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Mail: a truly despicable article ("nothing 'natural' about Stephen Gately's death")

What would I want?


On the basis of that ruling, all columnists kicked out of the NUJ, what with them now having a special relationship with accuracy and decency.

Talked to my mum about this, (she used to cover inquests) had she done the same to a UK coroner she reckoned she would have been up on a contempt charge
 
intrusion into grief is already a "limit" on press freedom.


or should the " be on press seeing as saying what you like in the face of evidence shouldn't be what journalism is about
 
Daily mash take on it
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/...eing-wrong-about-jan-moir-again-201002182485/

@Nickking said: "Don't understand why PCC are not acting on #janmoir comments on Stephen Gateley. When 25,000 offended people complain it has to be offensive."

But Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, explained: "No it doesn't."

@Olipro added: "There is a right to free speech, however, that doesn't give you the right to publish vitriolic hate in a major newspaper. #JanMoir"

Professor Brubaker said: "Actually yes, that's exactly what it does."
Click to expand...
:D
 
gosub said:
On the basis of that ruling, all columnists kicked out of the NUJ,
Click to expand...

how would that help anything? The Mail doesnt give a shit if its writers are in the union or not (actually, it prefers them not to be) so it wouldn't have affected that column.

And the right to be an offensive motherfucker is absolutely central. today they camee for Jan Moir, tomorrow they'd come for someone 'offensively' supporting te right of (say) afghans to self-defence.
 
Given that there is no such thing as objectively free speech it doesn't really matter one way or another, we live in a society where a young girl can be hauled before the courts for writing poetry, it doesn't mean anything if someone writes some offensive shit and doesn't get done for it, or if they do get done for it. Neither has anything to do with 'free speech' and everything to do with the balance of cultural power.
 
belboid said:
how would that help anything? The Mail doesnt give a shit if its writers are in the union or not (actually, it prefers them not to be) so it wouldn't have affected that column.

And the right to be an offensive motherfucker is absolutely central. today they camee for Jan Moir, tomorrow they'd come for someone 'offensively' supporting te right of (say) afghans to self-defence.
Click to expand...

Fair enough, all hail the rise of the "i think" paragraph, should make the bits between the adverts far more interesting at any rate
 
It's not rocket science. Yes she is an offensive twat. Being an offensive twat however isn't illegal. If you don't like what someone writes then write a reply.
 
Summary of the 100% correct FA here

The commission had three opportunities to condemn the Daily Mail for publishing Moir's piece only six days after Gately's sudden death in Majorca, and the day before his funeral. The complaint brought by Gately's partner, Andrew Cowles, argued that the Mail had breached clause 1 (accuracy); clause 5 (intrusion into grief or shock); and clause 12 (discrimination) of the editors' code of practice.

In a detailed adjudication, the PCC explains why it has not upheld any of these complaints. In terms of accuracy, it reasons that Moir's piece was clearly labelled as her opinion, and that any inaccuracies in the piece were repeated from other coverage in the days since Gately's death. In terms of her intrusion into the family's grief, the commission argues that the sheer volume of other press coverage had already placed the issue firmly in the public domain. And in terms of discrimination, the PCC sticks to its belief that discrimination against a group (gay men) is different from discrimination against an individual, and that, while Moir is clearly guilty of the former, she is innocent of the latter.
Click to expand...
 
dylans said:
It's not rocket science. Yes she is an offensive twat. Being an offensive twat however isn't illegal. If you don't like what someone writes then write a reply.
Click to expand...

and object to the publisher. After all, just cos she's written it, that doesnt mean they have to print it. Having to the right to an objectionable opinion doesnt mean that she has a right to its publication.
 
yardbird said:
Paul Dacre Editor Daily Mail:

Chairman of PCC Editors Code Committee
Click to expand...

Yep he chairs the codes committee - he's not on the deliberative committee that adjudicates on complaints - these are the people that impose the code that Dacre etc come up with. Given that it's a voluntary body for the newspaper industry all the main editors are on it almost by definition -that's the whole point. It's shit mind. Here are the members of the commison
 
The question is what would make a better system?

Ideally, public opposition to what Moir wrote would have lead to such a massive backlash that the Mail would have had to sack her in order to preserve their reputation or protect their sales. The problem is that that was never going to happen because the vocal minority who voiced opposition were just that - a vocal minority.

It seems to me that websites like Twitter and Facebook are able to massively distort any given perspective on society because of the way campaigns or causes can grow into perceived mass movements when, if you actually set them in their context, they are anything but.

I reckon the most salient example of this in the past year or so has been the Iranian protest movement. I think it was only last week that there was all this stuff in the media about how a massive counter-protest was going to result in violent confrontation and precipitate some wider popular revolution. But that never happened and reporters were lost for an explanation at the time. The bottom line is that Twitter had distorted the perceived size of the movement and it had always been a minority, elite interest.
 
Wrong example -Iran been going on for 8 months and the rhythm of Iranian politics makes this normal - it was just the expectations and lack of knowledge of commentators that did that - not twitter.
 
butchersapron said:
Wrong example -Iran been going on for 8 months and the rhythm of Iranian politics makes this normal - it was just the expectations and lack of knowledge of commentators that did that - not twitter.
Click to expand...

Well, yes, I didn't mean that the recent failure of the protests to ignite in any meaningful way and therefore meet the expectations of Western commentators was an isolated phenomenon. It's part of a broader pattern of reporting on the Green movement by the Western media and as such is only the most recent example of the distorted perspective that surrounded the same protests months ago. The way to think about the role of twitter and online media is to think about how they present information on a practical level and then how people make assumptions contingent on that presentation.

I'm not sure what you mean by the rhythm of Iranian politics - the lifecycle of a protest movement maybe, or the simple fact of the retrenchment of the status quo.
 
Diamond said:
Well, yes, I didn't mean that the recent failure of the protests to ignite in any meaningful way and therefore meet the expectations of Western commentators was an isolated phenomenon. It's part of a broader pattern of reporting on the Green movement by the Western media and as such is only the most recent example of the distorted perspective that surrounded the same protests months ago. The way to think about the role of twitter and online media is to think about how they present information on a practical level and then how people make assumptions contingent on that presentation.

I'm not sure what you mean by the rhythm of Iranian politics - the lifecycle of a protest movement maybe, or the simple fact of the retrenchment of the status quo.
Click to expand...

I meant that it follows, for one reason for another, long cycles - we're talking a few years here, not a few days.
 
Well you could you say that the politics of just about anywhere follows long cycles.

Talk of historical cycles is always a bit suspicious to me. Mostly it's the work of historians looking to post-rationalise in order to construct some kind of sense.
 
Trouble I have with that is, my gripe was that a grieving family shouldn't have to put up with shit like this. It was bad enough that the brew hahaha it generated at the time meant it was even more in the families face, and now we have precedent that a grieving family may well have to face stuff like this all in the name of press freedom.

Tom Courtney put it quite well on QT last night: freedom to do something is not the same as license to do something, I only hope the media have grasped that.
 
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