Harry's Blog

Anyone else getting really fed up with the double standards of much of the British press these days?

There are several stories I've read over recent days that made me pretty cross with the way the newspapers covered the issue.

What galls me about the way the press deals with these issues is that they clearly print the stories to titillate the reads and feign mock disgust, which allows them to print the piece with what they perceive as a moral right.

The first of these stories was the Mail on Sunday (open in a new window) shock at a headless goat being used at a videogame press launch. This piece was clearly designed to engrage the white middle class racists who read the paper, who enjoy being annoyed in this way.

Of course, there's very little in the story about the goat being bought in that state from a butcher, guests not actually ever touching it and the supposed entrails given to journos just being some regular soup. That would all get in the way tickling the annoyed erogenous zones of Mail-reading types.

Similarly we have the sad story (open in new window) of Lord Browne, chairman of BP. He's been hounded out of his job for being Gay. The newspaper involved, yes the Sunday Mail again, would argue Browne resigned following the findings that he lied in court of the affair with his boyfriend. But really this is yet another example of a shitty rag like the mail, playing with someone's private life to excite the readers, then pretending it has the moral high ground. Mail readers hate gays and the paper clearly considered it its duty to make another poof miserable. Well done, wankers.

When it comes to sex, the British press really knows how to capture readers yet claim innocence. Remember all the paedophone campaigns in papers like the Express and the Mail? There's very little mention in those papers of the thousands of men targeted by Operation Ore that were innocent and were fingered because the paedo website company was (a) hosting some legit sites and (b) committed credit card fraud which then incriminated innocent people. There's some evidence that this whole thing has led to hundreds of suicides, but the papers don't really talk about this.

Instead these are the newspapers that will happily make comments about Emma Watson or Charlotte Church coming of age, but then go on about sex pests as though they aren't complicit in their creation.

Compare that to the more relaxed Danes. This story about school girls stripping (don't worry it's a safe link to a newspaper site) shows a nation with a more relaxed and less hysterical attitude to sexual matters. Whatever the rights and wrongs in the story, the actual reaction by authorities shows a nation not quite in the grip of the moral force exerted by two-faced rags like the Mail or Express.