Life Lessons from the Gutter Press: If You Insist on Being an Arsehole, You'd Better be an Accurate Arsehole · 6:05pm Apr 3rd, 2018
Greetings my good ladies and gentlemen on this fine Spring afternoon.
Today I present a lesson to would-be reviewers, journalists and commentators courtesy of The Sun newspaper. Specifically, a lesson on what not to do.
First, a quick introduction for those unfamiliar with the fine publication in question. The Sun is ared-top newspaper, which would call itself centre-right and firmly in favour of the common people. A rather more honest assessment would be ultra popularist, far-right and of highly dubious journalistic merit.
And that's being very, very polite.
To really get a feel for it, imagine the scummiest bottom-feeding rag imaginable, where "ethics" is a foreign country, vicious attack pieces are a daily norm and "fact checking" is an incomprehensible alien concept. Picture The Daily Mail or Fox News with all pretenses abandoned. Have you got that image in your head?
Excellent. You now have a good, fuzzy idea of what The Sun is like. Here is one of it's more well known headlines:
That was published in the aftermath of the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster, where ninety six people died. The accusations on the front page, right under the words "The Truth"? Every one of them was a complete fabrication, invented from whole cloth. The general idea was to paint the victims as criminal sub-humans fully deserving of their fate, and to exploit the disaster to sell a few extra papers.
I believe I've done enough, now, to establish that The Sun, as an institution, is a grade A, world class arse.
With all that said, we have a fine example of The Sun's journalism, to use the term loosely, to examine today, and there are lessons here for reviewers and bloggers on this site. For your enjoyment:
FLAKENSTEINS Snowflake students claim Frankenstein’s monster was ‘misunderstood’ — and is in fact a VICTIM
One professor even claimed that the murdering monster could have been protected by human rights laws today
English authorMary Shelley’s classic novel Frankensteinhas terrified millions since it was first published in 1818.
In it, scientist Victor Frankenstein’s monster gets snubbed by society and then murders his creator’s brother, pal and bride. But an academic has revealed growing support for the beast in the introduction to a 200th anniversary edition of the book.
Prof Nick Groom, of Exeter University, said: “When I teach the book now, students are very sentimental towards the being. But he is a mass murderer.”
He then asked: “If he’s not human, but he is intelligent and sentient, does he have rights?”
Mary Shelley expert Professor David Punter, of Bristol University, said: “It’s a familiar story isn’t it, someone with a terrible upbringing going on to commit terrible crimes.
“The monster does deserve sympathy.
“I don’t believe he would qualify as human and I’m not sure he would qualify under any kind of animal rights regulations either. I think the poor chap would rather fall in between two stools.”
The Monster is sympathetic you say? What new lie-beral conspiracy is this?! Damn those wrong-headed SNOWFLAKE students!
This must surely be some awful, radical new quack theory? It couldn't possibly be the bog-standard, GCSE set-text two-hundred-year-old interpretation of the story? That actual school children can and would tell you? Ha! Stupid SNOWFLAKES.
Needless to say, much fun was had at The Sun's expense. Basically everyone mocked and belittled them; even on it's own website, this was about the most "charitable" interpretation:
People are saying the authors of this article didn't read the book but I think it's more like...
-Gary: I just came up with this idea to get outrage-clicks from conservatives AND liberals!
-Thea: Sounds lucrative, what is it?
-Gary: It's- well, real quick though, just to make sure- you don't have any journalistic pride left, do you?
-Thea: *laughs*
-Gary: *laughs*
-Thea: Seriously though, what's the idea?
And it worked, so if they ever feel a twinge of conscience at least they'll have money to comfort themselves
To show the level of absolutely no fact- checking or research that went into this, I did exactly one Google search ("Frankenstein themes") taking less than one minute. The first page bought up ten web-pages that were variants of "Themes in Frankenstein". To minimise my research efforts, I clicked on only the very first of these. A quick scan revealed the following, under the title "Monstrosity":
One can argue that Victor himself is a kind of monster, as his ambition, secrecy, and selfishness alienate him from human society. Ordinary on the outside, he may be the true “monster” inside, as he is eventually consumed by an obsessive hatred of his creation.
Total research time: ninety seconds.
