We get the media we deserve
We’ve all heard plenty over the last few days about the Daily Mail‘s crass, crude and clumsy attack on Ed Milipede’s father. Anyone who’s been watching telly has seen plenty of it too, as one Mail exec after another has been rolled out to take a kicking on news and current affairs programme . . . apart from Paul Dacre, the editor, himself, that is, although his absence did not spare him from being slaughtered by Alastair Campbell on Newsnight.
But for those who think that the Mail is the only rotten, stinking, vicious, suppurating organ on our newsstands, take a look at this nasty insidious little story.
Is this news? No way in 100 years, but it is grotesquely slanted reporting.
We know all about John Bercow’s background, but nothing at all about that of his accuser. I’d like to know a little more about the background and agenda of someone who picks up her old man off a plane from Texas then pops off in the Range Rover with him and her two sons to Gauchos for lunch. I’d like to know a lot more about the ‘newspaper reporter’ who ‘happened to be passing by’, and saw the alleged incident.
But I don’t need to know any more about the standards of the profession which I joined when I was 19 years old. They weren’t exemplary then, as I discovered, but today they seem to be completely down the crapper.
