Spot the deliberate April fool.

As you might have expected, the Sun is outraged by yesterday's decision that Sky must reduce the price at which it sells its sports channels to rival broadcasters:

THE beauty of competition is that YOU decide what to watch on your telly.

Unlike the BBC, no one is forced to pay for Sky TV, part of the company that owns The Sun.

But Labour have decided Sky must hand over its content cheaply to rivals who have never taken Sky's risks to revolutionise TV sport.

Nor made the massive investment that won Sky rights to events like the Premier League and Test cricket.

Sky pays around £1billion a year to UK sports. That will be hit if the firm has to take less for its content.

Labour the party of business? A ragbag of meddling Lefties, more like.

Did you spot the deliberate mistake? No, not that Sky has ever revolutionised anything, but rather the paper's strange decision to blame the Labour party rather than err, Ofcom, the media regulator which actually made the decision. It's doubly strange as the paper's actual report correctly identifies Ofcom as the body behind the ruling.

Undoubtedly this is simply another of the paper's April fools, of which there were a further four, as surely the paper's leader writers wouldn't deliberately blame the government for something that has absolutely nothing to do with them whatsoever. If they had, then the Press Complaints Commission would surely take a dim view of such an egregious lie, coming as it does only days before the election campaign is officially launched. Clearly, the Sun would never try to mislead voters into believing that Labour is threatening their beloved sports on satellite; now that really would be a scandalous, unfounded and certainly libellous allegation.

The future of television!

The Sun and Sky are completely separate entities, aren't they? Who could possibly think otherwise? Err, probably everyone, judging by today's completely arslikhan leader on the future of television:

A LUCKY handful saw the future yesterday - and it works!

They were the fans who got into nine pubs around Britain to watch soccer's clash of the giants on 3D Sky television.

The experiment could be just the start. In a few years 2D telly may seem as old-fashioned as the black and white era does today.

Of course, the feeling that you were actually at the match was better for Manchester United fans as their team walloped Arsenal 3-1.

In Manchester they were chanting as the ball whizzed past their beers and into history.

Soon we'll all be singing: "Here 3D Go, Here 3D Go, Here 3D Go!"

Yes, or more likely, we'll have forgotten it within a few years as just another failed gimmick. Still, kind of the Sun to give other space to another Murdoch "innovation", as if it hadn't already hyped up Avatar enough.

Blue movies

Media Monkey...

So how many times can the Sun find pretexts for mentioning James Cameron's movie Avatar in its news pages? Answer: quite a few. "Rugby in a 3D first ... 3D fever, begun by film Avatar", "3D set to go seedy ... adult film makers have jumped on the Avatar bandwagon", "District 9 review: James Cameron's £300m breathtaking Avatar is currently taking cinemas by storm ...", "Ava-Ta Very Much ... The huge success of 3D blockbuster Avatar is helping Cineworld to battle the recession" and so on. The Sun is owned by News International, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation which also owns Twentieth Century Fox, which made ... Avatar.

No mention of the 'downside' of seeing the movie, though (via Anorak)...

"When I woke up this morning after watching Avatar for the first time yesterday, the world seemed ... gray. It was like my whole life, everything I've done and worked for, lost its meaning," Hill wrote on the forum. "It just seems so ... meaningless. I still don't really see any reason to keep ... doing things at all. I live in a dying world."

Reward for a puppy, Facebook and immigration plots.

Via the inestimable Tabloid Watch, I note that the puppy meant to have stamped to death by yobs has been found to have, err, in fact died of a virus. The Express wasn't the only paper to declare this a huge story: the Sun also felt sufficiently angered by it to offer a reward of £2,500 to anyone who helped catch those responsible. The first person to call the news desk with the good news and then ask for the reward will be, err, suitably rewarded.

P.S.

Facebook has, predictably, fallen over and played dead. It's signed up with the IWF, probably because it knows full well that the organisation doesn't "drive out perverts" as the Sun seems to imagine it does.

P.P.S

The Sun's editorial team have arrived rather late to the nonsense surrounding Andrew Neather and the claim that somehow the immigration of the last few years was all a plot to create a multiracial hell-hole, but that doesn't make up for just how wrong it is:

That's because Downing Street whistleblower Andrew Neather has revealed that uncontrolled, mass immigration was a deliberate, covert policy cooked up by Mr Brown and Tony Blair to transform Britain into a multicultural melting-pot.

Err, except as Neather himself said:

"There was no plot," said Neather. He pinpointed a shift in immigration policy in 2001, when he wrote a speech for Roche outlining changes to make it easier for skilled workers to come to the UK. The speech followed a sensitive report on migration from the Downing Street performance and innovation unit.

