Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Author: Carrie

  • Murdoch and the Mail want your money

    There is a campaign just now asking people to save newspapers. The gist: many are threatened by coronavirus-related advertising collapse; without them, especially plucky local ones, democracy will be under threat. The first stage is to ask the public to support them; the second, to demand government help.

    Byline Times isn’t entirely sold on the idea of taxpayers’ money bailing out billionaire tax avoiders.

    We need to remember that the biggest titles – the Sun, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Times – have proprietors who are genuine billionaires; that they are individuals and come from families worth thousands of millions of pounds. And those billionaires and their companies pay their taxes only where it suits them, which means that they pay the least they can manage in the UK.

    Before we hand them any money that has been paid as taxes by nurses and bus drivers in this country, we need to be certain that (a) none of the cash will swell the personal coffers of the Murdochs, Rothermeres and Barclays, (b) they themselves have spent everything they can afford to keep their newspapers going, and (c) in the future, they will pay all the tax that they should in this country – no more Channel Islands, no more Bermuda, no more Delaware.

    The piece also makes a good point about local newspapers. While there are some genuinely wonderful local newspapers – the Yorkshire Post springs to mind – many local papers are nothing of the sort. They are centrally produced, low-quality publications run by firms who’ve sacked most of the journalists and asset-stripped the businesses.

    when the industry talks about the ‘local press’, it wants you to think of a heroic little outfit in a small town with a hard-working staff who are in tune with the needs and habits of the community and who deliver, not just information, but also social cohesion and identity.

    In reality, the press industry has been furiously trashing that entire culture for decades. Three rapacious multi-million-pound corporations – Reach, Newsquest and JPMedia – have been rolling through the local and regional press industry like asset strippers, sacking journalists by the thousand and closing titles by the hundred.

    Year after year, these three have banked handsome operating profits which, to a striking degree, they have spent outside the local and regional newspaper industry.

    The article suggests that any help should be conditional, and should be designed to protect journalism rather than bad and broken businesses.

    as these newspapers are always quick to insist in the context of other benefit claimants – we must weed out the scroungers from those genuinely deserving of support. And we must do so with a clear eye on the future.

    …Let the billionaires exhaust their own funds and pay their own taxes first. Let them make their practices and finances accessible and transparent to taxpayers. Let them make their journalism properly accountable.

  • Nature, nurture, hormones and brains

    There’s an interesting article in The Scientist, the magazine for life science professionals, that includes a good round-up of the current research into trans people’s brains. There are lots of fascinating questions:

    for people who transition to identifying as a binary gender different from that assigned at birth, “we still also don’t know whether male-to-female and female-to-male transsexualism is actually the same phenomenon, or . . . [whether] you have an analogous outcome in both sexes but you have different mechanisms behind it”…. Other outstanding questions include what, if any, differences there are in the brains of transgender people with different sexual orientations, and between those whose gender dysphoria manifests very early in life and those who begin to feel dysphoric during adolescence or adulthood. [and we don’t know]  whether the brain differences that have been identified between cis and trans people persist after hormone treatment.

    Brains are wonderfully complex things, and the mismatch between the gender we’re assigned at birth and the gender we are is likely to be multifactorial: it’s never been as simple as “being born in the wrong body” (which was always a huge oversimplification in an attempt to help cisgender people understand trans people). As one of the interviewees in the piece says, it’s likely to be “a combination between biological, psychological and social factors.”

    The more we know, the more we know that we don’t know. For example:

    hormone treatments might even affect regions the brain that are not commonly considered to be among those sensitive to sex steroids—specifically, the fusiform gyrus, involved in the recognition of faces and bodies, and the cerebellum, known in part for its role in motor control

    There may also be differences in the mechanisms affecting the brains of trans men and of trans women, because while we both take hormones we take different hormones – testosterone for the men and estrogen for the women.

    The article concludes:

    For now, as is the case for many aspects of human experience, the neural mechanisms underlying gender remain largely mysterious. While researchers have documented some differences between cis- and transgender people’s brains, a definitive neural signature of gender has yet to be found—and perhaps it never will be. But with the availability of an increasingly powerful arsenal of neuroimaging, genomic, and other tools, researchers are bound to gain more insight into this fundamental facet of identity.

