Sim-O

Hand out mephedrone in nightclubs, says ex-drugs tsar Professor David Nutt

You what? Has the man taken leave of his senses? This stuff is dangerous. D.A.N.G.E.R.O.U.S.

But in a classic Daily Mail sidestep, that’s not quite what the Prof said. There’s more to it than just doleing out drugs.

I wouldn’t be against exploring the possibility of some sort of regulated use for MDMA or mephedrone where people, maybe in clubs, could have access to small amounts, safe amounts under guidance.

What Professor Nutt is saying is have a look at regulated access to the drugs. He isn’t even saying we should do that, just that we should look into what sort of harm reduction may be achieved from letting consenting adults, because only adults are allowed in nightclubs, buy untainted drugs that aren’t cut with all the usual rubbish along with the information to let those adults make an informed choice. We do that with alcohol and cigarettes, so why not with other substances that are no more harmful than alcohol and cigarettes?

The headline which gives the impression that every club should have someone just dishing out mindbending drugs to who ever wants them in what ever quantities are asked for. That is just ridiculous. We don’t even do that in pubs, and pubs are only there to sell you a mindbending drug.

This sort of mis-representation would be right at home at the Daily Mail. But it isn’t. It’s the Independent, a supposedly ‘quality’ paper. No wonder it’s had to pay someone to buy it. Which is bribery, isn’t it?

Tiger Woods has apologised.

Who gives a shit?

What the fuck is he apologising to us for? Did he sleep with my wife? did he sleep with me after telling me he was single? No. Obviously not.

With his adverts, and I must say I didn’t follow them ever so closely so I might not have seen them all, did he proclaim that he was an the epitome of of the monogamous family man? Not from the ones I’ve seen. The adverts I’ve seen him don’t have much talking, by Tiger himself, or many women in them, his wife or any other woman.

So why the fuck is he top of the cunting news? Even my local BBC news had a slot on him this evening!

The only people he needs to apologise to are his family. This is just a fucking media stunt to get Woods’ sponsorship back and the media are complicit in this. Woods plays chuffing golf, for christ sake. He doesn’t need anyone’s forgiveness to play and win tournaments, he needs the publics’ good feelings to get sponsorship.

What a waste of fucking airtime.

Update:
Immediately after I published I found, via MamaJunkyard, this flow chart to work out if Tiger owes you an apology or not.

I recently saw James Camerons’ Avatar. I thought it was quite good. Excellent special effects and CGI, as we’ve come to expect nowadays, an interesting story, based of the age old line of good vs evil with the underdog winning the day. And, of course, the 3D effects which are sooo much better than the old generation of 3D which was always a bit dodgy and, frankly, used in films that weren’t particularly good in 2D stuffed with moments that were in the film purely to show of the 3D. Avatars 3D is a lot subtler and is more about giving depth to the scene rather than having something lunge at you from the cinema screen.

After the film I expressed my view in a rather shorter version of the above via Twitter and Dnotice replied asking if I had read the Sp!ked review of the film. I must confess I hadn’t.

I have now, though.

Steve Bemner reckons Cameron has taken…

misanthropic perspective to a whole new level of anti-humanism. Its main character, and hero, is so alienated from humanity that he literally disowns his own species. This move requires Cameron to indulge in and reproduce some of the most backward and anti-human development prejudices of our age

I’m not going to give you a bit of background to the story of Avatar, as you either know it already or you can read James’ Sp!iked piece for it. But here is why James’ thinks that James Cameron is a self-hating human. I reckon Steve is reading far too much in to this film and needs to relax a little.

In order for the audience to be persuaded that it is legitimate for one human to join another species and begin to kill fellow humans, Cameron indulges in several fictional conceits that draw upon modern misanthropy. First, the miners and their mercenaries embark upon genocide with no thought whatsoever, despite the fact that humanity has considered genocidal behaviour to be a bad thing for some time now. This allows Avatar to imply that man has not changed since the explorations and conquests of the Middle Ages. There is even a fairly explicit suggestion that the humans are acting in the same way that the settlers of America did and that the Na’vi, whose main weapons are bows and arrows, are equivalent to Native Americans. Here, humanity is depicted as having learnt nothing from the past and as being inherently savage towards that which it does not instantly understand.

