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Posted: 14-10-2013 10:45 Post subject:

Well, I understood your post to mean that where in the paper the news appeared doesn't reflect on its importance. It does, obviously. The inner pages of most papers are more magazine and opinion than news.

I don't see what the number of people who read it has to do with anything other than indicating - imperfectly - the popularity or otherwise of the paper's style.

Posted: 14-10-2013 11:46 Post subject:

Posted: 14-10-2013 13:29 Post subject:

What's contentious?

I'm sure if anything stated as fact was in reality incorrect it would be pointed out by now.

The original article was on the opinion pages - you are entitled to assemble facts and express an opinion, whether you are an individual or a newspaper.

Dacre's point is that the comments on his paper's opinion were given the status of news, indeed front page news, when other more important things were going on compared to discussing one newspaper's opinion of a politicians' father.

Posted: 14-10-2013 13:40 Post subject:

I think you're now deliberately sidetracking the argument you claimed, a couple of posts back, to be responding to - that is, my response to Dacre's riposte.

Simply put, Dacre, in that article, begins by inferring that the issue is unimportant, and then goes on to explain why it is important. He's having it both ways.

Now, that very simple point seems obvious to me, but if it isn't apparent to anyone else then maybe my powers of reasoning are having a day off. But I don't think so.

Posted: 14-10-2013 13:52 Post subject:

He is saying that it is important and valid to explore the views of, and, therefore, have an opinion about, someone who is said to have had a pivotal influence on shaping the views of a potentially powerful person.

He is also saying that such a thing - and the debate about it - is not the sort of item which should replace front page news.

Those are not contradictory positions. It _is_ important and useful to understand the views and formative influences of someone who may affect all our lives. We certainly spent enough time back in the day debating - and sometimes cursing - Mrs T's antecedents. It is not however something you would normally hold the presses for.

Posted: 14-10-2013 14:11 Post subject:

Okay, just for the sake of argument let's say that is the case.

Why then is that argument not as self-serving as any other?

Dacre's paper claims the right to say something they believe is relevant, while at the same time belittling any response to it by shifting the focus of that relevance. If that's not having it both ways I'm really not sure what is.

On a different note.

I can't help wondering if the celebrity paedo-fest of the last year or so – which has seen a significant proportion of the millions of words of newsprint expended lavished on accusations which can never be tested in a court of law, and against those who can no longer defend themselves - has rather hooked certain sectors of the media on the idea that the dead - who, generally speaking find it rather difficult to fight their own corner, and are never going to sue - make easy news with no likelihood of legal repercussion, and that the habit now acquired is a vice they are going to find difficult to resist.

I don’t think I’ll be terribly surprised if we see more of this.

Edit for repetition.

Posted: 14-10-2013 14:14 Post subject:

Posted: 14-10-2013 14:26 Post subject:

As to the Dacre/Milli-spat, I don't think anyone is claiming that it shouldn't have been written, that parents - deceased or otherwise - are off-limits. It was more a matter of tone, and a dodgy headline. An analysis of Ralph Miliband's beliefs (quotations would have been nice) and how damaging they may have been or may still be if put into action through a Mili-senior ministry would be fair game (and interesting), a catalogue of transparent slurs, light on evidence and stong on rhetoric, with a misleading and unsubstantiated headline, is not.

It's a matter of tone: it read like a hatchet-job on a dead man - because that's what it was. You wouldn't read a similar tale about Cameron's father's views - even in the dreadful Grauniad.

It was a mistake. And for once 'error of judgment' sums it up quite well instead of being a cheaply euphemistic. Unlike Ed Miliband, I don't believe there's a wider issue about the culture of the publication, this was quite out of character; they usually only savage the living and the evil - and Stephen Gateley - that was a similar lapse in taste and decency. That said, some of the anti-semitism I've seen in the Guardian and outright lies in the Sun are equally nasty.

Posted: 14-10-2013 14:30 Post subject:

Yes, precisely - to all of that.

Posted: 14-10-2013 14:32 Post subject:

Posted: 14-10-2013 16:35 Post subject:

Don't forget the real terror threat that the newspapers are caught up in is the fear they may become irrelevant in the internet age, so they have to build their part up at every opportunity. I think a lot of them think they'd be better off running the country - but never as politicians, too much of an image problem there, thanks in part to the machinations of those papers.

Posted: 14-10-2013 17:38 Post subject: