Nothing in its life became it like the leaving of it.
We all know the story: 4000 people’s phones hacked. Milly Dowler. The murdered Soham girls. Families of dead soldiers coming back from Afghanistan.
£100,000 paid as bribes to the police and a Met Police investigation that manifestly failed to find the truth.
And evidence growing daily of a huge cover-up by News International staff. Thousands of emails deleted and police misled. They even hauled off one staffer’s desk to a solicitor’s office and refused to let the police see it.
And yet today the News of the World has five million copies on sale, twice its usual circulation.
If there’s one word to sum up the final issue of the News of the World, it’s “unrepentant”.
Squint and you might find it among this grand celebration of journalistic trash. There’s a five-sentence apology of sorts buried in the long leader column on page three that spends far more space recounting notable stories preceding News International’s purchase of the paper in 1969 than it does tackling the reasons for its sudden and inglorious death.
“Phones were hacked”, it says in passive-voiced weasel words that surely must make it into the next edition of Mistakes Were Made, the classic text on cognitive dissonance.
As in all the worst apologies, the scale and persistence of the News of the World’s criminality is entirely glossed over. Like Nixon in Watergate, the cover-up can do more damage than the crime. It’s not just the phone hacking but the alleged bribery of the police and destruction of evidence that could see executives James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks face criminal charges. News International is rapidly becoming the media’s Enron moment.
In a last-ditch attempt to manipulate the public’s emotions and go out with a bang rather than a whimper, the News of the World has cynically chosen to offer the profits from its final issue to three charities.
Barnardos, the Forces’ Children’s Trust and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham Charity have a lot of explaining to do to their staff and supporters this morning. By taking the News of the World’s tainted cash their names are indelibly written in the final chapter of a legitimate news business that became an organised crime syndicate. Their support has been instrumental in ensuring that this final edition of lies, evasions and distortions was not only produced but widely read. The other charities that accepted free advertising in today’s issue are equally culpable.
We should reject utterly the convenient lie that the News of the World was a great newspaper that, in its own words, lost its way.
The News of the World stood for all that was worst in British journalism. Intrusion not investigation. Cynicism not critique. Prurience not propriety.
The worst failure of the News of the World was not what it did outside the law but what it did within it. Newspapers that leave their readers less knowledgeable, less genuinely critical and less civilised have no place in our society.
If you’re just curious to see what they’ve written today you can read it online. If you want to support charity, donate directly.
Don’t give the Murdochs and Brooks the satisfaction of a record final sale of their tawdry, dead rag.
Twifakes is a spam website created by Cairo Noleto @caironoleto and Cleiton Francisco @cleitonfco. I’m sure they’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have about it.
You may have seen the website at http://twifakes.heroku.com/ which promises to tell you how many “fake” Twitter followers you have.
Do not authorise this website. It tweets without your permission and there’s no telling whether it may do other damage to your account.
Imagine you’re running social media for a public library service. You’ve got ten libraries in the service and you want to use Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.
Ethical Consumer has a feature called “Love this, ban that!” which asks an assortment of the green and the good which saintly products they love and which evil ones they’d ban. Sadly, no-one took the opportunity to challenge the premise that banning things is the best way to steer society down a more sustainable path and to allay the well-founded suspicion among many outside the green ghetto that environmentalists tend to be ban-happy authoritarians.
Inexplicably, Ethical Consumer didn’t contact me to take part in their survey but I’d like to nominate the bicycle as my favourite “ethical consumer product” and the cycle helmet for an immediate, total ban backed up with the full force and violence of the criminal justice system.
I hope that choosing the bicycle as my preferred product needs little explanation or justification but my putative ban on cycle helmets might be a little more problematic. For a long time I’ve harboured the suspicion in my more paranoid moments that there’s some kind of collusion between the road/oil lobby and elements of the cycling fraternity to ensure that cycling in Britain remains a marginalised, unpleasant and largely despised activity.
For those of us looking to travel between around a mile and eight miles without an extreme amount of cargo, the bike should be the default the choice. Done right, cycling is convenient, cheap, safe, accessible, fun and sustianable.
Done right.
It’s not possible to uninvent the bicycle but if Shadowy Forces wanted to minimise the number of people cycling so as to benefit their Evil Agenda they’d probably want to chip away at all the things that make cycling potentially great so as to diminish the whole experience. If you can’t ban it, knacker it.
Here’s how to do it:
Cycling is cheap? Can’t have that. Now, let’s see. Let’s start at the obvious place by making bikes more expensive. Load them with features that cost more to build (complex braking systems, gears, suspension) and require expensive expert maintenance rather than DIY. Turn the bike from an everyday utilitarian thing, a utensil, and make it a product. Desirable. Fashionable. Consumerable. There’s a lot of choice, so shop around. Read reviews. Get recommendations. Worry, because it matters. Who’d want to be seen riding a cheap bike? An unfashionable bike? A tatty bike? Now accessorise. That expensive bike needs an expensive lock — or two. Got to protect your investment. Buy insurance. (Shop around, shop around.) Compare the tensile strengths and style options and get a helmet. A bone dome. A skid lid. Don’t be cheap — your skull could depend on it. Get a hi-viz jacket that’s more breathable than a string vest and only fifty times the price. Padded shorts for that tiny, bony saddle. Special shoes to couple perfectly with your special pedals. A messenger bag from this week’s premium brand.
