In re-defining Santorum, Irish Times redefines ‘squalid’

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While yesterday’s men in many sectors of the economy must make do with taking more of a back seat in the face of changing technology and wave upon wave of young turks, it looks like the boot may be on the other foot where the print media is concerned.

Journalists born before 1975, see, generally know how to spell. Just look through any written-word media these days and you’ll soon pick up on how much of a dying art that has become.

But there’s another thing that should make veteran hacks more, not less valuable as time goes on. Many ‘old school’ guys also know the meaning of “fit to print”, namely that there’s tittle-tattle and then there’s stuff actually worth writing about.

Now there’s a blurred line for you in 2012. Reading Donald Clarke‘s sarcastic lament as Rick Santorum abandoned his run for the White House, I had to keep checking the masthead to make sure that it really was the Irish Times that was running this piece and had decided that the following amounted to worthy op-ed in a quality newspaper:

“Hats are doffed to the gay activists who managed to make [Santorum's] surname a neologism for the damp residue that remains after a particular sexual practice has taken place. (Look it up yourself. I can’t be bothered to reply sarcastically to the complaints a fuller definition would trigger.)”

If you missed the gem of wit that gave rise to this tribute, I’m genuinely sorry to have to enlighten you. Particularly if you’re eating. It is important to spell it out, though, just so you are aware of the level of inspired discourse that floats Clarke’s boat.

Someone aparently decided that taking apart Santorum’s politics with reasoned debate and counter-argument was too tame  – what was really needed was for his surname to become a widely-used synonym for the mixture of lubricant and faecal matter that remains following anal sex.

Yep, you heard me right.

There was a time, of course, when puerility as debased as this was confined to the playground, to be mercifully lost in the breeze after a few guffaws among half-wits. Nowadays, alas, the playground is known as the Internet. This stuff gets written down and enjoys a longevity vastly disproportionate to its merit, among people who park their minds in the gutter.

To see this pathetic titbit given fresh life in a paper of the Irish Times status (“hats are doffed”!? Is the man out of his mind?) begs two questions. This Donald Clarke is over the age of 15, I take it? And who among his superiors actually cast an eye over this revolting paragraph and thought, “fit to print”?

Robin Cook – wisdom from beyond the grave

Robin Cook MP (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While the abiding impact of his memoirs The Point of Departure is to remind us that British politics lost one of its better representatives when Robin Cook died, the book serves two important purposes.

Firstly, his comprehensive dismantling of the supposed case for putting troops in Iraq in 2003 lands a far greater blow on the credibility of Tony Blair than I fear any tribunal will ever muster.

Far from having an axe to grind, Cook, who died in 2005 after spells as Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House, is unabashed in his admiration of what Blair and the Labour Party achieved between 1997 and 2003. When even your staunchest allies feel obliged to resign from cabinet and then be so publicly critical of your thinking as this, you must have put in some pretty lousy days at the office.

While his stand on the Iraq debacle is the central theme of the book, however, the Scot scores some equally valid points when he turns to media matters.

This is no mere tit-for-tatting under the euphemistic guise of ‘setting the record straight’. Having first-hand experience of seeing the press at work, I am forced to concede that he has the  Fourth Estate weighed up to a T when describing the harm he believed it does to politics in Britain.

I reproduce extracts below. They should be mandatory reading for anyone who plans on entering this particular bearpit with a pen and notebook.

“…the adversarial mode which is now all the range among broadcasters is part of the reason for the growing alienation of the public from political debate.

“…reducing every political interview to a one-dimensional  confrontation suppresses any chance of an honest and balanced discussion of the real dilemma.

“Between [politicians and the media] we have created a style of political discourse which is aggressive and overpersonalised and which has become a barrier between us and our joint public.

“[Politicians] are in danger of seriously boring our voters…leaders today bang away at the same phrase that they are told works well on focus groups…nobody in the party must say anything original…This is deeply baffling behaviour to our electors, who live in a defiantly individualist society…

“The reason why politicians stick to their hymn sheet is that they are dealing with a media which is no longer capable of handling an original idea but knows how to report a personality conflict.

“The irony is that the press constantly complain that politicians are boring but they are not going to dare to be interesting unless the media starts to reward rather than punish originality.

“[Voters] want more MPs with whom they can feel some psychological empathy – MPs who have thrown away their pagers, speak what they think and demonstrate real passion for a cause…most of my colleagues would be happy to rise to that challenge if they felt it was safe to come out of the bunker.

“Today’s headline writers want drama and drama requires conflict and exposure, not progress and solutions…The awkward truth is that serious politics does not throw up a novelty every day for the next morning’s edition. As a result the search for novelty often ends in treasuring trivia.