"Multiculturalism was not the primary point of the report or the speech. The main goal was to allow in more migrant workers at a point when – hard as it is to imagine now – the booming economy was running up against skills shortages," Neather wrote in the Standard.

He admitted he had a sense from several discussions at the time that there was a subsidiary purpose of boosting diversity and undermining the right's opposition to multiculturalism, but Neather insisted it was not the main point at issue.

"Somehow this has become distorted by excitable rightwing newspaper columnists into being a 'plot' to make Britain multicultural. There was no plot. I've worked closely with Ms Roche and Jack Straw and they are both decent, honourable people who I respect … What's more both were robust on immigration when they needed to be. Straw had driven through a tough Immigration and Asylum Act in 1999 and Roche had braved particularly cruel flak from the left over asylum seekers."

The Sun has even further distorted Neather's original point into it somehow being Brown and Blair as the scheming geniuses behind this sinister plot. Obviously they can't imagine the average Sun reader will be able to recall Jack Straw, let alone Barbara Roche, which says a lot more about them that it does about their actual customers.

So when Mr Johnson admits it has caused a "strain" on jobs and public services, remember this:

It did NOT happen because Labour took its eye off the ball. It was done on purpose and in secret. The result was a catastrophe.

We used to have rely on Margaret Hodge to help the BNP. Now it seems the Sun is willing to take up the reins. And of course:

We have repeatedly voiced those views. But, like all opponents of Labour's lunatic open-door policy, we were branded "racist" and ignored.

The Sun, ignored? Chance would be a fine thing!

Disgrace-space.

I thought that with the undeniable triumph of Facebook as social networking site of choice for almost everyone, with the exception perhaps of bands who favour MurdochSpace and various media luvvies and others who like Twitter that the Sun had put a lid on its Facebook-bashing. They couldn't apparently resist the temptation to splash today though with "DISGRACEBOOK", because Facebook isn't vetting every single profile on the site:

Andrea, 39, said: "It is time somebody introduced controls which stop people putting up false information. The people who run Facebook have a responsibility."

Well no, they don't. They provide a service. If you somehow think you can stop people putting up "false information" without infringing the privacy of everyone, you haven't thought it through clearly. The Sun for its part, without mentioning MySpace (prop. R Murdoch), drops hardly the most subtle of hints with the bringing up of the Internet Watch Foundation:

Facebook and Twitter are the only major social networking sites which are not members of the Internet Watch Foundation.

The paper continues the argument in the leader:

As Ashleigh's devastated mother Andrea tells The Sun today, Facebook MUST now face up to its responsibilities and do more to stop perverts.

It is wrong to think nothing can be done about manipulative monsters who use networking sites to stalk victims.

There IS an organisation dedicated to making the web safer: the respected Internet Watch Foundation.

Facebook bosses have no excuse for not joining forces with it. Other similar sites belong.

The Foundation works with child protection agencies to track down internet perverts before it is too late.

The Sun urges Facebook chiefs to read Andrea's heartbreaking words.

And then, for Ashleigh's sake, join up.

Err, except the Foundation doesn't. The IWF is the body which blocks child pornography, criminally obscene content ("extreme pornography") and material considered to incite racial hatred. It might report material posted by someone to the police, as it did in the case of Darryn Walker, and it works with child protection agencies, but it doesn't "track down internet perverts", unless it is going well beyond its remit. The IWF couldn't have done anything to prevent the murder of Andrea, and it wouldn't be the slightest surprise if her murderer had also in the past used other social networking sites in exactly the same way. Bebo and News International as a whole are members of the IWF, but all membership brings is that rather than simply blocking material through "Cleanfeed", the IWF issues them with takedown notices. That the IWF is not "respected" in all quarters, is also one good reason to not sign up with it: it's a completely unaccountable organisation which acts a censor when it does not have legal jurisdiction to decide what is illegal and what isn't; it just decides what is and isn't according to its own legal advice, which is not the same thing.

That then is a damning front page and damning editorial aimed at a commercial rival which is based on the idea you can police the internet when you can't and on the idea that the IWF can when it doesn't. One wonders if Facebook will play dead in the same way as the BBC when attacked by the mighty Murdoch press. Oh, and I almost forgot, back in 2007 it was found that 29,000 sex offenders in America had profiles on MySpace. The Sun strangely didn't have anything to say about it, despite the rest of the press thinking it was important enough to.

Should the Sun carry a health warning?

The Media Blog has an excellent spot in the Sun this morning...



Just what I needed yesterday on a long driving day. A big can of energy drink.

But why would that make it into the Sun Lies? Surely there can't be any hypocrisy going on with a drinks promotion, can there? Especially a non-alcoholic drinks promotion?

There has been a little controversy in the past about these types of drinks. All that concentrated caffeine and what-not can't be good for you, really. Just like any responsible company, The Sun and News Corp wouldn't want to do anything that might harm their customers, so maybe The Sun/News Corp didn't know about that side of it.

oh...

ENERGY drinks like Red Bull can cause heart attacks and strokes...

er...

ENERGY drink Red Bull may claim to give you "wings" but it could also give you a heart attack

um...

RESTLESSNESS, headaches, agitated behaviour and chest pains.
These are some of the symptoms of caffeine addiction, a growing problem among Britain's schoolkids.

Consumption of caffeine-enriched drinks such as Red Bull and Diet Coke is soaring among youngsters.

ah...

THE father of an 11-year-old boy found hanged has blamed his death on energy drinks.
Lee Johns said son Tyler had mood swings after becoming hooked on popular caffeine-filled drinks

*shrugs*...

...a worrying study at the Cardiovascular Research Centre in Adelaide, Australia, showed a single can of sugar-free Red Bull could have a damaging effect on the heart within 60 MINUTES.

None of these articles name Relentless, but as The Media Blog point out...

one can of Relentless contains 160 mg of caffeine. That's twice the amount of caffeine in a can of Red Bull

Facebook-bashing returns?

I'm not going to go too to town over two stories in today's Sun which are essentially Facebook-bashing pieces - the first an interview with the victim of the "cyber-bully" who was successfully prosecuted last week, the second a ream of bullshit about how serial-footballer shagger and Celebrity Big Brother racist Danielle Lloyd had a "nervous breakdown" after she discovered a Facebook group called "I Hate Danielle Lloyd" - but it's worth wondering whether if either story had involved MySpace, owned by Sun parent company News International, rather than Facebook they would have been given such prominence or if the social networking site would have even been mentioned, especially considering how the Sun failed to name MySpace when it came to the gang banned from posting "intimidating" pictures on such sites.

Remarkable reticence.

The Sun is delighted that a gang from Manchester have had their internet privileges proscribed:

DECENT people should salute Judge Clement Goldstone, QC.

He has banned 10 gang hoodlums from posting sickening group photos of themselves on the internet.

The Manchester yobs had used a networking site to boast about their vicious activities.

Judge Goldstone told them: "The courts will not stand idly by when youths maraud menacingly like packs of wild animals."

Thank you, Judge. Other courts please take note.

The gang in question is the Fallowfield Mad Dogz, as the Sun's report makes clear. Both the Sun's editorial and article are remarkably reticent though about just what "networking" site the Mad Dogz had been using. Other reports are much more clear:

MEMBERS of a street gang have been banned from posting photos of themselves together on the web.

In a landmark ruling, 10 young men - all members of the `Fallowfield Mad Dogs' group - could be locked up if they put pictures of themselves on social networking websites.

...

An image of the youths in thuggish poses posted on MySpace was used as evidence of their gang membership.

And indeed, a Google search for the Fallowfield Mad Dogs brings up as the very first result the gang's MySpace page, untouched since late last year, where you can see over 36 photographs of the members in various "sickening" and "thuggish" poses. Doubtless the fact that MySpace is owned by the Sun's parent company News International has nothing whatsoever to do with how the paper couldn't name the most easily accessible place where "decent people" could see why they should salute Judge Goldstone.

It's a hard life

One of Roy Greenslades commentors pointed him in the direction of Tatler magazine. The particular piece in the mag is not online, but it is all about Rebekah Wade and her husband-to-be, Charlie Brooks.
So from Tatler via Roy...

When Charlie Brooks wakes up in the mornings at his barn in Oxfordshire, he likes nothing better than to fly to Venice from Oxford airport with his soon-to-be-wife Rebekah Wade, the dazzling redhead editor of The Sun, for lunch at Harry's Bar.

Later in the day, after shopping and sightseeing, the couple fly back to London for dinner at Wiltons in Jermyn Street.
...
When they're not in Venice, Charlie and Rebekah go on holiday with the Freuds on their boat... the Oppenheim Turners at their house in St Tropez... and with the Daventrys in the country.

They spend their weekdays at their flat in Chelsea Harbour... and weekends at their two-bedroom taupe-painted barn outside Chipping Norton... [where] a portrait of Rebekah by artist Jonathan Yeo, flame-haired and smiling, sits almost forgotten against a side wall...

Their weekend routine includes shopping at Daylesford, the most extravagant supermarket in England. They call it 'the mothership'... On Sundays they throw the occasional lunch for 20.

