"Lying Labour rat Phil Woolas".

Today's Sun editorial couldn't be much clearer in its views on the now ex-MP Phil Woolas (temporary link):

SO voters in Oldham East and Saddleworth must wait to find a decent MP to replace lying Labour rat Phil Woolas.

Speaker John Bercow rules a by-election must be delayed to let Woolas have a judicial hearing.

At least Mr Bercow's Labour-supporting wife Sally will be pleased. That was what she asked him to do.

It's good that judges have seen off Woolas.

Could the paper possibly be covering for something? Like being quoted approvingly by Woolas in his now notorious 8 page newspaper-esque missive? Surely not. Here in full is just how impressed the paper was by "lying Labour rat Phil Woolas" less than two short years ago:

IN one interview, Phil Woolas speaks more sense on immigration than every minister combined in 11 years of this Government.

Such good common sense, in fact, that he'll need to watch his back.

Not just because it'll rile so many left-wingers. But because it so harshly exposes the abysmal failure of previous Labour immigration policies.

Woolas leaves no stone unturned.

He'll wipe away the scandal of immigrants handed a golden life of benefits and council homes.

He'll make them spend five years earning a passport and up to five more earning the right to welfare.

He'll ensure they don't take vacant jobs from Brits in the recession.

He'll prevent our population from topping 70 million - and attacks his own Government for failing to check numbers in and out and making it too easy for illegals to stay.

He even savages Labour's beloved multiculturalism that allowed insular immigrant communities to fester dangerously on our soil.

We can only hope the Woolas revolution, in a Bill next month, gives us the fairer society he wants.

Meanwhile we can applaud both his vision and his bottle.

Silenced already once by the Home Secretary, he knows he is walking a tightrope, but it doesn't faze him: "If I lose my job, I lose my job."

Let's hope not.

Maybe we should give the Sun the benefit of the doubt: it might just be subtly hinting he should have kept to his previous promise.

How to Respond to Media Myths

This is a cross-post on The Sun - Tabloid Lies, Express Watch and Mail Watch.

When you read the Sun, Daily Mail and the Express over a long-enough period of time, you start to notice a few things.

One thing that crops up regularly are hysterical ranting posts over a few small topics, including the following:

• It's Political Correctness/'Elf-and-Safety gawn maaaddd!!!;
• Scandal as the NHS refuses treatment!!!!!/New miracle cure for [insert scary medical condition here] - this is a particular favourite of the Mail which appears to be on a quest to categorise everything into either causing or curing cancer;
• Eurocrats are trying to control our way of life!!!!;
• Immigrants taking over and guess who's paying?!!!!

We've noticed that a lot of these scare stories could be stopped by a little research, which we accept that pressed-for-time tabloid journalists, for whatever reason, are unable to do.

Therefore, in the spirit of co-operation, we've decided to help them out by listing great sources of information, thereby saving them valuable time:

• Health and Safety Executive - "Myth of the Month" - a useful site for any claims which are made about bizarre actions taken or prevented in the name of preventing accident;
• NHS Choices - Behind the Headlines - a very good site for any "miracle cure" stories;
• National Institute of Clinical Excellence - evidence-based guidelines on various health topics, which go a long way to help the NHS what medicines and treatments should and shouldn't be funded by the taxpayer;
• News from the European Commission in the UK - news on how the Eurocrats aren't necessarily trying to dictate how we live;

There are also a variety of websites which can be used for any "Bloody Foreigners! Coming over 'ere! Takin' our jobs! Takin' our wimmin!" stories*:

• The Refugee Council - The Truth About Asylum;
• National Assembly Against Racism - Mythbusting Guide (PDF); and also
• Mediawise's guide to the use of correct terminology. 

There are also more general fact-checking sites**:

• Fullfact.org; and 
• Channel 4's FactCheck Blog

Of course, any and all of these lists could also be used by anyone else who wants to know more about the articles which the Sun, Daily Mail and/or the Express publish.

If anyone has any other suggestions as what other sources our tabloid journalists could use, just leave them in the comments.

* Thanks to Tabloid Watch for these particular links
** Thanks to Bloggerheads for these suggestions

"Gay illegals" to stay.