  • “However far we slip into the pits of disaster, armies of queer-botherers persevere”

    Eleanor Penny, for Novara Media, on “bathroom bills” and anti-trans scaremongering:

    It seems to matter little that all this has been repeatedly debunked as statistical nonsense or swivel-eyed conspiracism. They aren’t really propositions to be proved true or false – they are ways of telegraphing disgust. Of signalling to those who fall outside normative conceptions of gender: ‘you don’t belong here’. This may be where we empty our bladders – but the real filth is you.

    There are zero confirmed cases of a man pretending to be a trans woman to commit sexual assault. It’s a fever dream of conservative culture war strategists and overly-online obsessives determined to forge a cover story for their own reheated prejudice. There are, however, many cases of cis men assaulting people in women’s bathrooms without such a pretence. As journalist Paris Lees has charted, there are many cases of gender-non-conforming cis women being stopped in public bathrooms on suspicion of existing-while-trans.

  • The end of an era: .net RIP

    Net magazine, originally know as .net, is closing after 25 years.

    I cried at the news. Not just because it’s putting some lovely, talented people out of a job, but also because .net has a special place in my heart. It’s the magazine that gave me my break into journalism nearly 22 years ago, the magazine that taught me how to be a writer and the magazine that introduced me to some of my very favourite people. It literally changed my life.

    Bye, .net. I’m heartbroken to see you go.

     

  • Save the magazines you love

    If you can afford it, this would be a very good time to subscribe to your favourite magazines. If you don’t, they might not be around when this crisis is over. One of the publishers I work for has already closed three titles. They won’t be coming back, and the industry as a whole is already in crisis.

    Press Gazette:

    A representative survey of PPA members taken last week showed an “extremely concerning” picture that advertising revenues are expected to drop by an average of 60 per cent in the next quarter, ranging between 20 and 95 per cent per publisher.

    Events, upon which many B2B publishers have relied for years and which consumer brands had increasingly focused on as ad revenues declined, are down 90 per cent this quarter.

    I understand that times are hard but many publishers are offering really great deals, and if you’re really skint you can still help the magazines you love by subscribing to their online editions or to digital services such as Readly or Apple News+. I use both: they’re really good on computers and absolutely fantastic on tablets, where they come very close to the feel of a real magazine.

  • 5G, Coronavirus and clickbait

    The mainstream media has been quick to point the finger at social media for the conspiracy theory that 5G mobile phone signals spread Coronavirus. But the mainstream media played its part too.

    Here’s the Daily Star, just before people started arson attacks on mobile phone masts.

    Coronavirus: Fears 5G wifi networks could be acting as ‘accelerator’ for disease

    You may be getting flashbacks to when the likes of The Independent, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph covered “fears” that wi-fi and mobile phones caused “electrosmog”. Or perhaps you’d like a more damaging example, such as the “fears” that vaccines could cause autism.

    The headline is important, because many people read it and don’t read further. In this case, that means they’ll go away with the impression that 5G networks (not WiFi, that’s a different thing and a different conspiracy theory) affect Coronavirus.

    They do not.

    They can not.

    There is no possible way in which they could*.

    5G signals are just radio waves. They have the same effect on viral spread as the shipping forecast from Radio 4.

    Now, I know the Daily Star hardly counts as the quality press. But it’s a newspaper nevertheless, and people believe what it prints. And from the headline down, this article is constructed in exactly the same way newspapers have covered other baseless scares from the MMR vaccine and electrosmog to trans healthcare, creating the impression of a danger that does not exist.

    I’ve grown to detest newspaper stories with “Fears” in the headline because they’re so frequently baseless. People may fear that if we go beyond 30mph in a train, our faces will fall off (a genuine fear from the early days of rail travel) or that if we sail our ships too far we’ll fall off the end of the world (an old favourite that’s back! Back! BACK!), but fears are not facts.

    Fears also require context: is this fear credible? Is the person expressing this fear credible? Does this person have any expertise that means we should take their fears seriously? For example, if the chief medical officer fears that a particular behaviour will put people at risk of a particular virus, that’s an informed fear. Whereas if a man who lives in a bin fears that if he ventures out before midnight a magical space owl will steal his eyes, that’s a slightly different proposition.

    Unfortunately in these clickbait days it’s more important for something to be popular than for it to be accurate, informed or useful; if my imaginary man-in-a-bin actually existed, you just know he’d get 15 minutes on Newsnight, a column in The Spectator and a regular guest spot on Question Time.