Right. First off, if you lump every body on this planet together you could claim that humanity might consider genocide to be bad behaviour, but there are little pockets here and there around the world today, and in recent history that think that genocide is the best thing to get what they want. There is also, still, companies about that think nothing of exploitation of the local resources [.pdf] and people.

Humans, or more specifically the majority of those with any sort of power, do behave in a way that is not dissimilar to settlers and conquistadors. ‘We’ want something from a people that is less powerful than us, ‘we’ try to persuade them to our way of thinking and the people ‘we’ want something from doesn’t or can’t give it to us we go in with the guns. Case in point, Iraq. If the coalition had a chance of getting their butts kicked, the military option would never have been on the cards. In Avatar, if the Na’vi had bigger guns than the humans instead of bows and arrows, the humans would negotiated a hell of a lot harder and longer.

The film focuses on one company. One company that behaves badly in a certain way. That doesn’t imply that the whole of the human race are like that. There are probably all sorts of people with all sorts of characteristics employed with the company, but the film only focuses on a certain group of them.

Second, the Na’vi are depicted as living in an essentially harmonious tribal society. Their society is depicted as a primitive kind of utopia in which all the individuals within it know their role and social conflict does not exist. A central idea of the film is that they also live in literal harmony with the planet, a harmony that the humans, of course, destroy. In its depiction of the life of the aliens we see a kind of green fantasy of how human life should be: primitive technology, a hierarchy in which everyone knows their place, a community at the mercy of the environment. This is also a kind of Western primitivism that advances racially demeaning stereotypes of happy natives living in harmony with the environment, when, in reality, tribal society is much more brutal, and much less harmonious and fulfilling, than those who celebrate it are willing to admit.

The Na’vi society may be depicted as essentially harmonious, but how different is it to other primitive societies, here on Earth? There are tribes in the Amazon that live in harmony with the environment. They take what they need, they do not hunt animals just for the hell of it. Hunting takes energy and time when all you have is spears and arrows. Why waste that effort killing stuff that you’re not going to use? The primitive tribes ‘listen’ to the jungle, they know how it works, when to leave plants alone, where to find certain foods. How is that different to the Na’vi?

The Na’vi also showed that they’re are not all peace and harmony, too. When the Jake and the girl Na’vi (I’ve forgotten the Na’vi names. Sorry) admit that they have mated, the chap that she was going to be partnered with shows jealousy and a fight ensues between him and Jake. This shows that the Na’vi feel the same emotions as everybody else. How many of the other Na’vi are happy with their place in society? We don’t know. Just like every other society the Na’vi are forget their differences and become unified against the threat. What we see is a snapshot of a certain time period. Who knows what happened before the time period of the film, but there are clues there that the Na’vi society operates just like any other.

Cameron’s third conceit is that the planet Pandora has a consciousness. This is necessary in order to show why such a primitive society survives when, in reality, it would likely perish given the potential hostility of the environment depicted in the film. This idea reflects the green notion of Gaia: that is, the belief that all beings are connected into one consciousness and that harm to one being harms the organic whole. The film makes this idea even more explicit with the aliens being able to physically link their minds with the animals and plants of the planet. The humans, meanwhile, are depicted as blundering into, and threatening, this ecological paradise like some kind of inter-planetary plague.

Why is Pandoras’ conciousness necessary for the Na’vi to survive? Why would they perish if they couldn’t ‘plug-in’? Why is Pandora any more hostile than say, the Australian Outback? The Australian Aborigines have been living in the middle of a desert with, on the surface of it, nothing there. With a sun beating down so strong that it can cook eggs. The Aborigines’ can’t just plug themselves into the landscape yet they have been living in that place for millennia by ‘listening’ to their surroundings. The Aboriginal society went down hill rapidly when Europeans appeared on the scene bringing with them tobacco, alcohol, disease and animals that upset the local ecology not to mention what the Europeans did in terms of denying the Aboriginals rights and access to their land and the civil society that was growing up around them. “The humans, meanwhile, are depicted as blundering into, and threatening, this ecological paradise like some kind of inter-planetary plague.” That sounds about right to me.

