Why we should be grateful we don't have to be subjected to Fox News

There are some things that we in Britain have to be thankful for. We live in an affluent and tolerant society, we can complain jovially to each other about the weather, we can even watch Adrian Chiles and Christine Blakely every evening should we so choose. And we don’t have to be subjected to Fox News (*for those pedants among you I appreciate it is available via a Sky subscription).

Just as the British tabloids are feared and viewed with a certain amount of bewilderment by those across the Atlantic, the same goes the other way for their rolling 24 hours a day TV ‘news’ channels. For this is the station which brings you the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, presenters of hours of hate-filled and biased political commentary brought direct to your living room. Though this blog may have taken issue with much rubbish spouted by the Daily Mail, rest assured this is just an uncomfortable pin-prick in comparison to the full-scale rack of torture that is Fox News.

For those unsure of the type of content broadcast, this is the station that on the day of Barack Obama’s historic inauguration as US President dedicated much of its coverage showing images of the departing George Bush. This is the station whose main star Beck upon presenting Sarah Palin cried on air because he was so moved by her ‘patriotism’. The same station who allowed business anchor Neil Cavuto to insinuate Al-Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden was going to be supporting John Kerry in the 2004 election. The station whose host John Gibson, during the sensitive election of 2000 where serious questions were asked of the ballot counting, said: “Who needs to know that he's [Bush] not a legitimate president?”

And it doesn’t just stop at controversial comments. When a New York Times piece criticised the network in 2008, Fox News staggeringly doctored photos of the journalist in question, Jacques Steinberg, and the editor, portraying them unattractively with yellowed teeth, skewed facial features and darkened eyes. Not only was this petty in the extreme but offensive and morally downright abhorrent.

Just a week ago Hannity was caught out by Jon Stewart’s Daily Show using footage from a completely different protest in order to exaggerate the scale of one of the “tea parties” it had openly backed and encouraged people to attend to demonstrate against the government. Although subtle, one shot of a sunny autumn day then cuts to another which is overcast and the trees are magically green again. Hmmm…

And yet nobody was sacked. Can you imagine what would have happened had a similar tactic been used here? There would have been uproar with the aftermath lasting for weeks. But Hannity merely dedicated a few seconds on his next show, saying Stewart had “got him” and it had just been a “mistake”.

It begs the question why can this be permitted, and why is a comedy programme doing the work of investigative journalists? I would strongly urge anyone unfamiliar with Stewart to watch his show, (aired weeknights at 20.30 on More4). It is satire at its very best and certainly counters any claims that American TV is weak in this regard.

But the issue at large here is one of responsible objective media reporting. Fox News claims to be “fait and balanced” and gets very fidgety when people openly question this. In fairness their news probably isn’t as biased as one may think. But the thing is most of content on the channel is not news per se, it is comment. And it is here where impartiality is left behind at the station and the train has long since disappeared.

Fox News is partisan in its support for the (right-wing) Republicans. Literally overnight its views changed, supporting Bush right to the end and then changing tack to blaming the new administration for all of the country’s ills. Like the Mail in the UK, Fox News plays on people’s fear, with regular updates on the level of security threat. But it is much snider in its reporting and very much more sensational, the result being very manipulative.

In one of the most shocking outbursts I have witnessed on broadcast television, Beck who previously had overtly stated that Obama’s economic policies were “communist”, “socialist” and also “fascist” (contradiction duly noted…), later affirmed Obama was a “racist” and had “a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture”. Fortunately some sense among the population was seen and advertisers in their dozens refused to be associated with the show. But it’s astounding that this type of comment was allowed to go unquestioned, unpunished.

People are perfectly entitled to their views but only up to a certain point can you air such opinion. This is example was not only defamation but an insult to millions. It is no surprise to learn that the White House has boycotted interviews with the network though Fox has been stinging in its criticism of this, openly declaring a “war”. But the sad fact is Obama will suffer as a consequence due to the power the network holds over so much of the nation.

