The Worst Example Of Journalism I've Read

[Iangould]

Simply describing Ghost Rider as a hit destroys any possible credibility that article might have.

[king mob]

The Nic Cage article was so funny, priceless.

Talking about making huge deal of a man doing an everyday thing like taking out money.

I've used that same cashpoint but I wore a suit!

[Surtur]

Can't..stop..reading..Liz Jone articles..

[Iangould]

Has Ms. Penny graced us with her thoughts on the riots yet?

[Charles RB]

Dear Mob

If Penny the People's Poet has said anything, please don't post it here please please

Signed,

My sanity

[Paradox]

king mob shows some head up the arse journalism:

Nicolas Cage has the brass neck to get money out of a cashpoint while looking a bit grey! The fucking bastard! Wanker! Hang him!

He is famous for his jet black hair and leading man looks...

And the pedant in me wonders when Cage ever had "jet black hair", let alone be famous for it. His hair's always been dark brown to me.

[pariah-1972]

I just had to google that to see if it was real or a joke

[king mob]

Has Ms. Penny graced us with her thoughts on the riots yet?

Yes.

The resilience of Londoners approaches cultural cliché. Just up from Camden Lock, on the morning after the worst night of civil unrest in living memory, people were going back and forth with brooms and bin bags, looking for something left to clean. The glass, debris and burning bins from the previous night's riots had already been swept away by the first eager Londoners to arrive. Five women, some white, some Asian, were holding large pink signs reading "free hugs". They had already been to Brixton.

I accepted a cuddle. It was that sort of morning.Across London, an enormous clean-up campaign swept through the shattered boroughs, organised over the same social networks that rioters had used to co-ordinate looting and arson. It quickly became clear that social media, contrary to initial panicked reports, was morally neutral in this crisis. In Clapham Junction, hundreds of people stood together and raised their brooms. Some had come from across the city to show support. The website that had been set up only hours earlier to bring together cleaning campaigns crashed due to a surge of traffic from volunteers.

Elsewhere, stories of solidarity were filtering through over the feeds: of local Jewish and Muslim youths banding together to protect a Stamford Hill synagogue from rioters, of anarchist groups in Hackney putting out fires where the emergency services were stretched. People called their friends to check that they were safe and opened their homes to strangers who had no way of crossing town. This, commentators began to assure each other, was the "real Britain". As I write, no member of the beleaguered cabinet has yet dared to use the term "Big Society".

The narrative being encouraged by most politicians is one of social division: of "us" and "them", of "real" British citizens mopping up after the "mindless" young hooligans.

Party leaders vow to punish looters who, they insist, are engaging in a “pure criminality" with no social precedent. Right-wing commentators pointed the finger at multiculturalism, single parents - anything except austerityand unemployment. Twitter was alight with racist indignation on Tuesday morning, and some people discussing the clean-up urged volunteers to "sweep away the scum". News outlets trying to explain the chaos focused on social media rather than social breakdown.

New broom needed

A clean-up operation is one thing, but vigilantism on the streets is quite another. The impulse to defend one's community is absolutely understandable, and citizens cannot be faulted for organising to patrol their neighbourhoods against arson attacks, but reports of gangs of EDL members yelling racist slogans at young black men in Eltham are extremely worrying. So are the professed liberals calling for water cannon and rubber bullets to be deployed.

Those using the various manifestations of this "fightback" to confirm their own prejudices would do well to remember how the Clapham broom brigade reacted when Boris Johnson arrived to congratulate them on their hard work. Shouts of "this is your fault" and "how was your holiday, Boris?" greeted the mayor, who had only just returned after three days of rioting to "take charge".

He did so by making helpers clear the area and pause their clean-up operation while he posed, broom in hand, for press photos. He then put down the broom and made a hasty exit from a crowd murmuring about closed community centres.

As panicked politicians with little understanding of social disorder fight to reclaim the narrative, it is vital that we resist the easy story of "us"
and "them".Because the truth is that it's all "us". The disorder will continue until we acknowledge that the young people who rampaged through Manchester, Liverpool, Brixton, Tottenham and 50 boroughs of London are as much a part of the "real Britain" as those who nobly came out the next morning to clear the debris from their trashed high streets. The language of "true Brits" defending themselves against a feral underclass is precisely the language of social division that predicated these riots.

Civil unrest is a frightening thing, but more racism, more violence and more young people being demonised will not heal our cities.

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/la...an-story-broom

But this is more typical.

[king mob]

I'm bumping this thread back from the dead for this utter monstrosity of an article in today's Guardian. You might want to suspend disbelief now...

ChoObjectify: (verb) to treat something as a mere object, to deny its dignity.

This week in my house there has been much marvelling at Olympic bodies: gasping at the broadness of the swimmers, wowing at the cyclists' tree-trunk thighs and phwoaring at the hockey players. Because it's our house, yeah, so we can say what we like, and also I have been drinking a whooooole load of gin.

But it's also because watching the Olympics is a lot about bodies, their amazing strength and agility. These bodies are not objects, they are instruments, with inspiring stories behind them: stories of determination, of truckloads of Lucozade, of millions of mornings of getting up to swim or run or row instead of sleeping in like all the other teenagers. We are wowed by these people's stories. We worship them.

That's why it's significant how weird it is to see men's bodies without heads, beach volleyball style. There are their little bottoms; there are their broad shoulders; there is one bending over.