“Politicians find themselves conscripted to parts in a soap opera, in which the plot line is solely about who is on the way up, who is on the way down and who is on the way out…The elector is reduced to being a spectator rather than the owner of the process.”

Distinct lack of Star quality

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Good to see the Morning Star pushing forward the boundaries of quality journalism yesterday.

Their front page banner headline, on view for all to see at newsstands around the country – CITY KNOWS IT’S TAKING THE PISS.

That’s it, is it? The sum total of the Star brains trust’s command of the English language?

And there I was thinking that what separates professional writers from the man in the street is that they take the trouble to convey anger in intelligent prose while Joe Public merely reaches for the first expletive to come to mind.

I know the Internet is supposed to have made everyone a journalist but I had no idea just how much the divide has narrowed.

And how counter-productive for a newspaper with the Morning Star‘s politics. I’m trying to think of a more emphatic way in which its editorial staff could have made themselves look like peasants. But I’m struggling.

Alex McLeish, Aston Villa and why journalists should get out more

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Not a great day at the office for The Guardian‘s Paul Hayward, who believes the cross-city move of Birmingham City manager Alex McLeish to hated rivals Aston Villa should have met with little more than raised eyebrows from either side of the Second City.

And in a passionless, clinical corporate environment, much of what he says would make sense. But this is football and sportswriters like Hayward, who would be the first to bleat about the game losing its passion if they thought it would fill a column, should realise that tribalism, lazy or otherwise, is the inevitable flipside of such passion. It fills stadia, sells merchandise and guarantees football writers work.

Alex McLeish moving from Birmingham City to Aston Villa is indeed neither illegal nor immoral. Alex McLeish leaving Birmingham City because he feared he might be on one of those unspoken win-your-first-five-games-or-you’re-out deals at St Andrews next season, is understandable.

Alex McLeish presiding over the relegation of Birmingham City and then moving to Aston Villa, however, is tactless and insensitive and demonstrates that the insular cluelessness of many footballers does not end when they hang up their boots.

This is a man who managed a club in Glasgow, for goodness’ sake. Did he learn nothing?

Has he even considered how much weight his words will carry next time he’s exhorting his charges in a relegation battle to show some commitment to the cause?

And has he made sure he’s being paid enough by his new club to make worthwhile the risk of becoming one of the game’s great trivia questions: who was the last manager to take two clubs in the same city down in consecutive seasons?

It sounds to me like money has spoken and status has trumped all other considerations. If Paul Hayward seriously thinks that this should be met with a mere sigh by football followers then I would suggest that when next season comes around, he covers the occasional game from the stands, instead of the press room. He is beginning to lose touch with both his subject and his audience.

No guns or gore, yet Inside Job one of the all-time great horror movies

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In a way, I’m delighted that Inside Job is now available free of charge, for all to see.

And in another way, I’m not.

Because I defy even the most benign among you to reach the end of this documentary feature film analysis of the crash of 2008 without wishing you had a gun.

On the face of it, 108 minutes of talking heads shouldn’t make for an Oscar winner. The drama, however, emanates not from the characters but from their damning words, as the causes and causers of Wall Street’s latest meltdown are nailed emphatically to the wall, in an expose of greed and hubris that will take you beyond anger.

That not one executive nor company  has yet been brought to justice for their part in this fiasco raises serious questions about just how much daylight exists between law enforcement and Government in America and leaves we plebs having to savour the film’s minor triumphs of retribution:

1. Mouse-like Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard’s  laughable attempt to go all John Wayne on the interviewer (“Give it your best shot!!!” – at 1:31:55) as he begins to perceive the corner into which he’s being painted. Some men can carry off the all-guns-blazing approach: this isn’t one of them.

2. John Campbell, Chairman of Harvard’s Economics Dept (1:30:05 and 1:32:30) doing the best hapless Brit routine since Bertie Wooster. If I thought this was the sum total of my 15 minutes of fame, I might never leave the house again.

And at the end of what I thought might be a film that merely confirmed what we already suspected, there is a certain sting-in-the-tail. If America’s business and economics academics are as hand-in-hand with these Wall Street geniuses as Inside Job suggests, what’s to say we won’t be back here again in 10 years’ time, when the next batch of college graduates hit the Street?

It’s a sign of just how relentlessly infuriating this film is that its only note of optimism comes if you’re a woman of a certain age, as French finance minister Christine Lagarde ably demonstrates that grey hair need be no bar whatsoever to arousing a certain je ne sais quoi in the opposite sex. If Combe Inc is the next American corporate casualty, it may be the first in a while for which bankers can’t be held responsible.