It all just makes me relieved and so much the more grateful for our neutrality laws when it comes to TV news. Next time you’re sat watching Nick Robinson, maybe you should appreciate it a little bit more.

Why we should never politicise and devalue Remembrance Day

91 years ago today the Great War ended. The war to end all wars. And yet only twenty years later the world descended once again into global conflict which would lead to the needless deaths of even more still.

Marking this anniversary is something I’ve always felt that Britain does remarkably well; sombrely and poignantly. In each city, town and village wreaths will be laid at the memorials which list every person killed in conflict and people pay their respects with two minutes of silence.

This is the first year in which there are no longer any living survivors of the trenches. The war has now passed from memory into history. I’m not sure that anyone today could get close being able to fathom what it must have been like to fight in the trenches. It is almost completely impossible to imagine what life must have been like there, despite the first-hand accounts, poetry, documentaries and even sketchy footage.

In fact one of the most emotive depictions I have seen is the ending to Blackadder Goes Forth, in which all of the characters meet their deaths, which then fades out to the scene of a field of poppies (see the video at the bottom of this blog).

To put the seemingly limitless loss of life into context, families are currently mourning the death of the 200^th casualty since Britain began operations in Afghanistan. Already people are rightly beginning to question whether military operations should continue. Yet on the first day alone of the battle of the Somme one hundred times this number (20,000) died and a further 35,500 were wounded. These are just numbers, but it’s roughly equivalent to the size of the town of Rugby disappearing overnight. In total 15,000,000 on all sides died.

Today we donate money to the British Legion and are able to personally pay tribute to all of those killed in all conflicts by wearing a poppy. All of those who died gave up their lives to enable us to live in a free society, where we are free to able to make whatever choices we wish, free to speak our minds, free to vote for whom we choose. It is therefore totally abhorrent to use this day of commemoration for any form of political wrangling, or indeed coerce people into making the gesture if wearing a poppy.

People can wear a poppy if they choose to – but they should never feel pressured into doing so which increasingly seems to be happening on the television. John Snow apparently refuses to wear a poppy when presenting the Channel 4 News for this very reason, but off camera does indeed wear one. Likewise, the Italian manager of the England football team, Fabio Capello, chooses not to wear a poppy as he respects it as a British act. On the other end of the scale, the British Legion has asked BNP leader Nick Griffin not to wear a poppy badge throughout the year in order that it not become a political symbol.

Equally, as part of its anti-Gordon Brown week, the Sun derided the Prime Minister for not bowing his head upon laying a wreath at the Cenotaph on Sunday. But as John Walsh of the Independent points out:

“If a politician lays a wreath at the Cenotaph, it's not an insult; it's an expression of respect. And forgetting to adjust your head a certain way indicates you have personal feelings and aren't just going through the motions.”

In a similar vein, five of the Premier League football teams chose not to embroider a poppy onto the front of their shirts for last weekend’s matches. Manchester United was one of those teams and a spokesperson rightfully pointed out that poppies were available around the ground, were worn by club officials and the club works regularly with armed forces charities.

Yet again the bullying campaigns such as in the Daily Mail to ‘shame’ those who do not wear a poppy wholly miss the point. Quite instead of respecting the lives that were lost they are devaluing their sacrifice.

I shall leave the final word with Guardian journalist Richard Williams:

“The bullying campaign run by the Daily Mail debased a tradition that, in its modesty and dignity, reflects individual responses to collective emotion. Coercion does not come well from a newspaper that might do better to reflect on its own reaction to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s (sample headline: "Hurrah for the Blackshirts!")”

