The Worst Example Of Journalism I've Read

[coveredinbees]

I don’t have 50p and try tossing 30p and a White Company button into the bucket. It doesn’t work.

There is now an angry queue behind me.

Hahahahahhahahaha Thank you for posting!

[Shawn Hopkins]

What is a White Company button?

[coveredinbees]

I wish I knew. I burst out laughing at the angry queue.

[Vic Vega]

She really has a talent for making it all about her, whatever the subject. Bet her Somalia piece will be a fascinating study in self-absorption.

10,000 words of her bitching about her hotel room, I'll wager.

[coveredinbees]

Reading more of her, I'm finding it hard to believe she's a real person.

[king mob]

Oh my fuck.

I couldn't make it the whole way through, but I was intrigued at the way she managed to sneak in a quick restaurant review on her way to the point of the piece, whatever it might have been (presumably something along the lines of, "Why aren't the police doing enough to find out what happened to a pretty white girl?").

This one made me angrier than the other one because the Joanne Yeates murder was close to home, and the Mail pestered a friend of mine for information on Yeates landlord who was a teacher at her school and was plastered in the media as the murder because he looked 'weird'. the Mail got her partners mobile number (how I have no idea when it's a company mobile) and their landline number (it's in the directory). No information was passed on and the Mail hack was told to fuck off, as was the hack from the Mirror who also appeared after the Mail had been told where to go.

Thankfully Yeates landlord sued several newspapers for libel and won.

[king mob]

She really has a talent for making it all about her, whatever the subject. Bet her Somalia piece will be a fascinating study in self-absorption.

You need to read the pisstake Twitter account someone set up. It's bloody genius and my recent favourite is:

I'm speaking English slower. I'm speaking English louder. Still these people don't understand me.

[king mob]

I wish I knew. I burst out laughing at the angry queue.

I've no idea either but the tollbooth at the bridge is pretty well known about, and frankly I don't think the person who gave her 50p was actually nice to her as you'd have to be a bloody idiot trying to chuck a button in.

[Charles RB]

She really has a talent for making it all about her, whatever the subject. Bet her Somalia piece will be a fascinating study in self-absorption.

"The food at the hotel is shockingly subpar!"

You need to read the pisstake Twitter account someone set up. It's bloody genius and my recent favourite is:

Oh that's great.

[king mob]

In the interests of balance, here's another awful piece this time done by Laurie Penny (or Penny Red as she paints herself), the now well-known champion of left wing politics who survives only on her massive inheritance and her regular income from her half-arsed badly thought out opinion pieces.

From the Fortnum & Mason ruckus to a Radio 4 panel show, Laurie Penny's double life has never been so chaotic or contradictory...

It's a balmy Thursday evening and I'm on the balcony of a swish editing suite in Fitzrovia, staring down into one of those scraped-out dead spaces hidden behind security walls all over London. From above, you can see it properly: 50sq ft of barren gravel with a rusted surveyor's tower at the centre. 'It used to be a hospital, but some property speculators bought it out then they went bust,' says my companion. He tells me the name of the hospital. I lean out over the expensive decking to take a closer look, and say, 'That's where I was born.

These days, I live in two cities. In one of them, I'm a precariously employed young person. I associate with activists and jobless workers in squats and cramped, overpriced flats rammed with empty cereal packets and internet cables. People eat food out of skips and wear out their trainers running away from the police. In the other, I'm a media luvvie and mingle with people who take taxis to events that have name tags to make it clear something important is under way. TV and radio programmes are made, editorial meetings are held, and networking takes place in large glass buildings. More than any other city, London is a chimera, a human monster stitched together from overlapping lives. Sometimes there is irritation at the seams.

Two weekends ago, I reported on the riots in Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square from behind the police lines. I saw young people beaten by officers of the law while offering passive resistance to police tactics. I saw workers and students running through the streets in masks and hoods, throwing paint bombs at bank branches. I saw my best friend marched out of a peaceful occupation inside Fortnum & Mason, as refined diners took tea amid the chanting of slogans and hanging of banners. My friend is a conscientious young man who would never hurt anyone. Across a solid wall of police officers, who shoved me away when I tried to get closer, I watched him dragged out of a holding pen, handcuffed and taken away. He later told me he was made to strip to his underwear and sit in a cell in a white paper jumpsuit for 17 hours, with no food or legal advice. Observing the mass arrest of a peaceful protest group outside the vandalised frontage of the world's most upmarket grocer, my first thought was: 'How did it ever come to this?' My second thought, because I am a Londoner, was: 'I need a bloody coffee.'

So I did what any Londoner would do at a time of trauma and confusion. I stumbled into the nearest Pret A Manger, paid far too much for a fix of caffeine, and stood fingering the fruit bars surreptitiously while I waited for my order. Warm jazz was playing. Two well-dressed women were sharing a falafel salad, their feet nestled among oversized bags from Liberty and Selfridges. Behind them, past the familiar branded stickers on the shopfront, you could see Jermyn Street burning. As the police chased the black bloc past the windows, I sucked down the scalding liquid and tried to stop my hands shaking, making a mental list of how many of friends had been hospitalised or arrested. The shoppers continued to gossip, oblivious. Across the road diners briefly stood up from their meals, snapping pictures on their smartphones of kids charging down Piccadilly with flaming Union Jack flags and placards that read: 'Where's my future?' London has always been two cities, but now they are tearing apart, and the wound is red and inflamed.

Two days later, I take my friend, still shaken from his encounter with the law, to the launch of the Orwell Prize at a legal firm on Fleet Street: a glittering set of offices high above the city. We wear name cards and nibble at salted peanuts, and talk to a lot of important people who write about politics for a living. We listen to a genteel debate, sitting down a little stiffly because our legs are covered in baton bruises from the scuffles in Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly. We walk home by the river, smoking.

Last week we walked along the same route with half a million others on the 'march for the alternative', and the Embankment echoed with the noise of whistles and drums and floats and pushchairs rattling on the pavement. The streets are now clean. The placards have been picked up, the slogans about revolution in the mind scrubbed off the statues. A few commuters run for the bus on im-practical heels. I light a roll- up, the flame flickering in the wind. My friend cups his hands around the flame, making a little cave of brightness in the dark. I inhale

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifest...ennys-diary.do

Like Jones, Penny relies upon this vision of the UK being so amazingly awful that only her and a small band of like-minded people can save it. Both are simply awful.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

That Liz Jones piece reminds me something I would do for laughs. "Fuck everyone else and the rules , I'm SuperE so give me shots ! NOOOOW."

[Iangould]

I actually find Laurie Penny more detestable than Jones.

Probably because I've had about a hundred arguments with sad tossers who know all about what "the working class" wants and needs, despite never having done a single day's manual labor and whose longest-ever conversation with a member of the working class probably involved the phrase "decaf, skinny soy latte".

[Vic Vega]

The Laura Penny piece reads like something Alan Moore's Rorschach would write in his journal if Rorschach was a useless poser.

[dupont2005]

when i saw the thread title i thought it was going to be about fox news.

[Charles RB]

the now well-known champion of left wing politics who survives only on her massive inheritance and her regular income from her half-arsed badly thought out opinion pieces.

So if impoverished working-class youth didn't have enough problems, they've got to put up with her hanging around them for column fodder?