In fact, this is no specific critique – instead it portrays all humanity as destructive.

No it doesn’t. It shows that a company and people can be destructive. It shows that with no checks and balances capitalism will do what it can to take what it wants. After all, did anyone in the film say ‘Hey, you can’t do that. I’m going to report you to the authorities’? No, because presumably there are none out in space.

This bleak portrait does serve a purpose: only by making humanity uniformly destructive, and the Na’vi holy, can Cameron justify the final conclusion of the film, in which the hero abandons humanity altogether to join the Na’vi.

The final conclusion, for me anyway, wasn’t that the hero turned his back on humanity. Jake became a Na’vi to be fully and completely with the one he loved. He didn’t have the use of his legs and to stay with the Na’vi and his love, he would’ve had to have worn the facemask and been, basically and burden to them. There was a spare Na’vi body and a way of getting his conciousness into, then why not. Avatar finishes on a positive tone for love, not a negative blast at humanity.

By the end of the film, this reviewer felt like rising to his feet and cheering the final human attack on the Na’vi.

Oh, I see, Steve wants’ to see the destruction of the Na’vi because they’re so bloody nice and make us all look like horrid bullies.

Indeed, much of the audience seemed ambivalent – we were clearly dazzled by the spectacular 3D effects and the beautiful rendering of the alien planet, but the unrelentingly bleak portrayal of humanity left everyone more than a little despondent as we left the cinema to celebrate the New Year.

Despondent after two and a half hours of unrelentingly being shown humans are shits? I could believe that if it was a film based on a true story or a documentary, but not such an obvious work of fiction. I never got that feeling from with the audience I watched it with.

Steve Bremner seems to think that just because a film focuses on certain events and certain people that the director is trying to say that everything is like that. That is wrong. The film was two and a half hours long, which some people think it is already to long (it was too long after half an hour in the crappy cinema seats we were sat in). How long would Avatar have been if James Cameron had to show the cuddly, caring side of humans and the “much more brutal, and much less harmonious and fulfilling” side of Na’vi life?

As you can see, if you follow the link to our petition, iPetitons dog ate it.

For all his efforts, Tim couldn’t get iPetitions to feed it some canine laxatives so we could have it back in a timely manner, and so is still waiting the data that was collected and probably won’t see it this side of March. Which will be too late.

So what we need you to do, even if you left your name and suggestions for the review on the petition is to send an email to:

Vivien Hepworth, Chairman, (PCC) Independent Governance Review:
governancereview@pcc.org.uk

This one needs to be done today (25 January) as it closes today. If you do not want your submission to be made public, you will have to specifically tell them. Also send you suggestions to:

Ian Beales, Code Committee Secretary, Editor’s Code of Practice Committee:
ianbeales@mac.com

The deadline for this one is 31 January.

Here are the five suggestions on the original petition…

SUGGESTION ONE: Like-for-like placement of retractions, corrections and apologies in print and online (as standard).
Retractions, corrections, and apologies should normally be at least equally prominent to the original article, in both print and online editions. Any departure from this rule should only be in exceptional circumstances, and the onus on showing such circumstances should be on the publication.

SUGGESTION TWO: Original or redirected URLs for retractions, corrections & apologies online (as standard).

Retractions, corrections, and apologies in respect of online articles should always be displayed either at the original URL or at a URL to which the reader is redirected.

SUGGESTION THREE: The current Code contains no reference to headlines, and this loophole should be closed immediately.

Headlines should be covered by the same rules as the rest of a story. Further, headlines and titles for links should never be misleading in what they imply or offer and should always be substantiated by the article/contents.

SUGGESTION FOUR: Sources to be credited unless they do not wish to be credited or require anonymity/protection.

Sources should normally be credited. Any departure from this rule should only be when the source does not wish to be credited or if the source requires anonymity/protection.

SUGGESTION FIVE: A longer and more interactive consultation period for open discussion of more fundamental issues.

I submit all of the above without implying support for the PCC, the remainder of Code as it stands, or even the concept of self-regulation, and request that the 20th year of the PCC be marked with an open debate about its progress to date, and its future direction.

There is also a post at Liberal Conspiracy where submissions can also be left via the comments.

