2010 in Dicks

2011 has started and seems disappointingly familiar, but it gives us all a chance to look back at the year just gone. And I felt that I'd look back at all the dicks who have made the world slightly worse. And where better to start than...

THE CONSERVATIVE-LEAD GOVERNMENT: We all knew it was coming. There was no way that New Labour could hold on any longer, but the popularity of the Liberal Democrats (a phrase that is as laughable now as it was last January) just kept the Tories from a majority. And then gave them the MPs they needed anyway. Much of the anger has been (rightly) directed at Nick Clegg for backtracking on virtually every promise that made him so popular in the first place, but let's not forget that to bend to the every whim of the Conservative Party, there needs to be Conservative policies to begin with. So whilst Cameron and Osborne are happily pissing on everyone, let's not take out all of our anger on the guy pointing and laughing.

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM: This was the year when Paul Chambers was convicted for an illegal use of irony, but at least he was fortunate enough not to end up in hospital at the hands of the police (allegedly, of course). Surely the worst injustice of the year is of the rape victim jailed for eight months for retracting her genuine allegations. Though she has since been released, she still has to fight for her children. The husband had all the charges against him dropped, begging the question: How can they convict someone of falsely retracting allegations of sexual assault, and yet not convict the (therefore genuine) rapist? It saddens me that the organisations that are suppose to protect me -- the police and the CPS -- have shown themselves to be thuggish and shockingly misguided.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Not for his work with WikiLeaks, an organisation which I support and I believe has done a remarkable amount of good work in revealing what it has, but for his entirely dick-ish remarks following the recent allegations against him. Sunny Hundal has compiled a brilliant piece on whether the accusations of conspiracy stand up, but regardless of his guilt or innocence (neither of which have yet been proven in court, and I would not like to speculate on it), he has recently said some phenomenally unpleasant things, such as claiming he fell into a "hornets' nest of revolutionary feminism", that Switzerland is the "Saudi Arabia of feminism", and that these women had got into a "tizzy" about something as trivial about the very serious subject of STDs. WikiLeaks would do very well without him.

KAY BURLEY, ADAM BOULTON AND BEN BROWN: 3 journalists, two working for Sky and one for the BBC. Boulton and Burley provided us with such shoddy journalism that people were compelled to shout at them in the street, but then at least you would expect that of Sky "News". Ben Brown's treatment of Jody McIntyre was a different matter, with the supposedly "impartial" BBC doing all they can to pin blame on a victim of a violent and horrific incident. The official statement from the editors completely misses the point. Would they really interview anyone in the same way? Is Crimewatch an interrogation of the victims, ascertaining whether they were "rolling towards" the criminals, perhaps? It was not a balanced view, but a disgusting display of victim-blaming.

NADINE DORRIES: I have tried several times to write a post about Dorries, about her 70% fictitious blog that she uses to make personal attacks on her constituents, but every time I begin I realise that Tim Ireland has said it earlier and better than I ever will (and been the victim of some vicious and nasty smearing as the result), so I'll just point you in his direction.

DANNY DYER AND ZOO MAGAZINE: Oh how we laughed back in May when Danny Dyer joked about cutting women's faces. Except we didn't, because it was deeply unpleasant. Dyer initially claimed to have been misquoted, but has since offered this apology, in which it becomes clear that the problem was that he was quoted, albeit an off-record aside. He has since resigned, and released the film Pimp to huge box-office takings of £205. Zoo magazine, however, which approved and printed the column, continues to be published to a wide readership.

THE POPE: An inevitable inclusion on this list, the Pope currently feels more like the head of SPECTRE than the Catholic Church. Accusation after accusation after accusation of child abuse and subsequent cover-ups have been leveled at Catholic Priests (too many to link to, but the length of this Wikipedia article is startling in itself), and yet all Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his lot have done is attack homosexuals, secularists, and women. I said back in September that

I will never be able to put into words the horror and sadness that I feel, knowing that there are millions of people who hold this hateful, bigoted, misogynistic homophobe in the highest regard possible.

Since then, the Pope has claimed that paedophilia wasn't a big deal in the '70s, and that child pornography is increasingly seen as "normal". Am I really expected to moral advice from a man who opposes the use of condoms more than child pornography?

So, that's why he's my Dick of 2010. Until the end of Monday you can vote for five dicks here (Cameron, Osborne, Dorries and Dyer were my other choices, by the way).

Happy New Year!

Bryant v Burley

There is always the danger, when you have an opinion, of allowing that opinion to influence your viewpoint. For instance, I think that Rupert Murdoch and his affiliated publications are hideously biased politically towards a side I disagree with. I know that the News of the World, one of those publications, is currently under scrutiny thanks to allegations of phone-hacking. I also know that Sky News is, in part, owned by Murdoch.

All this leaves me open to the suggestion that Sky News would provide poor coverage of this story. Indeed, they, along with most of the mainstream media, provided no coverage of it the day The Guardian broke the story, and only relented when it became too big to deny. But, as Kay Burley points out in the clip, as a journalist she is there to provide the opposite side of the argument. It is only that she performs this badly that it is worthy of criticism.

The first problem is her demand for evidence. This is normally a perfectly reasonable demand, except for the fact that all the evidence has been out in public for a while (see Jack of Kent's blogpost for details), and, as an interviewee, it's a little unfair to ask him for all the figures when he doesn't have them to hand.

Nevertheless, the interview then progresses. Burley asks Bryant if he is prepared to make a controversial claim. A claim that he had already made before he was interrupted by Burley asking for evidence. If nothing else, it's poor journalism to ask an interviewee merely to repeat the same point over and over again.

Since Paxman's famous interview with Michael Howard, in which he continued to ask if Howard the same question without getting a straight answer, it seems that all journalists think they can badger their way to the truth. Burley is not alone in this, and neither is it limited to politics. Fabio Capello was badgered by a journalist minutes after England's draw with the USA in the FIFA World Cup as to the future of goalkeeper Robert Green. When Capello rightly argued it was too early to make a firm decision, the point continued to be brought up.

The biggest problem with Burley's "Devil's Advocate" argument is that she tries to make a dismissive comment without phrasing it as a question. Her assertion that Bryant should merely change his PIN and there would be no problem is immediately countered, despite the fact that she was clearly trying to move on to another topic. Of course, the fact that she seemed to be defending the concept of phone-hacking itself, rather than the fact that these are just allegations, is also disturbing.

So, is it journalistic bias, or just being "dim"? It's difficult to say objectively. However, whichever is the case, it's not the first time that Kay Burley has shown herself to be astonishingly poor at conducting an interview. If only there could have been protesters behind this interview...

Pie in the Sky

Hello all,



A couple of months ago I posted a tweet on my Twitter page (which I'm shamelessly linking to here), saying,

People want to sack Kay Burley. People are laughing at Adam Boulton. Sky - When you BECOME the news, you're doing it wrong.

This immediately became the most re-tweeted tweet I'd ever posted, implying that other people, like me, were also fed up with Sky "News"'s take on events at that time. More than 1000 people complained to Ofcom about the clash involving Boulton above, and a further 1000-odd complained about Kay Burley's shocking "interview" with a protester:

(Though this did lead to this fantastic moment, in which the protesters made their opinions of Sky News very clear).

This kind of "news" coverage (the inverted commas are getting tedious, so I shall stop, but you get the idea) is quite common in America, where pundits like Bill O'Reilly and the monstrous Glenn Beck have made their names by being bullies dressed up as journalists. There is no attempt to dress the news as anything other than propaganda, and as a result, gaining facts is a tricky business. But in this country, mainstream broadcasters must be impartial, and our news is the better for it.

Some important facts must be added at this point, that may or may not have relevance. Sky News is, ultimately, owned by Rupert Murdoch, at that time a prominent supporter of David Cameron and the Conservative Party, who owns many newspapers who proclaimed their support publicly in the run-up to the General Election. He also owns FOX News, the home of O'Reilly, Beck, and many of the most significant right-wing propagandists currently working in America. His son, James Murdoch, is the direct head of News Corp's dealings in Europe, and is non-executive chairman at BSkyB. He is also the main reason for Murdoch Snr's switch from Brown to Cameron. This information might lead us to assume a bias is likely, BUT it does not make it inevitable.

I was disappointed when Ofcom decided to reject the complaints leveled at Sky News. For me, both of these incidents show clear journalistic bias. David Babbs, the director of the movement behind the protest, seems barely able to speak three words before Burley shouts at his pointlessness and tells him to go home and watch it all on Sky News (nice plug, there, Kay). And at what point did anyone vote for a "Hung Parliament"? The only people claiming you could actively vote for a Hung Parliament were the Conservatives, though I would argue this is more an inability to grasp facts rather than a deliberate link. However, it is, whichever way you look at it, shockingly poor journalism.

Boulton's outbreak is less serious than Kay Burley's crimes, if much funnier. It weakens your integrity as a journalist if you are unable to counter arguments with anything other than shouting (rather like John Sweeney getting angry at the Church of Scientology), and so again can only be seen as bad journalism. His constant point-scoring techniques make him sound more like one of the politicians he interviews than an impartial onlooker. Even if we accept that, as an interviewer, he must take the other side of the argument, it is clear from the footage that he is trying to undermine Alastair Campbell's arguments, rather than challenge or highlight them.

If Ofcom are not going to censure such poor journalism and partial broadcasting, there remains only one solution. As the protesters themselves shouted out on Sky television, "Watch the BBC"!