Compared to the Express and Star, as covered so amply elsewhere, the Sun's coverage of yesterday's ruling by the supreme court that gay asylum seekers cannot be sent back to their home countries on the basis that they won't be persecuted if they're "discreet" about their sexuality was mild.

The headline to their article however is dead wrong. Not only were the two appellants not illegal immigrants, having applied for asylum when they entered the country, but they are most certainly not going to be "illegal" in any shape or form as the ruling almost certainly means they will be given asylum. They were never illegal immigrants; if your asylum application is rejected then you're a failed asylum seeker, not a "bogus" asylum seeker, as they were often previously referred to or an illegal immigrant.

While I'm here, let's also clear up the much quoted paragraph about gay people having the right to enjoy Kylie and multi-coloured cocktails. The judge was in fact being deliberately stereotypical to make his point, probably not a good idea when you can be so wilfully misquoted:

In short, what is protected is the applicant's right to live freely and openly as a gay man. That involves a wide spectrum of conduct, going well beyond conduct designed to attract sexual partners and maintain relationships with them. To illustrate the point with trivial stereotypical examples from British society: just as male heterosexuals are free to enjoy themselves playing rugby, drinking beer and talking about girls with their mates, so male homosexuals are to be free to enjoy themselves going to Kylie concerts, drinking exotically coloured cocktails and talking about boys with their straight female mates. Mutatis mutandis – and in many cases the adaptations would obviously be great – the same must apply to other societies. In other words, gay men are to be as free as their straight equivalents in the society concerned to live their lives in the way that is natural to them as gay men, without the fear of persecution.

Which is actually a brilliantly argued and concise summary of the entire ruling.

Thatcher, sick pics, some contempt and 40 years as the Eye sees it.

Wednesday. The easiest day of the fortnight for the Media Watch editor of this place.

This fortnight, after a bit of a drought recently, Private Eye has served up a couple of juicey bits.

First of all shocking pictures...



This being the story in question.

The next is an example of the Sun showing contempt for the Contempt of Court Act 1981...



...with a nice little dig at the Met Commissioner, too.

PE couldn't let 40 years of the sun go by without it's own little corner, either...



That last headline is a cracker, isn't it? There was an apology, in the only place it should've been for headline as wrong in every way as 'Straight sex cannot give you AIDS - Official': page 28. /sarcasm

Adam Macqueen, in 2006, writes about a similarly scarey, and dangerous, headline "Killer Plagues", about AIDS & HIV riddled Bulgarians and Hungarians invading Britian.

And to finish with, something a little lighter...

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!

More double standards.

The latest Sun editorial is disgusted at the silencing of one of our most venerable judges:

THE knives are out for Judge Ian Trigger who spoke so searingly last week about our abject immigration controls.

Judge Trigger lashed out in exasperation about the "hundreds of thousands" of illegal immigrants who abuse our welfare system.

"In the past 10 years the national debt has risen to extraordinary heights, largely because central government has wasted billions of pounds," he said.

Like Army Chief Sir Richard Dannatt's damning words about our armed services, this is the unvarnished truth from an expert witness.

Yet the Lord Chief Justice has ordered a probe into whether Judge Trigger's remarks were "too political".

There can be only one verdict: NOT guilty M'lud.

As Tabloid Watch pointed out last week, Judge Trigger's comments, rather than being the "searingly unvarnished truth", were abject nonsense. Illegal immigrants don't get benefits, as should be painfully obvious, while those who apply for asylum receive almost derisory amounts until their application is accepted, while if their application fails they don't receive money at all, rather vouchers which can be redeemed in exchange for goods and services.

The Sun is as usual letting its prejudices get in the way of its thinking. When judges make rulings and decisions which they disagree with, especially when they give out "soft" sentences, they're outraged, and in the past have demanded that "bad" judges be suspended. Political comment on the other hand, which goes beyond the case which the judge is dealing with, is perfectly all right as long as the paper agrees with it. Nothing quite like double standards, is there?

Flee! Run for your lives!

This post was just gonna be a quick media-watch post with a snippet from Matthew Norman:

Kelvin MacKenzie has a pop at the remade Reggie Perrin starring Martin Clunes. I thought the first episode was hilarious, but that seems the minority view, and Kelvin took grave umbrage. "Some between-jobs idiot at the BBC decided it could be updated," he harrumphs. "Having seen the first show, the answer is clear – no it couldn't." Well, he has a point. It can be pitiful when people try to reinvent a memorable triumph of old. Kelvin's paper, meanwhile, featured Gordon Brown's face in a 60 watt bulb beside the headline "Will The Last Young Family To Leave Britain For Australia Or New Zealand Please Turn Out The Lights".