If reading a page full of text about how the PCC Editors Code of Practice could be improved isn’t your thing and you’d rather watch a lovely spangley video with some great music, then watch this (there’s even a game at the end for you to enjoy).

go and sign the petition and maybe even leave your own suggestion.

Oh, and tell yer mates, too.

Update: A quick note from Tim Ireland…

[NOTE – It’s probably something to do with the sudden popularity of our petition, but ipetitions.com have now started displaying a donation page (instead of a ‘thank you’ page) after you submit your details. I understand why ipetitions.com have done this – and Dog knows they deserve a donation or two for providing a superior petition service – but I’m less-than-impressed by the way they’ve gone about it. At this stage, I can only apologise for this unexpected feature and provide new people with advance warning; you do not have to make a donation for your signature to register.]

The PCC is holding its’ annual review of its’ Code of Practice, the rules that govern the behaviour of the press and it’s members.

The PCC want suggestions from, not just the industry itself, but from the general public too.

(Update: We will also be submitting our suggestions to the to the Independent Governance Review in time for the 25 Jan 2010 deadline

A few of us bloggers that take an interest in this sort of thing have got together and come up with some suggestions, which we feel, should be a priority for the PCC to incorporate into its’ Code of Practice, while we await and try to get started a bigger discussion of who and how it should regulate.

The idea being a ‘safety in numbers’ thing, the more people put their names to these suggestions the harder it will be for the PCC to ignore than if a lot of suggestions come from individuals.

We need you to sign the petition and also, in the comments section, you can leave you’re own suggestion. The petition will be delivered in a format that means that any individual suggestions can be responded to by the PCC, not just the main group petition. You can use a nickname or your real name (if you use your real name it can be hidden from public view if you wish) and the PCC will still count as valid.

For more, see Bloggerheads.com

The text of the petition is below, just follow the link and digitally sign it, please.

SUGGESTION ONE: Like-for-like placement of retractions, corrections and apologies in print and online (as standard).

Retractions, corrections, and apologies should normally be at least equally prominent to the original article, in both print and online editions. Any departure from this rule should only be in exceptional circumstances, and the onus on showing such circumstances should be on the publication.

SUGGESTION TWO: Original or redirected URLs for retractions, corrections & apologies online (as standard).

Retractions, corrections, and apologies in respect of online articles should always be displayed either at the original URL or at a URL to which the reader is redirected.

SUGGESTION THREE: The current Code contains no reference to headlines, and this loophole should be closed immediately.

Headlines should be covered by the same rules as the rest of a story. Further, headlines and titles for links should never be misleading in what they imply or offer and should always be substantiated by the article/contents.

SUGGESTION FOUR: Sources to be credited unless they do not wish to be credited or require anonymity/protection.

Sources should normally be credited. Any departure from this rule should only be when the source does not wish to be credited or if the source requires anonymity/protection.

SUGGESTION FIVE: A longer and more interactive consultation period for open discussion of more fundamental issues.

We submit all of the above without implying support for the PCC, the remainder of Code as it stands, or even the concept of self-regulation, and request that the 20th year of the PCC be marked with an open debate about its progress to date, and its future direction.

–

Further issues or suggestions may be included as a ‘comment’ and individual responses to these concerns/suggestions (via the corresponding email address) would be appreciated.

Thank you.

sign here

These suggestions were decided upon by Tim Ireland, Kevin Arscott, Adam Bienkov, Dave Cross, Sunny Hundal, Jack of Kent, Justin McKeating, MacGuffin, Mark Pack, septicisle, Jamie Sport, Clive Summerfield, Unity, Anton Vowl.

How fucking hard is it to find a snap shot of a newspaper frontpage, eh?

PA…

Peaches Geldof has accepted substantial undisclosed libel damages at London’s High Court over a claim that she was a prostitute who charged £5,000 a night for sexual services.

The 20-year-old TV presenter and model had brought proceedings over a September 2008 front page story in The Daily Star.

That is quite insulting, isn’t it? It could ruin a career, an accusation like that, and once mud has been thrown it can be bloody hard to get off.

