1. Baby P.
2. Gordon Smart (everything “written” by).
3. “Political correctness” (get a clue, or at least look it up on Wikipedia).
4. How the British economy is recovering (shut up bankers, you are despicable liars).
5. Faux-controversial puff pieces about waning artists and actors designed to promote their latest attempt to arrest their decline. It is miserably transparent and rarely even offers self-righteous amusement. Quit it.
6. Dan fucking Brown.
7. The Labour Party (if your name is Polly Toynbee).
8. Princess Diana / Jade Goody / anyone else ever described as a people’s princess (stop pandering to the grief athletes you sick fucks).
9. The Wire (yes, it is amazing, but for god’s sake stop using per-episode fansquee as content).
10. The phrase “couldn’t make it up” (opinion pieces and comments, thank you very much).
Further, anyone who uses the phrase “bonkers Britain” will be summarily hung, drawn and quartered without trial.
Feel free to post your own entries in the comments. The mainstream press can be amazingly rubbish and it’s nice to vent, snark, sneer and otherwise hop up on a moral hobbyhorse about it, so do join me.
I..have no idea who this Gordon Smart fellow is.
That’s probably for the best. He’s almost the concentrated form of what is most incompetent and awful in journalism. His only saving grace is that he isn’t particularly prone to horrible racist toss, but then he is a “showbiz” writer.
I vote they stop obsessing about whether or not people are saying the word “cuts” and focus on what would actually be cut (or the lack of information thereto, as appropriate).
Good call, Niall. This has inspired me to add “conflict reporting devoid of political or historical context”. On the other hand, that would eliminate all TV war reportage at a stroke… ;)
11. the child who changed sex during the summer holidays: things that shouldn’t be on national news #1
12. The Daily Fail, of all people, pretending they aren’t homophobic right wing twats:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1214528/The-tangled-private-life-murdered-Honorary-Consul–sexual-hypocrisy-shames-Jamaica.html
“But if it transpires that homophobia was behind the murder of this British diplomat, the people of this beautiful but benighted island — to whom he gave so much — should hang their heads in shame.”
Bloody hell, I can scarcely believe that Daily Mail article…