The British press and its immense fail

What is with the British press lately? Why all the stupidity this week alone? I've decided not to buy any papers other than the ace 20p I from now on. And this is why:


1. News International have been dragged through the courts in the last year for hacking the phones of celebrities. It's all very silly and intrusive, etc, etc, etc.

Except this week, it has come to light that they hacked the voicemail of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old girl who was murdered. Her killer was only sentenced in the last month for the crime, which occurred some years ago. Her family have had to face that awful pain for all that time. Her father, who collected BDSM and alternative lifestyle magazines, was not only questioned by police for being so depraved (BDSM! He must have killed his own daughter) and had the details of his life scrutinised in court, but the press got hold of it and covered every last lewd detail of the private lives of Millie's parents.

And then it came to light this week that, hoping for a story, News International hacked the voicemail of this little girl while she was missing and deleted the messages. Her family lived in agonised hope, telling themselves she must be okay, because she was logging in and listening to her mail.

All this for a scoop for a stupid newspaper that people read for the celebrities, anyway.

Rebekah Wade, the editor of the paper, insists she knows nothing about this and it was the work of a maverick member of staff. Today, it transpires they had 'personal dealings' with each other.

Oh, and they also hacked the phones of the families of the girls killed by the Soham murderer. And victims of the 7/7 bombings. It's so depraved that it's hard to put into words how low it is.

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Okay, so I know that finding offence in The Daily Mail is hardly the most difficult thing on the planet, but I'm really annoyed by today's article: a diatribe about how the programme Coronation Street has abandoned its working-class roots to give us 'Wall-to-wall gays, transsexuals, transvestites and teenage lesbians'.

Because working-class people can never be gay, or transgendered. It's so hateful and so inane and stupid that I don't know where to begin. Coronation Street gave Britain its first transgender character and although very problematic from the start with how they depicted that, the programme has opened up an issue that some would rather stay hidden and refuse to understand. What's not to celebrate about that? I also hate that they rant about 'transsexuals and transvestites'  - a transvestite character appeared in one episode. It seems to me that they're deliberately trying to paint Hayley Cropper as a transvestite. And look at this: 

'Squalor, grime and poverty  have been replaced by shoddy, tinsel-edged glamour.'

Well, I'm awfully sorry to tell you, London-centric idiot journalist, but it's not The Road to Wigan Pier up here. Squalor and grime don't tend to be the landscape of 2011. Poverty in some areas, yes. God forbid a programme written by working-class people has working-class people being happy with being gay or eating something other than a bag of chips and running t' coal mine for mam.

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The Guardian, meanwhile, is always very, very, quick to report on the failings of other papers. It was this paper which broke the phone-hacking scandal. Everything should be in the light, it says. Everything should be acknowledged. Even if a freelancer for a paper, The Guardian finds the story, investigates it, shows us what's wrong.

So when Kia Abdullah, a columnist for The Guardian itself (as stated on her Twitter bio) decided to openly mock the deaths of three teenagers in a bus crash in Thailand because of the crime of having double-barrelled names (because nobody poor ever has double-barrelled names), the British press picked up on it.

Except The Guardian.

And when the grieving mother of one of those boys finally got an apology from the spiteful clown and people expressed their outrage to The Guardian, they replied that she wasn't a full-time columnist with them, which is excusable. What was inexcusable was them refusing to run a story -- even two lines -- about what happened in their paper or their site, or on the Comment is Free blog. This is in the same week when they have obsessively written about the failings of Johann Hari, who is sometimes inflammatory, sometimes a little harsh... but who doesn't celebrate the deaths of young people.