Peaches initially went to the Press Complaints Commission, which according to the PCC is the right thing to do, and the complaint was upheld and the Daily Star published an apology and retraction. So if Peaches got an apology, why sue?…

“The defendant refused to publish a retraction and apology on its front page but instead published it on page two.

“As the publication was substantially smaller, the claimant considered this to be unacceptable as it was not, in her view, adequately prominent.”

The PCC felt that an apology on the inside of the paper, even though the offending headline was on the front page, was fine. As far as the PCC was concerned it was job done. Next, please.

But it isn’t fine, is it? What the Star did was the equivilent to standing in the street shouting about how Peaches Geldof is a whore to all and sundry that passed by. What the PCC let them do is tell only the people that stop by their office that, actually, Peaches isn’t a whore.

The headlines on the front page scream to the world whether the paper is bought or not. When you buy a paper people notice the other papers, just because they have to find it on the shelf. Many more people would’ve seen that headline, and changed their opinion for the worse, than would’ve seen the retraction and apology.

What, though, would the PCC have done if it had deemed an apology on the second page not good enough and the Daily Star still refused to put it on the front page? Would it have fined the Star? Would it have helped Peaches take the Star to court? Of course not. It would’ve done nothing, because it can do nothing more.

The question is purely academic, anyway. The PCC may have ruled that the complaint was valid, but the ‘punishment’ (yeah, yeah. stop laughing) would’ve been negotiated. The Star, along with many other papers, would never put an apology on the front page, it would’ve told the PCC to fuck right off, so as a compromise, the second page it was.

Quite rightly, the second page was found not to be good enough.

Fortunately, Peaches has the money to take the matter further, not everyone does. The next time it could be you, unable to make a paper stand in the street and tell everyone it was wrong about you.

via Scaryduck

Private Eye, we expect better of you than this.

There is a word for what has happened here. Hypocrisy, and it fucking stinks.

No, Crimestoppers is still 0800 555 111. Someone thinks it has changed though.

I’m not quite sure what it is about this, but something doesn’t quite sit right with me.

Is it the way this cabbie chaps’ pal rang the Sun with his tip off about an absconded (can you escape from an open prison?) murderer rather than going straight to the police? Or is it the way the Sun seems to have weaselled itself into a position where it can claim credit for getting an escaped convict knicked?

There’s nothing wrong with someone ringing a paper with a story. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make a bob or two out of it either, although it would be hard to argue that with a kiss-n-tell story. But who thinks of ringing a paper before the police?

A CABBIE told last night how he helped to capture fugitive killer Jane Andrews after she climbed into the back of his taxi.

Darren Auckland, 40, told police he picked up Fergie’s mud-caked former aide in the early hours yesterday near the Kent prison she fled.

He had been hired by her parents to drive them from the family’s Grimsby home, but refused to take them back once he recognised Andrews, 42.

Police seized her at a hotel after The Sun passed on a tip-off over her whereabouts from a friend of the cabbie.

From the wording of the Suns’ story, this cabbies’ pal rang the Sun first before the police…

Meanwhile a pal of the cabbie called The Sun to tell us Andrews had met up with her dad in Maidstone.

Our night news editor Brandon Malinsky passed on the tip to police.

Why would Malinsky pass on the info to the police if Buddy (that’s what I’m gonna call this pal) has already done so? Malinsky is not going to be able to add anything new to the hunt for Jane Andrews. Unless of course this is to ‘big up’ the Suns’ role in this story, to make them an active part of it, rather than just passively reporting it.

Note that Buddy has kept his name out of the paper.

The story then goes carries on with how Andrews was apprehended and then, again…

Just after midnight, the cabbie’s friend tipped off our man Malinsky that the Andrews family were on the move. Malinsky asked to be kept informed and passed the information to police

Surely Malinsky should’ve told Buddy to go to the police directly and then asked to be kept informed. In a situation like this time is of the essence and by going through a third party (Malinsky) could’ve been the difference between evasion and capture, especially if further information was needed by the police that Malinsky would not know, being sat in his office.

Kents’ Assistant Chief Constable was quite impressed…

Kent’s Assistant Chief Constable Andy Adams last night thanked The Sun “for their assistance and public spirit in alerting us to the information they received”.