Sunday papers a round-up of despair

Co-op, Sunday morning. An unlikely setting in which to take the pulse of a nation but a lap of the newspaper stand, digesting headlines each Sabbath has become something of a tradition.

In retrospect, I could have done without the ritual this week. What I thought would be its nadir – yet another bent-over Corrie star panty pic – turned out to be the relative highlight. It might have appalled but at least it didn’t depress.

Elsewhere, however, the news was not so good.

British doctor helps patients around rules against choosing your baby’s sex. We name this child ‘Commodity’.

More relaxation on wedding rules  – now you can be married at any time of night or day – further blurring the line between ceremony and circus.

And a prison governor is advised to apologise in writing to an inmate for finding methadone in his cell because proper procedures were not followed.

“You should always read the newspapers and watch the news at least once a day,” Miss H used to advise us in our final year at junior school. Nowadays, I suspect she’d be more likely to shield our impressionable young eyes.

And illicit panty shots would be the least of it.

Independent’s day, with pre-emptive strike on royal wedding overkill

I don’t have much time for its politics but hats off to The Independent for its defiance in keeping the royal wedding resolutely off its front page this Wednesday.

It would be naive to think journalistic principle was its motivation but hopefully others in the media will have taken note that opting for important stories over the easy one did not result in the sky caving in.

At a time when family and national budgets alike are creaking like a galleon in a force ten and where young troops are dying for the folly of politicians not fit to shine their boots, a royal wedding – even one that looks beyond the blue bloods for a mate – warrants only so much attention.

Not that you’ll hear that from the press, too many of whose members will see fairytale nuptials as the ideal excuse not to wear out their shoe leather hunting down real news stories between now and the big day.

Brace yourself, instead, for a string of puffery pieces based around musings of the kind of royal ‘insider’ so beautifully lampooned by Armstrong and Miller. Trite fodder for the masses that probably won’t even require a trip beyond Greater London.

So from this royalist, grudging thanks to one newspaper prepared to raise the bar just a little bit higher. For now, at any rate…

Balding highlights bad taste more than she knows

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While the Sunday Times lands some long-overdue blows in his defence, I am generally with Clare Balding in her dispute with Times TV critic AA Gill.

Gill can argue to the contrary till he’s blue in the face but his review of Balding’s programme Britain By Bike has absolutely no need of the following:

“Now back to the dyke on a bike, puffing up the nooks and crannies at the bottom end of the nation.”

“I wonder if the production team noticed that, even through three layers of Viyella and Gore-Tex, Clare has heroically assertive nipples”

This isn’t criticism, it’s the journalist as smart aleck, proffering crass, unnecessarily personal digs that he hopes will bring almost as much of a smirk to his peers’ faces as they did to his own. It is pathetic and there are too many newspaper people who abuse their power in this way, whether it’s a writer or a sub-editor egging him on.

And it’s a shame that the hopelessness of his case detracts from an otherwise valid point made by Gill’s editor, John Witherow, in response to Balding’s complaint:

“In my view, some members of the gay community need to stop regarding themselves as having a special victim status and behave like any other sensible group that is accepted by society.”

Agreed. Watching homosexuality acquire almost reverential status in recent years has been somewhat bewildering. If only this particular case fit his rhetoric. Prejudice, however, starts with name-calling that goes to the core of what a person is. Unchecked, it becomes legitimised and a civilised society takes a step backwards.

As it does when vulgarity rules and people with the intelligence to do better communicate publicly  in the language of the taproom.

Clare Balding was never likely to dignify her stance by taking it onto Twitter but the following input, as reported by The Guardian, drags the issue down to a yah-boo level, at which point those of us who don’t enjoy watching adults embarrass themselves start to move on:

“Balding, who made her debut on the microblogging site earlier this week to call Gill a “twat”, is now seeking advice from fellow tweeter Stephen Fry. Last night former the Labour deputy leader John Prescott tweeted his support for Balding, referring to Gill as ‘a shit’.”

Balding, I should remind you, was educated at Cambridge University. Prescott, I won’t need to remind you, as you’re probably still wiping the tears of laughter from your eyes, is now a peer of the realm.

There was a time when people in their position, whatever language they might use behind closed doors, would have felt obliged to raise the bar slightly when venting their anger in an open forum.

Nowadays, it seems, anything goes. Propriety is once again subjugated to the cult of self and its overriding need to emote.

Yes, Clare Balding, AA Gill gave us ample cause to wrinkle our noses at the state of Britain’s intelligentsia.

What a shame you then had to go and do likewise.

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Bald truth on Gill is vulgar, vulgar, vulgar – Rhoda Koenig, Belfast Telegraph