Presumably the quote came from Kelvin's column of the same title, with the same light bulb picture.
A read through of Kelvin's piece this morning shows that either Matthew Norman is mistaken and was obviously thinking of a different Kelvin Mackenzie or the bit about trying to re-invent old triumphs was removed. As The Sun doesn't let Google cache its pages we shall never know...

Anyway, I read Kelvin's piece and, after much scrubbing of the eyeballs, thought it needed a few things pointing out.

All the time he [Brown] took credit for the global boom, never once criticising the bankers, the private equity guys or the hedgies.

He loved them because they paid huge taxes and he was able to conduct his Scottish social experiment of giving money away to the useless and the layabouts, making sure that the great unwashed would vote Labour for ever.

Ah, of course, anyone without a job or is unable to work are naturally layabouts and useless and I also seem to remember the Sun being huge fans of New Labour before Gordon rose to the Premiership.

With our vaults deserted thanks to his profligacy, the economic tsunami hits us and then it becomes a global phenomenon.

His solution is to borrow even more, knowing, of course, he is going to be thrown out in a massive humiliation next June. But then it will be Cameron’s problem.

Perhaps that’s considered, in his twisted little obscene world, to be clever politics. But perhaps I could remind you, Mr Brown, that it’s OUR money and OUR future you’re playing with, not yours.

'OUR money and OUR future'. Man of the people is citizen Mackenzie. But he seems to forget that his paper and editor also plays with people lives.

Well, it’s time to do something about it. Normally I would advocate going up to No 10 and punching him firmly on the nose...

Because violence really does work, normally, but these are exceptional times.

...but if you have a family and are under 40 years of age could I urge you to take another course — desert our country as swiftly as you can and head for Australia or New Zealand and a new life.

Yes, you read it right, The Sun advocating immigration! It's ok though, because this is different. This is Brits going abroad, so it's emigration and everyone loves us Brits. Except those evil Muslims that want to destroy western civilisation, of course.

I thought that the Sun was supposed to be patriotic? First sign of trouble from a party that the Sun helped install and keep there for over twelve years and its ex-editor columnist is advising us all to swamp another country.

After all, we won’t have paid the debts run up by the socialist swindlers until 2032, so the only thing you will be missing is rubbing shoulders with the thick and the skint.

If everyone buggers off, won't it take longer for the debt to be paid off?

Such a move will upset your parents, but what with email, mobile phones and the low cost of flying you’ll probably hear and see more of each other than you do at the moment.

I doubt it very much. If you don't see or hear much of your family when you're in the same country, why would you when you're the other side of the planet?
Yes, there is email and to begin with, you may send photos and stuff back to family but that will taper off as you get used to the place. There are mobile phones, but what that has to do with anything, I have no idea. Has Kelvin seen the prices for calling Europe, where we are all supposed to be equal, never mind Australia?
And the flights, yes they are cheaper, but £500 is still a lot of money for some people and with 12 hours of flying and then the jet lag, it's not quite feasible to pop over for the weekend.

And now we see who Kelvin is really talking to...

Personally I will miss you because you think like me. You don’t want state handouts, you simply want to do your work, come home and be with your family without the state constantly looking over your shoulder or stealing 50 per cent of your money

People earning over £150,000, not the more common (as in more of them) reader who earns much less.

When Trevor Kavanagh warned us about the flight of the rich, I wasn't expecting the same paper to be urging them to leave.

Target audience

Phil Woolas, the minister against for immigration reckons Sun readers hold all the power.

BBC:

The government calls the new points based immigration system "Australian-style" to get its message across to Sun readers, Phil Woolas has said.

The immigration minister said it was "not a direct comparison" but he believed it was a fair one.

He challenged a CBI immigration conference audience to come up with a better description for a Sun headline.

"If you ignore the Sun reader in this debate you are not going to move it forward," he added.

hmmm.

Explaining his latest comments to journalists after the CBI meeting, he said Sun readers knew as much about the realities of immigration as many "so-called experts".