    Back to the Star. Since publication, the original story has been been rewritten to make it clear that the “fears” are really fact-free claims by “conspiracists”. But the original gave them hundreds of words to spout gibberish, which it didn’t try very hard to correct. For example:

    The theory has been met with scepticism from experts, who have pointed out that coronavirus cases have been identified in many areas with no 5G networks.

    “Scepticism” means doubt and implies that there’s a debate here. There is no debate here. Experts have called the claims “crackpot”, “rubbish” and “dangerous nonsense” because there is no conceivable way in which mobile phone signals can spread coronavirus. You might as well say that “the theory that putting custard in your ear cures cancer has been met with scepticism from experts”.

    Activist Louise Thomas, based in Somerset, told Daily Star Online: “We can’t say 5G has caused the coronavirus, but it might be exacerbating it.”

    Is Louise a credible person to base a news story on? Does she have expertise in virology or radiobiology?

    Let’s look at her Facebook. She describes herself as:

    Yoga, pilates, fitness, meditation teacher Truth advocate, mother.

    But Louise is the warm-up act for another activist:

    Tanja Rebel, another activist and philosophy lecturer at the Isle of Wight College, told us:

    What is it with philosophy lecturers and science denial? They’re all over trans medicine too, shouting LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU at doctors and the WHO. She says:

    “Many studies show that Electro-Magnetic Radiation (EMR) suppresses the immune system and that it helps viruses and bacteria thrive.”

    Did someone mention the WHO? Yes. Me, just a moment ago. Here they are:

    In the area of biological effects and medical applications of non-ionizing radiation approximately 25,000 articles have been published over the past 30 years. Despite the feeling of some people that more research needs to be done, scientific knowledge in this area is now more extensive than for most chemicals. Based on a recent in-depth review of the scientific literature, the WHO concluded that current evidence does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields.

    Back to our philosopher.

    “So EMR and in particular 5G could act as an accelerator for the disease.”

    That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.

    The article goes on:

    Italy, now the country with the highest coronavirus death toll, had 5G networks installed in five cities in 2019 with plans to extend coverage throughout 2020.

    You can see what the writer is trying to do here: she’s implying causation from correlation. But there is no correlation – the map of coronavirus cases in Italy bears no relation to the 5G coverage map; the technology is still only available to a handful of people – and of course there is no causation. The Italian death toll is multifactorial: an ageing population, an overloaded medical system in specific areas (notably Lombardy), inadequate testing, people not taking the danger seriously enough until it was too late.

    As if that wasn’t enough of a reach:

    A 2011 study from Northeastern University in Boston indicated that some single-celled bacteria, such as E.coli, may communicate with each other using “radio waves”.

    First of all, bacteria aren’t viruses, so this has nothing to do with the story. Bacteria are living organisms; viruses are particles. Bacteria could be setting up video chats on Houseparty for all we know; it still has no bearing on viruses.

    And secondly, oh no it didn’t. It wasn’t a study, it was a still-controversial hypothesis by theoretical physicists about a possible mechanism in which some bacteria may generate detectable radio signals.

    Very little is known about COVID-19, the novel coronavirus at the heart of the current pandemic, but research has shown that viruses “talk to each other” when making decisions about infecting a host.

    That’s a very misleading way to put it. Here’s Nature on that research:

    when a phage infects a cell, it releases a tiny protein — a peptide just six amino acids long — that serves as a message to its brethren: “I’ve taken a victim”. As the phages infect more cells, the message gets louder, signalling that uninfected hosts are becoming scarce. Phages then put a halt to lysis — the process of replicating and breaking out of their hosts — instead staying hidden in a sluggish state called lysogeny.

    That’s what we mean when we describe viruses “talking to one another”. They’re not sending each other messages on WhatsApp.

    This particular monstrosity may have been in the Daily Star, but there are articles like it in all the press with increasing regularity on all kinds of subjects.  The topics and mastheads may vary, but at heart the problem is universal: all too often, mainstream media tells us to ignore the experts and listen to cranks instead. The consequences of that go far beyond a few blackened phone masts.

    * Radio is a spectrum. In much the same way that there’s a difference between your lover’s breath and a hurricane, some radio waves are harmless and some are harmful. For example, X-rays and UV-A light are known to damage us.

    That kind of radiation is called ionising radiation, and it lives in the petahertz and exahertz frequencies. Mobile phone signals are not ionising radiation. They are much, much lower frequencies. It’s like the difference between the sun and a light bulb. The sun emits high levels of ionising radiation. The light bulb in your kitchen doesn’t.