This turns quickly from a state of admiration, sexual or otherwise, to objectification, a removal of someone's story (and a close up of their balls). It seems an antithesis of what the Olympics is about – the individual, their particular achievement. Of course, men haven't got a whole history of bodily oppression behind them, so the effect is sort of comical. But it's still unsettling.

Underneath the volleyball article some guy called Bill Pickle has shrieked, "You think the problem is that the general male audience objectifies these [female] athletes, not so, the problem is that the general female audience don't objectify the men enough."

Weeeell I'm not sure about that, to be honest Bill! When I was a teenager I saw a young skinny man physically leapt on by a raucous hen party. They must have had some challenge to get hold of a man's T-shirt, and this wasn't consensual – it was ugly. The women were blind drunk, hugely predatory and he looked like a shy type. They were a herd, pushing him to the ground and ripping his shirt off. They were playing on his vulnerability, and the size and aggression of their group. He was shaking afterwards, all the more humiliated because they were woman and he was supposed to be a "man" – like when you're beaten up by kids who are younger than you. It remains one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen (and I once watched Requiem for a Dream followed by Irreversible. So sue me!)

So no, I don't think ramping up the objectification of men's bodies is preferable, or unproblematic. But there is a line between admiration – oh boy, let's call it plain fancying! – and objectification.

Any web article about objectification or male harassment of women inevitably has some guy called Bill shouting "WHAT'S THERE (sic) PROBLEM WE'RE ONLY PAYING THEM A COMPLEMENT (sic)" in the comments section, and I think the sad thing is, Bill really doesn't get it. It reminds me of my granny's bemused face when I haltingly said that maybe, if she wants to comment on the competency of the nurses in the NHS, she shouldn't say admiringly, "The Blackies are fantastic nurses!" No Granny. Not OK.

It's confusing, see, because some women – usually the ones who already know you – like your wife, maybe! – or who are more extrovert types, do like being "complimented", whereas some feel intimidated or offended if you whistle or leer or publicly look at pictures of them in degrading positions and generally make them feel like an object. IT'S ALMOST AS IF WOMEN ARE NOT ALL THE SAME BEING. IT'S ALMOST AS IF SUCH A THING AS "CONTEXT" OR "HISTORY" EXISTS.

It's a little problem I like to call "failure to climb into someone else's skin and walk around in it". Man, these guys need a chat with Atticus Finch! In the absence of Atticus, I will attempt to explain to Bill just What the Hell is Going On. Come on Bill, sit down – no, not that close. I know you think I'm a humourless old bag, but imagine, if you will, that images of women's bodies – often their fetishised bodies, with no heads or contexts or suggestion of personhood; let us call these images objectified – saturate culture so entirely that people barely notice them anymore. Imagine if they are on billboards magazines websites newspapers – newspapers! – BBC1 2 3 4 ITV Channel 5 Sky 1 2 Arts HBO cinema screens books flyers adverts leaflets smartphones flatscreens. Could you imagine that this might become, in an age where women are presidents and astronauts and actors and brilliant comedians and Pulitzer prize winners and Nobel prizewinners and world-leading scientists and eloquent poets and CEOs and war correspondents and achingly wonderful artists and mums and sisters and daughters and Olympic weightlifters – that it might get a little tiresome when they're portrayed, again, as objectified bodies? As tits? As arse? How it might kind of take away from those Pulitzer prizes?

It's why constant close-ups of beachball volleyball bottoms are irritating, offensive, so boring, why seeing women's bodies – Olympic or otherwise – objectified is frustrating. Men abusing Beth Tweddle or Zoe Smith because of their appearance is a result of the fact that some chaps just cannot get out of the habit of expecting women to look attractive for them! Sure, I'm all for free speech so I'm not going to have you arrested for making comments on Twitter, but free speech means I can call you a wanker, doesn't it?

It's not that harmful, however, for my mum to coo over Ben Ainslie. This kind of context always exists. Me in my house watching the swimming with my boyfriend, him rolling his eyes while mine pop out of my head at Michael Phelps' chest – that has context. Him getting his own back and ogling at the hockey players – that has context. The context is me, and him, in our house. My male gay friend jerking off to a gay objectified body has context. So does fancying the hell out of someone you're about to fuck as they take their clothes off and reveal their body: skin, muscle, sinew, cellulite, freckles, whatever.

Objects, bodies, desire, admiration. It's a complex old world, isn't it, Bill?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...ifferent-women

[bringthenoise]

They published that sub-Livejournal bollocks in the actual, physical paper?

[king mob]

Yes, I believe so. It was apparently on the front page of the site most of today as well.

[thehod]

I'm rapidly coming to the opinion that most papers have turned to outright trolling in order to get people to take notice of them.

[Johnny P. Sartre]

I need to stop reading this thread... My sides are hurting.

And come on Fox! Barkley and Chris, those two aren't even hip-hop artists and NO just cause Chris did CB4 does not make him one.

[Alan Lynch]

I'm rapidly coming to the opinion that most papers have turned to outright trolling in order to get people to take notice of them.

Which funnily enough was the subject of an article on The Guardian's website just last week. They're all at it.

[Puppetmaker Grae]

Which funnily enough was the subject of an article on The Guardian's website just last week. They're all at it.

Oh Grauniad, what are you becoming?

Seems like a good excuse to post this:
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=5eBT6OSr1TI