Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Little Britain: streaming services say no

    The Guardian:

    Little Britain has been removed from all UK streaming platforms due to concerns about the use of blackface by its two stars, David Walliams and Matt Lucas. The comedy sketch show, which first aired in 2003 on BBC Three, has been removed from Netflix, BritBox and BBC iPlayer – with the pair’s follow up, Come Fly With Me, also taken down by Netflix for the same reason.

    It wasn’t just racist. As Matt Lucas admitted a few years ago, the whole programme was “cruel” and wouldn’t be made today. It traded in lazy stereotypes: shirkers pretending to be disabled, shrieking fat women, deluded transvestites, Thai brides and other tabloid targets. Defenders claim it was satire, but it was nothing of the sort. It was an extended exercise in punching down, its catchphrases shouted at minorities in the street.

    The usual grifters are claiming terrible censorship, and they’re much more outraged about this than they are about, say, racism or police brutality. But despite their claims of a ban, nobody is stopping them from watching it: it’s still available on pay-per-download. And of course, they can buy it on DVD and rack it next to their box sets of Love Thy Neighbour.

    Update, 12 June:

    The Sun appears to be driving a false narrative that Black Lives Matter protesters are demanding the removal of endless other TV shows. They aren’t. There is no “furious race row” over Gavin And Stacey, but there is a pretty transparent attempt by the Murdoch press to delegitimise protests against racism by pretending they’re about trivia.

  • “free speech outrage is disproportionately concerned with protecting the most powerful”

    Jessica Valenti, writing on Medium: Not All Opinions Matter.

    while police across the country are violently attacking peaceful protesters — actual state suppression of speech— powerful people are working hard to characterize disinterest or criticism as some kind of horrific rights violation.

    …It is not a coincidence that powerful white people are painting themselves as the victims at the same time Black Americans are on the streets demanding to be treated with some semblance of humanity. For the first time perhaps ever, the national conversation is solely focused on racism and anti-Black police violence. For those who are accustomed to holding all the power and attention, that shift in focus feels “oppressive.”

  • It’s getting harder to be average

    When I was at school, I was excellent. I didn’t find anything particularly difficult, and I breezed through exams without having to study for them. I assumed that when I left school, the world of work would be much the same and I would be hugely rewarded for doing sod-all.

    Spoiler: nope.

    One of the things about growing up – unless you’re lucky enough to benefit from inherited wealth and/or nepotism – is that you soon learn that you are not the genius you thought you were. It turns out that the world is full of people who are not just as clever or as talented as you, but who also work much harder than you do.

    That leaves you with two options. One, find ways to compete. Or two, have an almighty shit-fit about how it’s soooooo unfair that others are allowed into your treehouse. Previously the highly privileged railed against “PC gone maaaaaaad”; now it’s about “wokeness”. But it’s always a toddler tantrum.

    Laura Waddell in the Scotsman, itself no stranger to publishing such tantrums, writes about two kinds of contrarians: the career ones who manufacture controversy cynically to pay their bills, and the people who mistake loss of privilege for conspiracy.

    The second camp is rooted in insecurity about one’s own position in the professional world, and a sense of being left behind as it changes. This can be seen in the desire to suck up to a stale model of power, the white male change-maker who held court when the controversialist’s career was on the up. Mocking others is an ingratiation attempt, showing they’re in the same camp, fighting newcomers who dare think they deserve a place at the table. But it is always easier to trick oneself into believing advancement of others has resulted in one’s personal persecution, than come to terms with being average among the competition.

    White people aren’t necessarily better writers than people of colour. Men are not necessarily better musicians than women. Straight people are not necessarily better CEOs than gay people. But for a very long time, mediocre people have had better opportunities than others purely because of their skin colour. their gender or their sexual orientation because they and people like them promoted the people who were exactly like them – and limited the opportunities for people who were not.

    Waddell:

    The problem is not the existence of others – it’s just not being good enough. The world is just a little less likely to reward them for it.

  • Doing the devil’s work

    According to STV and Glasgow Live, there are “mass gatherings” planned for Glasgow this weekend to protest against the lockdown.

    The story is interesting for all the wrong reasons.

    Reason number one is that it isn’t true. A couple of far-right yahoos [update: their group is a front for the racist Britain First] have shared their drawing of a “come to our demo” leaflet – they don’t even have a real leaflet, just a drawing of one – on Facebook. Describing this as “plans” for “mass gatherings” is rather like saying I have “plans” to marry the actor Emma Stone or to be a size 8.

    And reason number two is that this kind of credulous reporting runs the risk of creating something from nothing. The coverage could encourage people who’d otherwise be unaware of the yahoos to wander down to the proposed meeting either to support it or demonstrate against it – thereby turning a couple of yahoos in a park into a much bigger thing.

