

The whole tawdry affair looks to be petering out to a rather murky conclusion. Still, whatever else DSK might or might not have done, he has undoubtedly performed one vital function. That of the scapegoat. Historically, scapegoating referred to the ritual of investing an animal, a goat say, with the sins of the village, and then casting the burdened animal out. DSK, so-called, seems to have served a similar function. Strauss-Kahn was to be symbolically sent out of the community, taking the sins of men, especially French political ones, with him.

Nowhere was this strangely modern ritual more apparent than in the so-called perp walk. Introduced by FBI director Edgar Hoover in the 1920s to bolster public support for prosecutions, and used most famously with mobsters Alvin Karpis and Harry Campbell, it involves tipping off the press that the accused is about to be moved from one location to another. So as the ‘perp’ is walking between, for example, the jail and the police station, photographers appear to snap the accused in all their humiliation and shame. Yet although the perp walk has a long, ignoble, not to mention justice-thwarting history, it only really came into its own under then US attorney Rudolph Giuliani (a future mayor of New York) who, during the 1980s Wall Street-insider trading scandals, transformed it into a deliberately unceremonious ceremony. For example, in February 1987, handcuffed trader Richard Wigton was photographed weeping as he was marched from the trading floor of Kidder, Peabody & Co.

The purpose of the perp walk is worryingly clear. From the handcuffs to the embarrassment induced in the accused, we are encouraged to see the guilt before it has been proved. It is a spectacle designed to elicit condemnation — regardless of whether that condemnation is deserved or not. Strauss-Kahn’s perp walk was no exception. Snapped in all his handcuffed, unshaven and fallen-faced infamy as he was taken to a police station to be charged, the watching world was invited to see him as guilty, his sullen shame writ large in every defensive stride.

August 23, 2011

Blatchford comes not to praise Jack, but to bury him

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:16

Christie Blatchford displays great courage in saying publicly in her column what others may only be thinking in the privacy of their own minds:

Yes, his death at 61 was sad and too soon; yes, he made an enormous contribution to his party and a significant one to Canada (though I would quibble with NDP MP Libby Davies’ characterization that “He gave his life for this country”); yes, he fought a brave battle against cancer, as, mind you, does just about anyone who has it; and yes, he was a likeable, agreeable, smiley man.

Yet what was truly singular about him was how consumed by politics he was and how publicly, yet comfortably, he lived.

How fitting that his death should have been turned into such a thoroughly public spectacle, where from early morn Monday, television anchors donned their most funereal faces, producers dug out the heavy organ music, reporters who would never dream of addressing any other politician by first name only were proudly calling him “Jack” and even serious journalists like Evan Solomon of the CBC repeatedly spoke of the difficulty “as we all try to cope” with the news of Mr. Layton’s death.

By mid-day, after Prime Minister Stephen Harper had offered a few warm words about Mr. Layton’s death and rued that their oft-talked-about jam session had never happened, Mr. Solomon even expressed sniping surprise that “Jack Layton wasn’t the sole focus” of the Prime Minister’s remarks.

Mr. Harper, who clearly had not spent the day watching the national broadcaster and thus was unaware that the NDP Leader’s death was the only story of note, had gone on to mention the families of the 12 people (including six-year-old Cheyenne Eckalook; now there’s someone who died far too young) who perished in the Arctic plane crash on Saturday and the tumultuous events in Libya.

She also addresses the mawkish over-sentimentality of people who probably never met Mr. Layton leaving bunches of flowers, notes, and the like (at least in this case, we’re being spared the teddy bears) as public marks of grieving:

Held out as evidence of Canadians’ great love for Mr. Layton were the makeshift memorials of flowers, notes that appeared at his Toronto constituency office and on Parliament Hill, and in condolences in social media.

In truth, none of that is remotely unusual, or spontaneous, but rather the norm in the modern world, and it has been thus since Princess Diana died, the phenomenon now fed if not led online. People the planet over routinely weep for those they have never met and in some instances likely never much thought about before; what once would have been deemed mawkish is now considered perfectly appropriate.

Certainly, Canadians liked Mr. Layton, but the public over-the-top nature of such events — by fans for lost celebrities they never met, by television personalities for those they interviewed once for 10 minutes, by the sad and lost for the dead — make it if not impossible then difficult to separate the mourning wheat from the mourning chaff. His loss — his specific loss and his specific accomplishments — are thus diminished.

August 19, 2011

If you want to take the moral high ground, you must live up to it

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:27

James Delingpole has a bit of advice for the BBC and the Guardian:

The liberal-Left has many vices. But surely the most noisome one of all (in a crowded field) is its rank hypocrisy. If you’re going to take the moral high ground — as Lefties will insist on doing at every opportunity — the very least you owe the world in return if you have a shred of compunction, decency or intellectual consistency is to demonstrate more integrity than those you are impugning. And if you can’t do that, then bloody well shut up.

In the last few months, you can’t have helped noticing, the liberal-Left media, led by the BBC and the Guardian, have been dwelling on the News International phone hacking scandal with a shrillness and hysteria and foaming moral outrage out of all proportion to the nature of the offence.

Am I defending phone hacking or the leaking by police of confidential information to newsapers? Of course I’m not. I think it’s a horrible, grubby practice which must have left all the people who were victims of it feeling soiled and discomfited. But a) as we saw in the cities of Britain last week (and we’re also seeing on the stock markets) there are many problems far more deserving right now of the media’s crusading attention. And b) it’s not as if News International’s imprints which were the only newspapers playing this game. The gutter end of journalism is, of necessity, an unscrupulous, highly competitive business. Tabloid hacks stand or fall on the number of scoops they get over the opposition. It would be stretching the bounds of credulity to claim that other papers, besides those owned by Murdoch, have not engaged in similar dirty tricks.

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