Paper Monitor
11:05 UK time, Monday, 27 October 2008
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
The doctored image of Sarah Palin in a swimsuit (see Friday) has disturbingly cropped up a number of times in Paper Monitor's mind over the weekend.
Jostling for position though is that photo of George Osborne et al in their penguin suits posing for their undergraduate PoshSoc photo as the doctored image of today. Well, it might or might not have been doctored. The Daily Mail says two people appear to have been airbrushed out of the photo, though the evidence is frankly slightly less than conclusive. What is most shocking, though, is that only eight of the 20 people in the photo have been identified. Obviously there's the Bullingdon omerta (vow of silence) issue to overcome, but come on Fleet Street... surely someone somewhere could be persuaded to ID these generously hair-gelled fellows.
Personally Paper Monitor is slightly disappointed in the people in one's past that none of them ever do anything scandalous, fantastic or even interesting. When oh-when will one of them enter the Shadow Cabinet or sleep with Russell Brand or something. Please!
Meanwhile. The mutual loathing that newspapers have for each other is rarely voiced in print - it's so unbecoming - but a Guardian book review at the weekend opened with these words: "The Daily Mail is in many (no, most) respects a dreadful paper, relentlessly stoking the worst human emotions: prejudice, bigotry and hate."
Ooh that hurts. Feels almost like a declaration of war.
A quick check of today's Mail for prejudice, bigotry or hatred (henceforth to adopt a WMD-style acronym) isn't too rewarding, though there is a bit of apparent escalation of hostilities, with king of columnists Keith Waterhouse having a pop at the Guardian, dropping in the line "bless its recycled sandals" and saying that it is "usually so gullibly green that on some days it is indistinguishable from a plate of guacamole".
As for PBH, there is also a double page spread which has the eminently Mail-style headline: "Bush's stupid, brutish presidency has made the US more hated than at any time since Vietnam." Hatred for George Bush is, one assumes, not the kind of thing the Guardian reviewer had in mind. There IS an article about how Agincourt was England's finest hour, but it doesn't quite make the mark.
In fact the only thing which seems to pass muster is a column by Melanie Phillips: "Gloating cruelty, foul vulgarity and a ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ that has lost its sense of shame." The ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's new mission, she says, is to "degrade, coarsen and brutalise". To be honest, Paper Monitor tries not to read e-mails from management, but will go back and check up on these new objectives. If tomorrow's instalment reads like an episode of The Wire, you'll know the reason.
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