    This is happening far too often with far too many publications, not just here but in the US too: again and again one or two clowns come up with a social media account, a snappy name and a logo and they’re immediately taken seriously by reporters who don’t do even the most basic checking.

    This is what happens when you chase traffic, not accuracy; when you pay your reporters not because of the quality of their work, but the quantity of content they produce; when your publication encourages churnalism, not journalism. It’s easy to exploit, and there’s no shortage of bad actors happy to exploit it.

  • Ill communications

    When you’re trying to keep people at home over what’s likely to be a hot and sunny bank holiday weekend, it’s hard to imagine a worse headline than this.

    It’s from today’s Daily Mail (in England; the Scottish edition has Nicola Sturgeon saying the lockdown can’t be lifted yet). The Mail of all papers should be wary about headlines with “Hurrah” in them.

    The Mail is one of several tabloid newspapers who are promising an end to lockdown starting Monday and publishing it on their front pages the day after the UK death toll became the highest in Europe. There are officially more than 30,000 people dead; the real number is believed to exceed 50,000.

    Let’s see what the papers have to hurrah about.

    Has the UK reached its own testing target? Nope: the much-promised 100,000 tests per day hasn’t been achieved at all. The government attempted to pretend otherwise by counting 40,000 tests posted but not received; that worked for one day, but the daily number is back down to 80-something-thousand.

    Do front-line NHS workers have adequate PPE? Nope. The much-lauded order of PPE from Turkey is being sent back today because it doesn’t meet NHS standards.

    Do we have enough testers and trackers in place to know where the virus is and where to target resources? Nope.

    Do we have a trace, track and isolate system in place? Nope.

    The official stats are online. We are currently recording over 6,000 new cases a day.

    All of these things together mean that the lockdown shouldn’t and won’t be lifted on Monday in England; we may see some very minor changes, such as stopping the cops from shouting at sunbathers, but it isn’t safe to change things yet.

    That’s not what the papers are suggesting, though, and as a result we’re going to have a weekend of people flouting the lockdown because hey, it’s going to be lifted on Monday anyway.

    Apparently the government are deeply concerned about this; what I thought was a deliberate leak to distract tabloids from the death toll is reportedly an unsanctioned leak that’s been blown out of all proportion to produce front pages like this:

    If it’s true that this isn’t what the government wanted, it’s clearly a case of reaping what you’ve been sowing: this is what happens when you don’t communicate clearly with a country, when you share policy and plans not with Parliament but with your pet newspapers, when your government cares more about PR than PPE.

  • News isn’t about making you feel better

    Ruby Lott-Lavigna in Vice:

    Journalism is not supposed to be a fluffy PR machine for the government (unless you’re working in North Korea, or, I don’t know, the Sunday Telegraph news desk), ready to boost your mood on a less than jolly day with an uplifting story of a dog who saved a duck from traffic, or a picture of a waving seal. It is a tool to interrogate power structures and inequality, serve the public interest and, occasionally, provide readers with something funny to read. Unfortunately, spiralling death tolls, falling stock markets and government failures – as depressing as it might be – are news, and need to be reported on.

    …the media has never existed to provide a soothing mood-booster or cheerlead the government. Now is exactly the time we need challenging, difficult questions asked, even if they’re hard to hear. The waving seals can wait.

  • “How discriminatory do you have to be before you’re called out?”

    Helen Belcher of Trans Media Watch explains why UK trans people are really scared right now.

    For some time trans people have understood the current media debate in the UK isn’t actually about the Gender Recognition Act. Instead, it is about our basic rights to live and move as full members of our society.

    …Most trans people I know in the UK are now absolutely terrified.

    They understand an arcane procedure for changing legal gender is probably going to be maintained in some form.

    But they realize their ability to function in any meaningful way as members of our society is about to be removed

  • Using coronavirus for a culture war

    Rachel Shabi in The Guardian:

    the key issue in the right’s current culture war is the lockdown, which is being presented as a freedom-sucking con – much like the EU. Mirroring the dynamics of climate denialism, those challenging the overwhelming consensus of global expertise cast themselves as lockdown “sceptics”. And cleaving to a rightwing populist script, these sceptics say their legitimate concerns are being silenced.

  • What’s wrong with this picture.

    This is the Daily Express, apparently showing crowds of “selfish rule breakers” during lockdown.

    The photo is of Brighton and Hove seafront. Rob Shepherd lives there. See the cranes in the background? As Rob demonstrates, they aren’t there any more and haven’t been for some time.

  • Priorities

    To add insult to fatal injury, the headline that dominates the front page isn’t even true.