Tax cuts for the rich, anyone?

Failing to extract the rafter from their own eye.

When there's not a lot of news about, journalists with pages to fill and editors to appease can fall back on one of those hardy perennials: revisiting an old story or banging out a highly similar successor.

The Sun has today done just that. Back at the beginning of July the Sun "exposed" a bunch of teens brandishing weapons in photographs they had posted on the social networking site Bebo. The problems with the article were obvious: we had to take the Sun's word that these images had indeed been on Bebo, as the site admins had removed them after being alerted by the Sun; and that they featured teens in this country.

Today's collection is much the same, albeit with less photographs than the effort in July. It features the same idiotic immature little children pretending to be men by posing with weapons about three times their size of their penises, and with the same lack of proof that such images were on Bebo, with no screen grabs and little chance of finding the profiles with much of the information provided. Thankfully however, the name of one of those featured is "Ironiik Starr", which is somewhat unique and gives us something to go on. His profile seems to still exist, although there is no picture corresponding with one presented by the Sun. He does however have two other images featuring baseball bats and guns, but trades that off by featuring an anti-gun crime song on his profile.

More interesting though is the other results which a quick Google of Ironik Starr gives us. Mr Starr has a profile on another social networking site, MySpace, owned by none other than the same parent company of the Sun. Like with his Bebo profile, there's no images of guns here. We do however have a link to another member of the group of which he's a member, a certain Hektiiq Starr. His profile is far more interesting: his background is an image of the character from the Hitman games, his add me box features two handguns, and lo and behold, his gallery contains this self-portrait:


Could this possibly be the image which the Sun describes in its piece as:

"The profile of a wannabe gangster called Ironiik Starr, from Luton, Beds, included a snap of a boy of no more than 12 with a sub-machine gun."

It just might be, mightn't it? Only it's on MySpace as well (Hektiqq Starr's profile on Bebo with the picture as his main photograph is here). The Sun probably hasn't featured this photograph because it's pretty apparent, even to someone like me with no knowledge of guns whatsoever, that this "sub-machine gun" is either a toy or an Airsoft rifle.

It does however prove the wider point: that focusing on one social-networking site, in this case Bebo, is wholly unfair when all of them contain much the same content from the self-same absorbed little gangs that will most likely grow out of waving weapons at cameras. To do a proper expose of this sort of posturing, if it would be worth the effort, would cover all the networks with examples from all of them, which are fairly easy to find. The Sun however can't do this, because criticising MySpace is something it simply can't do. It instead picks on a rival while at the same time continuing to perpetuate the nonsense of "Broken Britain". Considering that Bebo has been doing much more than MySpace to try to understand and combat knife and gun crime, the site might well want to consider whether it wants to make clear both the Sun's hypocrisy and its conflict of interest. And indeed, they might want to ask Patrick Mercer whether he think the Sun's sister company's hosting of the same material he was asked to condemn is also "deeply irresponsible".

The Sun misleads its readers over the BBC fakery scandals.

Today's Sun editorial is a standard example of its hypocrisy and complete failure to be honest with its readers:

"ONCE again, the BBC is fined for conning viewers.

Ofcom’s ruling should shame everyone in the Beeb’s management.

In a private company, heads would roll. Instantly."

The reality is that heads did in fact roll. The Ofcom ruling (PDF) pointed out Rix Blaxhill, the 6Music head of programming was directly responsible in one instance for the deceptions which occurred on the Russell Brand show. He resigned last year, far before yesterday's ruling. Likewise, Peter Fincham, BBC1's head of programming, resigned after the "Crowngate" affair.

The Sun's statement that in a private company heads would roll instantly simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The BBC's main terrestrial competitor, ITV, spent much of last year coping with fakery and deception scandals which make the BBC's look like the minor transgressions they mostly were. Despite Michael Grade, ITV's executive chairman pledging zero tolerance of any deceptions, no one was sacked after programmes like Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway were shown to have defrauded those who phoned in of up to £7.8 million. Indeed, Peter Fincham, having had to resign in disgrace from the BBC was quickly found a job at ITV as the director of programming.

What's more, the Sun has a massive conflict of interest which it doesn't bother to mention. BSkyB, the satellite and digital broadcaster is 39% owned by News Corporation, the Sun's ultimate parent company. BSkyB in turn owns 17.9% of ITV. Not only then does their claim that in a private company heads would roll over such fakery not stand up, the Sun's parent company if it so wished could have demanded that heads should have rolled. That it didn't ought to speak volumes.

An expanded post on this topic can be found at my own site.