Andy Adams is easier impressed than me.

What ever happened, once looked at a little clearer, this story doesn’t make the Sun or the cabbies’ pal look very good. Either Buddy has his priorities in er, a slightly different order to most people by calling a paper first with information that he should’ve gone straight to the police with or the Sun, not being entirely truthful, is trying to make itself look good by pretending to be a conduit for vital information to capture an escaped prisoner when Buddy did go to the police and just kept the paper up to date on events or both the cabbies’ friend is a numpty by not going to the police and the Sun are not as civic minded as Assistant Chief Constable Andy Adams reckons they are by being, and staying, an extra step in the flow of information.

There was nothing ‘civic minded’ about what the Sun did. It was all about the exclusive and to re-inforce the perception that the Sun is an altruistic organisation with only the good of the country at heart.

*the phone number in the title, if you hadn’t guessed, is the number for the Suns’ newsdesk

Baroness Buscombe has expressed an interest in expanding the remit of the PCC to cover blogs as well…

“Some of the bloggers are now creating their own ecosystems which are quite sophisticated,” Baroness Buscombe told me. “Is the reader of those blogs assuming that it’s news, and is [the blogosphere] the new newspapers? It’s a very interesting area and quite challenging.”

She said that after a review of the governance structures of the PCC, she would want the organisation to “consider” whether it should seek to extend its remit to the blogosphere, a process that would involve discussion with the press industry, the public and bloggers (who would presumably have to volunteer to come beneath the PCC’s umbrella)

Well, to quote a rather eloquent gentleman of a crimson hue…

Well, with all due respect, Baroness, you can fuck right off.

Because, basically the PCC is a useless pile of shit that seems to have the only function of staving off statutory regulation for the press industry.

Bollox to that. Which is why I’ve put my name to Unitys’ letter of a collective response to the Baroness at Liberal Conspiracy. Reproduced below…

Baroness Buscombe
Chair
Press Complaints Commission
Halton House
20/23 Holborn
London EC1N 2JD

Cc. Rt. Hon. Ben Bradshaw MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
Cc. John Whittingdale MP, Culture, Media and Sport Committee

17 November 2009

Dear Lady Buscombe

Re: Extension of PCC regulation to UK Blogs/Blogging

We write in regards to your apparent proposal that the PCC should consider extending its remit to the ‘blogosphere’ as reported by Ian Burrell of the Independent on 16 November 2009 (1).

While we are grateful for your interest in our activities we must regretfully decline your kind offer of future PCC regulation. Frankly, we do not feel that the further development of blogging as an interactive medium that facilitates the free exchange of ideas and opinions will benefit from regulation by a body representing an industry with, in the main, substantially lower ethical standards and practices than those already practiced by the vast majority of established British bloggers.

Although we would not wish you believe that this criticism relates to all your members – The Guardian, in particular, has adopted a number of practices, not least the appointment of a Readers’ Editor to deal with complaints, which we consider to be the current gold standard in ethical journalistic practice amongst national newspapers – It is nevertheless the case that the vast majority of national newspaper titles routinely fall well short of both those, and our own, standards and that our direct experience of dealing with the Press Complaints Commission shows the organisation to be, in the main, complicit in those failings.

To give but one recent example of bad practice, of the many that bloggers have documented in over the last few years, an article published by the Tabloid Watch blog in October, covered documented, in some considerable detail, the tortuous process that one of its readers had to go through in order to get the News of the World to retract a manifestly untrue and inflammatory statement by one of its regular columnists, Carole Malone. In this particular column, published in July 2009, Malone made use of an all-too-common and utterly racist myth that ‘immigrants’ (meaning asylum seekers) receive free cars on arriving in the UK (2), a myth that is most closely associated with the propaganda output of the British National Party.

All you have to do to get everything Britain has to offer is to turn up illegally with some sob story of how your own country is too dangerous or that you’re a lesbian who’ll be shot if you stay there and Hey Presto, it’s like you’ve won the lottery! And, in effect, they HAVE.

Free houses, free cars, free healthcare and free money. Hell, they don’t even have to work or speak the language. Even the suggestion they should is seen as racist in Brown’s Britain.