Here’s the safety strategy: Make it less safe and make it feel less safe. The best way to make cycling less safe is for cyclists to ride faster. Encourage this wherever possible. Forget ambling, casual, pedestrian images of cycling. Emphasise sport, fitness, competition. Measure speed. Sell speedometers and odometers. Get people to monitor their performance. Track their MPH, their heartrates, their calories, their carbon footprints. Compare with others. Compete. Idolise road racers, couriers, extreme mountain bikers, BMXers. Alleycatters. Lance Armstrong. Jump the red light. Race other cyclists. Race cars. Race the clock. Race, race. It’s not fun unless you’re taking risks. Life is one big risk, right? Cycling just got a whole lot more dangerous for the sake of a marginal shortening of the average journey. Ohh, wipeout. Nice one.
Now the perception of safety. Talk about safety, safety, safety so everyone thinks danger, danger, danger. Don’t show images of cyclists without helmets, especially not children. Never children. Sending your children out on bikes without helmets is tantamount to child abuse. Don’t you care? Don’t you care about the children? Would you send them out to their deaths? Photos of cyclists without helmets are like images of people with cigarettes. Historical documents. Anachronisms. Forbidden outside the intellectual safety of the academy. Be safe, be seen. Hi viz. Yellow jacket, yellow jersey. £100 lights that can dazzle shipping 20 miles off the coast. Lumens. Got to get more lumens. You need a bell? You need a foghorn. Radar. Missiles, if you could get them. And you need training, because it’s a war out there. Drivers hate you. Pedestrians hate you. Other cyclists hate you. The law is indifferent, the police don’t care. Every other road user will kill you if they get a chance. Unless you get trained. Unless you can stay one step ahead of them. Unless you can get them first. So you go to boot camp. You get trained. You are approved. You are a Cyclist. You feel a little bit safer in that dangerous place. Until you see the ghost bike. Don’t be a statistic like the pallid, mangled wreck chained to the lamppost at the roundabout. Don’t be a victim. Go faster. Be a winner. Beat them.
Do you smell? People shouldn’t smell. If you cycle, if you cycle fast, you’ll smell. You’ll need a shower. Does your workplace have showers? No? Don’t cycle. Does the pub have showers? No? Don’t cycle. Does the shopping centre have showers? No? Please, don’t cycle.
But if you don’t mind smelling, you can’t cycle to work because they don’t have lockers. You need a locker for your helmet. Your jacket. Your padded shorts. Your special shoes that couple so, so perfectly with your special pedals. Your quick-release (eezy-steal) saddle. Your lights and all their lumens. Your handlebar computer with its data, its intimate knowledge of your body, your performance, your lifestyle. Your hydration system. Your lock. You worry about your lock. It cost more than your first bike. And the bike itself? That needs a CCTV-monitored, thumbprint-secured, climate-controlled vault. A lamppost won’t do because your bike takes a month’s work to buy but only a minute or two to steal.
Are you fat? Don’t cycle. You don’t, do you? Fit people cycle. Fat people do not cycle. (Fat people do not swim. Fat people do not run. Soon, fat people will not walk.) Cycling is about fitness. Fat people, un-fit people, do not cycle. Fat people look ridiculous on bikes. Fat people look crap in lycra. Fat people look even more fat in lycra, if such a tragically hilarious thing could be possible. Fat people can only go slowly but cyclists must go fast. They must race. They must perform. They must compete. Fat people are not fast off the lights. Fat people do not look like Lance Fuckingarmfuckingstrong. Fat people must enshroud themselves in cars as a prophylactic against polite society’s sight of their ungainly self-propelled movement. Fat people must squeeze themselves onto buses and trains and tubes with all the other huffers and puffers, the children and the old people, the timid and the nearly dead. They say obese but you read fat. People like you are an epidemic. You are contagious and the things you must do to make the rest of us safe you are not allowed to do. If you are fat, don’t cycle. You don’t, do you?
Cycle helmets are the most visible and potent symbol of all that’s wrong with Britain’s (anti-)cycling culture. Cycle helmets say we cannot cycle without the right precautions, the right equipment, the right infrastructure, the right training. Cycle helmets say there must be more to cycling than a person, two wheels and the surface of the Earth. Let’s ban them now before it’s too late. Let’s lock up all the people who buy them, who sell them, who use them. Let’s drag them off to jail in handcuffs, in tears.