    You can still be damaged by lower frequency radio waves, but that requires a lot of power because it works in a different way. Ionising radiation breaks cells; non-ionising radiation heats them up but only if you give it a lot of power.

    Think of your microwave: it uses radio waves to generate heat, and it does that by using a lot of power at a short distance. So your ready meal is being hit with 900 watts for four minutes at a distance of ten centimetres of so in a closed and reflective compartment. The result of so much power over such a short distance is that the water molecules in the food get hot. If you climbed inside a microwave and switched it on it would do the same to the water molecules inside you. This is why you shouldn’t dry small wet dogs in the microwave.

    Back to the difference between your lover’s breath and a hurricane: they’re both moving air, but only one of them can throw a cow through the front of your house.  It’s the same with mobile phones. Where your microwave is 900W, a 5G cell is around 2W to 5W; where your microwave is right next to your dinner, the 5G cell is many metres – often hundreds of metres – away. 

  • Don’t blame your neighbours. Blame the government

    The chorus of anger at people supposedly risking everybody’s lives by going to the park is growing louder, especially in the right-wing press; the government is now floating the idea that going outside at all may be banned “if people continue to flout the rules”.

    Don’t fall for it: it’s a deliberate attempt to bury bad news. The government (and its media cheerleaders) wants you to blame so-called “covidiots” because if you’re getting annoyed at them, you’re not getting annoyed at a government that’s gutted the NHS so badly that key frontline workers are being forced to make their own protective clothing out of bin bags.

    BBC News:

    Several healthcare workers in England have told the BBC of a lack of equipment in their hospitals. Warned against speaking to the media, they were unwilling to talk publicly.

    these medical professionals, who continue to care for critically ill patients for 13 hours every day, are having to resort to fashioning personal protective equipment (PPE) out of clinical waste bags, plastic aprons and borrowed skiing goggles.

    People are not going to die because your next door neighbour went for two walks today, or because someone sunbathed in the park. But people will die because of the decisions that left the UK short of health workers, of ventilators to treat the sick and of protective equipment for the doctors and nurses our politicians stand outside Downing Street to applaud.

  • Enemies of the people

    America’s The Daily Show has put together a video it’s dubbed “Heroes of the pandumbic”. It’s a compilation of US broadcasters (and the President who loves them) pooh-poohing the dangers of coronavirus; no prizes for guessing which media mogul’s network they’re all from.

    I’m sure you can think of some UK examples too.

  • “A doctor wearing a Spiderman mask and boxing gloves.”

    Frankie Boyle is the comedian we need in these dark times.

    2020 began with Australia on fire and a billion animals dead. It’s sobering to think that will be the feel-good story of the year.

    He’s writing for The Overtake, a small, independent and excellent publication made by – in their own words – (relatively) normal people. If you can throw a few quid their way it would make an enormous difference – especially if you cancel a subscription to a Murdoch paper or the Daily Mail to do it.

    The UK press are currently running a campaign begging advertisers not to desert them: they claim that now more than ever we need high quality journalism. Which is true, but many of the papers doing the begging – such as the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and the Murdoch press – would have a better case if high quality journalism was something they actually did.

    The likes of Murdoch will survive coronavirus – although in the US, his sons are “girding for a pandemic of public-interest lawsuits over misinformation and conspiracy theories” peddled by his TV networks, so here’s hoping – but smaller, independent publishers such as The Overtake, The Ferret, OpenDemocracy and many more need your support right now.

    Back to Frankie:

    The world’s worst people think that everybody is going to come out of this in a few months and go willingly back into a kind of numbing servitude. Surely it’s time to start imagining something better.

  • There has never been a better time to use this image

    The image is of a famous Mitchell & Webb sketch in which a Nazi, played by Mitchell, wonders whether they might be the bad guys.

    PinkNews:

    Neo-Nazis and homophobes are among those supporting the UK ‘anti-trans’ pressure group the LGB Alliance.

    …There is nothing to suggest the LGB Alliance has sought or welcomed such supporters, but when asked by PinkNews to denounce neo-Nazis, the LGB Alliance refused.

    It doesn’t matter whether you officially support or welcome them; if you’ve convinced homophobes, lesbophobes, biphobes and neo-bloody-Nazis that you’re on their side and that your beliefs align with theirs, and you then refuse to even make a lukewarm statement that homophobia and nazism are bad, you’re showing exactly who you are.