Cracked.com: 5 Things The Media Loves Pretending Are News

So funny you’ll find it depressing.

I think The Telegraph is the worst offender in terms of the ‘-gate’ suffix. I’m not sure if its use is designed to merely annoy or if there’s a political idea behind it. Something -gate is immediately recognised to be “bad”, thereby avoiding any need to explain why or how it’s bad; it’s self-evidently so.

Daily Mail: “Two passports a minute given to foreigners”

“Two passports a minute are given to foreigners as 1.5m issued since Labour elected” read a Daily Mail headline yesterday, before deluging the reader with an article full of lots of scary looking numbers with plenty of zeroes… but no where could I find any further elaboration on that two a minute claim.

Fortunately, No Borders Brighton has saved me the effort of doing the mathematics myself…

For a start, roughly 6,619,680 minutes have elapsed since the Labour government were elected on 1 May 1997 (counting up to 1 January 2010, as the ONS statistics that the article is based upon relate to figures for last year). So, 2 passports a minute would mean 13,239,360 passports in total?!? Something wrong there

Then continues to explore almost every possible meaning that could’ve been squeezed from that statement – none of which make the claim plausible.

The Daily Mail seem to have simply made that up.

How do they get away with it?

Crimes against journalism – an introduction

This is a blog for those who, like me, hold high expectations for complete strangers. We are an unfortunate bunch, recognisable by a youth full of optimism which slowly, painfully turned into frustration and despair as we grew older. If you’re the type of person who expected your boss not to be a complete idiot, your local rozzer not to pirate DVDs and your doctor not to shoot heroin into his testicles, you know what I mean.

While there are many trivial transgressions I can easily forgive (who could begrudge a hard-working GP the occasional injection of skag, eh?), I draw the line when so-called professionals fail to reach even the minimum expected standard of their occupation. It’s easy to come up with examples of this that would elicit murmurs of agreement amongst the ignorant populace: the arsonist fireman, the child-molesting social worker, the articulate footballer, and so on.

I want to see the misleading journalist added to that list.

And that is the purpose of this blog: to highlight how absolutely rubbish some journalists are at their job. In particular, the humungous problem that exists due to the bastard child of the misleading journalist, the bullshitting columnist. This freak variant of the journalist model is terrifying in its ignorance, irresponsibility and indignant righteousness. And they’re paid for that. Fuck.

To a large chunk of the population, their daily newspaper is where they find out what’s going on. The columnist section is where they’re told what to think. The journalists job is to report, to the best of their ability, what relevant things are going on in the world, and to provide context and truth. The columnists role (in my high expectations fantasy world) is to distill these facts into insightful commentary blended with reality-based opinion to form a fair and justifiable view of the world. If the columnist is to adopt a particular position on an issue, their job is to use sensible and reasoned arguments to convince the reader that they’re right. I think this is a fair standard to expect. This blog calls out the people who either can’t be bothered to produce work up to this standard or are incapable of doing so.

So how can you help hold back this great tide of hate-baiting crud being spawned?

Well, you can email any crimes against journalism you find to: crunkfish [at] gmail [dot] com. Help me expose these bastards.

To help you in your search, consider any of the following as a crime against journalism (this list is a work in progress – leave a comment if you’ve something to add):

Misleading headlines
Deceptive or misrepresented statistics
Statistics, research or opinion from a dubious source
Hyperbole
Cherry-picking (quotes, facts, science, etc.)
Fallacious arguments
Misplaced assumptions (e.g. news articles that start from a position of assuming marriage is the best option, homosexuality is not ‘normal’, Saddam Hussein is a serious and immediate threat to the UK, etc.)
Pointlessness
Lack of context
Use of “scare” quotes
Vanity pieces (if you want to show off how brilliant a writer / person you think you are, set up a blog)

This list will grow over time…

I’m only interested in covering articles from the UK and would like to have examples from as broad a range of news sources as possible. It might not be worth bothering with examples from the tabloids – does anybody really take those seriously? However, I can see this quickly becoming the Daily Mail is a Shit Piece of Shit blog, so please help me dig through the full political spectrum of crap that’s out there. But try to justify why it’s a crime beyond saying “this journalist says global warming is happening when we all know it’s a global communist conspiracy designed to take wealth from the rich, give it to the poor – let’s rape polar bears”.

Thanks.