You’re free to republish/copy this article under the Creative Commons Attribution licence provided you credit me (Adrian Short) and give a link back to the original article. Thanks.
This article is now available as audio in twoparts on AudioBoo.
Ethical Consumer has a feature called Love this, ban that! which asks an assortment of the green and the good which saintly products they love and which evil ones they’d ban. Sadly, only Mayor Boris took the opportunity to challenge the premise that banning things is the best way to steer society down a more sustainable path and to allay the well-founded suspicion among many outside the green ghetto that environmentalists tend to be ban-happy authoritarians.
Inexplicably, Ethical Consumer didn’t contact me to take part in their survey but I’d like to nominate the bicycle as my favourite “ethical consumer product” and the cycle helmet for an immediate, total ban backed up with the full force and violence of the criminal justice system.
These are the (slightly modified) house rules I developed for Sutton Chat. If you’re starting a new community forum or blog and would like to use them as the basis for your own rules, please take them and modify them to suit you while giving attribution to Adrian Short under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 UK licence.
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House Rules for Anytown Chat
My aim is for Anytown Chat to be a place where everyone can feel comfortable debating both serious issues and the lighter side of life. In order for this to happen, there are a few House Rules which will be enforced sensibly.
By registering with this website you agree to follow these rules.
1. Be yourself
(Snip this clause if you’re happy to have pseudonymous members.)
Use your real name as your username when registering with Anytown Chat. Anytown is a real place full of real people, many of whom know each other in real life. Using real names rather than nicknames allows members to identify others that they already know and get to know people that they don’t. It also ensures that members are accountable for their words: If you wouldn’t put your own name to a comment, it probably doesn’t belong here anyway.
You are encouraged but not required to show your face by creating a profile picture of yourself.
2. No bad language
Most of us have a broad vocabulary of swear words but Anytown Chat is not the place to use them. Avoiding bad language helps to keep a civilised and intelligent tone to discussions. Use your imagination and where that fails, just restrain yourself.
3. No personal attacks
Anytown Chat is about sharing information, learning and debating. It’s not a place for personal disputes and vendettas. By all means strongly dispute others’ ideas and arguments but if you make it personal you’ll be asked to stop.
4. Respect others’ privacy
This is a public website and everything you write here can be viewed by anyone. Practically, things written here will be permanently available to the rest of the world. Do not disclose any private or personal information about other people, whether they are members here or not. This isn’t Facebook or your private email. The whole world can see what you’re writing.
5. Avoid discrimination
If you hold any unpleasant bigotries about people on the grounds of their sex, sexuality, age, nationality, ethnicity or (lack of) religion, this isn’t the place to express them. Get yourself a blog if you really must. These topics will inevitably come up in discussions but I hope that everyone is able to debate them without making the site uncomfortable for others to participate.
6. No porn
This is a site for adults, not an “adult site.” Don’t post porn, whether words, pictures, videos or links to any of these things.
7. Respect the law
Hate speech, libel, incitement, copyright infringement and obscenity are all forbidden here.
8. No spam
Don’t post just to advertise your website or business. If in doubt, please ask first [create a link here to your email address or contact page]. It’s fine to use your business or professional web address in your member profile.
These rules will be reviewed and changed if necessary in the light of experience.
Enjoy yourself
While it’s not a rule, I hope you enjoy chatting here and that these rules enhance rather than inhibit that enjoyment.
Gordon Brown is spending taxpayers’ money on the latest digital gimmicks, from Twitter to Flickr, but can’t be bothered to give out a simple email address.
The beleaguered Prime Minister is literally retreating to his Downing Street bunker, cutting himself off from an angry and disillusioned electorate.
Are Twitter and Flickr “digital gimmicks” that are beneath any self-respecting elected politician? Should government spend taxpayers’ money on such things? One could ask the same question about telephones, television, radio and the Internet more generally. They are communications media whose value for any particular purpose depends entirely what one does with them.
Barack Obama has amassed over 500,000 followers on Twitter and it doesn’t seem to have hurt his prospects much. (Shame he’s been too busy “leading” the “free world” to tweet lately.) Closer to home and somewhat more modestly, a man by the name of Johnson who seems to have found himself in charge of a large city happily Twitters away to a flock of 20,000 Londoners. If I remember correctly, the chap is the Conservatives’ most senior elected politician.
Further down the food chain, CllrTweeps has found 193 councillors from 129 councils on Twitter, including 54 Conservative authorities.
If social media networks are only used by politicans to broadcast top-down messages to a passive audience then they have little value beyond more traditional methods including conventional websites. But Gordon Brown’s Twitter has collected over 270,000 followers which his aides use to engage in an ongoing direct conversation with a substantial chunk of the public. If Mr Maude is right, presumably those 270,000 people — and all those thousands that follow councillors, MPs and aspiring politicians elsewhere — are wrong.
Do you think they vote, Mr Maude? Answers on a postcard (in 140 characters or fewer, please.)