They can just live as they did before, only with a whole heap more money and zero responsibility to the country providing it. (3)

What we find most striking about the process documented by Tabloid Watch is the extent to which the PCC actively sought to facilitate the News of the World’s efforts to avoid undertaking practices that we, as bloggers, take for granted as being standard practice in our corner of the Internet; i.e. the prominent publication of an honest and open correction of a factual error on the original article in which the error, itself, was made. Instead, as we invariably find to be standard practice amongst, particularly, tabloid newspapers; the correction and cursory apology (4)– when it was grudgingly issued after what Tabloid Watch described as ‘two months of wrangling’ – appeared in a location other than that of Malone’s column in the newspaper’s print edition and on its website on a page utterly divorced the article to which it relates, which was removed its entirely, and in such a way that only someone searching specifically for the retraction would ever be likely to find it. (5)

To all intents and purposes, the retraction might as well not have been issued, for all that it would apparent to visitors to the News of World’s website that it had ever been made.

This is but one clear example of a practice that would be unacceptable amongst established bloggers and one of many that bloggers who specialise in monitoring the national press for accuracy have documented in recent years. For a blogger to engage in such practices, which include ‘stealth editing’ of articles, after publication, to avoid owning up to factual errors and removing and/or refusing to publish critical comments from readers, especially those that highlight and correct factual errors.

For an established blogger to adopt such practices would do incalculable damage to their public reputation; this being, after all, all that we have to trade on.

To the vast majority of national newspapers such conduct is no more than standard operating practice.

Consequently we would suggest that before your even consider turning your attention to our activities, you should direct your energies towards putting your own house in proper order. Should you succeed in raising the ethical standards and practices of the majority of the national press, particularly the tabloids, to our level then we may be inclined to reconsider our position. Until that happens, any attempt by the Press Complaints Commission to regulate the activities of bloggers will be strenuously resisted at every possible turn.

Regards,

Unity – Ministry of Truth (6) and Liberal Conspiracy (7)

References

1. Ian Burrell. PCC to regulate UK bloggers? Independent Minds. [Online] 16 November 2009. http://ianburrell.independentminds.livejournal.com/8357.html.

2. MacGuffin. How the PCC Doesn’t Work. Tabloid Watch. [Online] 25 October 2009. http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-pcc-doesnt-work.html.

3. Malone, Carole. I’ll Give You a Real Benefits Sob Story. News of The World. [Online] 26 July 2009. Article no longer available online. Key content quoted by Tabloid Watch: http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/2009/07/carole-malone-and-bnp.html.

4. Press Complaints Commission. [Online] [Cited: 17 November 2009.] http://www.pcc.org.uk/news/index.html?article=NjAzNQ==.

5. News of The World. Illegal immigrants & cars . [Online] [Cited: 25 October 2009.] http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/showbiz/564615/Illegal-immigrants-amp-cars.html.

Supporting Bloggers/Blogs

6. Ministry of Truth. [Online] http://www.ministryoftruth.me.uk.

7. Liberal Conspiracy. [Online] http://www.liberalconspiracy.org.

If you haven’t already, put your name down in the comments there.

There’s always one, though isn’t there? Martin at Layscience.net sees this differently…

What the PCC needs is change. What the PCC needs is fresh blood to move in and shake things up. What better solution then to fill a syringe with new media magic and jab it straight into their cold, dying heart?

As long as British bloggers are not compelled by law to submit to regulations – and to my knowledge there is absolutely no serious suggestion that they ever would be – then the voluntary participation of leading bloggers in the PCC could in principle be an excellent idea.

While we’re on the subject of the PCC…

The PCC – the body currently speaking of the potential to ‘regulate’ blogs (more) – has at every stage refused to investigate or even publicly acknowledge the attempt by the Managing Editor of the The Sun to attack me instead of addressing the evidence I presented.

[That “me”, by the way, isn’t me, it’s] Tim at Bloggerheads who has posted the letter from Graham Dudman to the PCC about Glen Jenvey, Ummah.com and Bloggerheads.com.

It’s disgusting and all I can say is, Graham is a cunt. But then what do you expect from a Murdoch lackie.

Go and read it for yourself as it’s a bit pointless me going through it here.