Why I was one of the 22,000 who complained about Jan Moir

Last week I had the misfortune of reading Jan Moir’s Daily Mail ‘article’ suggesting that the late Stephen Gately’s death was not “natural” and rather a result of his “lifestyle”. Although briefly blinded by the outrage, I struggled through to the end of the piece where she questioned the legitimacy of same-sex marriages (let’s ignore the fact that at the moment they are not in fact marriages but civil partnerships according to UK law – we’ve still yet to get to the stage where they have equal legal status) and attempted to relate Gately’s death to that of M

att Lucas’ ex-husband. I say struggled to the end, the column flicks from casual homophobia to a light-hearted ‘story’ about Tara Palmer-Tompkinson’s risqué dress-sense with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, at which point my patience had long-since been excessively tested.

I have yet to work out quite what I’m most appalled about; is it:

a) That someone with such a large potential readership has he temerity to insinuate that gay people are victims of their own sexuality?

b) That it is still legal to get away with saying something like this in modern twenty-first century Britain?

c) That the second most-read newspaper in the country is willing and able to publish such material?

d) That the people reading such an article nod their way through it and actually agree with the dross which is being written?

I think for all liberal-minded Guardian readers the answer is sadly probably ‘d’. We don’t necessarily fear what is being written; the real fear is that British people might genuinely agree with it.

It seemed rather bizarre that Moir challenged the verdict given by the coroner’s report which stated quite clearly that there were no suspicious circumstances involved whatsoever. Her words are extremely disrespectful not just to gay people, that’s a given, but to all of those healthy people who do in fact die with no prior symptoms.

Anyhow, by the time that I had digested the abhorrence of the spouted drivel, I had a Charlie Brooker-inspired compulsion to vent my feelings to the Press Complaints Commission. At the time about 4,000 others had done likewise. I joined the accompanying Facebook group and posted urging others to do similarly.

As you read this more than 22,000 have. The PCC have had more complaints in the last 7 days about this than in the whole of the past 5 years. Of course they’re not going to do anything about it, other than perhaps a strongly worded letter of irrelevance, as only complainants involved in a story can make anything happen.

But I partly made the complaint out of principle. After all Middle England loves complaining. If we all lived in an ethnically-cleansed, sanitised, Clarkson-esque world they strive for they’d still be complaining that there was nothing to complain about. Let’s not forget the 40,000 people who complained about Jonathan Ross & Russell Brand being rude (and actually not very funny) to Andrew Sachs – when 39,998 of them hadn’t even listened to the programme in question. I’m not an especially big fan, but I watched Ross’ show for weeks after it came back on air just in protest to contribute to getting the ratings as high as possible.

In any case, to my dismay I later discovered that the head of the Press Complaints Commission is, you guessed it, the Editor of none other than the Daily Mail…

The now infamous Question Time episode waded

happily into this debate though, with BNP leader Nick Griffin true to form describing gay couples as “creepy”. Well what did you expect?

It was disappointing in a way that the programme didn’t run on its more regular format in order to oust Griffin from society by bringing to light his horrific fascist policies. In the end he ended up being defensive and was able to take a moral stance that he’d been ‘victimised’. Oh how the irony was lost on someone who if he had his way would be doing an awful lot of said victimisation.

It was right though that the BBC allowed Griffin on the debate. In our culture of free speech it would have been hypocritical to have banned him from appearing – and would have given him far more credibility had he not been permitted to attend.

Griffin came off badly as the despicable man should have with his pathetic attempts to side-step his holocaust denial and ludicrous suggestion that Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke was a non-violent figure. It was a shame though that the senior members on the panel that night were unable to make any killer blows - but kudos to the magnificent member of the audience who suggested sending Griffin to the South Pole – “a colourless landscape that will suit you fine”.

One final thought from the superb News Quiz – along with Have I Got News For You by far and away the best topical satire around – who quoted this Nick Griffin line:

“Sadly it’s not the indigenous, hard-working, middle class tax-paying population that’s exploding; my worry is how many immigrant mums have contributed anything to this country before landing us with another child to educate…”

“…Oh wait hang on, no that was Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail, that’s odd…”

Enough said.