This was apparently too much effort.
Even ignoring this, there are other issues here which are common in Sun articles. Point by point:
The article states that the professor quoted, Prof. David Punter, states that the "murdering monster could have been protected by human rights laws today". This is the opposite of what was actually stated. Reason for this deception: reinforce the idea that human rights legislation exists only for the benefit of criminals and monsters, and should be scrapped at the first opportunity. The Sun shoe-horns this concept into every article it can, in an attempt to reinforce it in the public conscious.
The tone of the article is remarkably anti-intellectual: it is implied that Proffessors Groom and Punter, along with their students, are out of touch and wrong-headed, despite the fact that the actual quotes contain nothing remotely controversial. Hostility, either overt or implied, towards intellectuals of every flavour (or "boffins", as it prefers) is standard MO for The Sun. The Sun seeks to reinforce the idea that intellectuals in general, and scientists in particular, are foolish, out of touch and devoid of common sense, and can thus safely be ignored. As above, Sun reinforces this concept at every opportunity.
The article is openly hostile towards students and youth. The Sun is very fond of articles demonising both of the above. The general idea is to paint the young as unworthy of any kind of help or support. It goes without saying that The Sun misses few opportunities to insert this theme, either.
I will leave the matter of why The Sun does all this as an exercise for the reader.
The conclusion here is in keeping with what I spelt out at the beginning of this blog: The Sun is a deeply, deeply unpleasant institution.
They are, in short, a bunch of utter arseholes.
The take home message is this: if you must insist on being an arsehole, all of the time and to everybody, If you want to shout your nasty arsehole crap from the rooftops, then you'd better be damned sure to get your facts straight.
It must be said: if there's one thing that's going to make you look like the biggest idiot in the world, then it's loudly and dickishly proclaiming something that's obviously and demonstratively wrong.
People will have no mercy, and you will have no credibility.
Let us learn, then, from The Sun's error, and not do the things that it does (this is generally good practice): do your research and above all don't be an unrepentant and persistent arsehole.
I don't know if I more want to laugh or weep. I really don't.
4831986
A strong argument could be made if favour of both.
You’re assuming there is actually an error.
1. Haven’t talked to the guy for fifteen years and don’t plan to. Long story.
I used to know someone who wrote for a paper like that1 and one of the things I learned from him is that most of this is entirely deliberate.
This is not a failure of journalism, and this is not a failure of being an arsehole. This is what causes controversy. Controversy sells papers. Monumental fuck-ups like this one sell papers. Telling other people about monumental fuck-ups like this one… you got it, sells papers. Just for curiosity’s sake and the privilege of having physical evidence of one, it still sells papers. The original target audience who doesn’t google – seriously, you expect people who google to buy papers? – laps it up anyway, if only because it convinces them they are actually knowledgeable and/or intelligent for having noticed how monumentally the paper fucked up.
There is no bad publicity, unless it’s so horribly bad that it forces them to close for good somehow.
4832022
That actually happened to The Sun's sister newspaper, the News of the World. It's an interesting story, you should look it up.
I take it, then, that you agree with the "charitable" interpretation?
Articles like this also shamelessly appeal to common prejudices. Assuming that someone was able to create a sapient Creature or Creatures like the one in Frankenstein, of course it would make logical and legal sense to acknowledge its possession of civil rights (the specific creature in the story being a serial killer, it would then make logical and legal sense to execute or imprison it, which is not really a digression, as with civil rights come civil responsibilities). But the common prejudice is "this is a monster, so we must treat it as less than a man."
Which, of course, was the mistake that Dr. Frankenstein made right at the moment of its animation, which leads to all the tragedies of the novel.
4832032
One of the arguments Prof. Punter made is that the Creature, if it came into being, would be effectively trapped in legal limbo, with neither the laws governing animals nor those governing humans applicable in it's case.
The Sun, in the finest traditions of the gutter press, chose to interpret that as: "Give Human Rights to Monsters, says Dippy Boffin".
Given your own tastes in literature, I suspect that Frankenstein appeals to you?
Wait, people actually read something besides page three?
4832027
As I have said, this is what I literally heard from a person whom I am definite wrote at least one article that got published in a tabloid – that is, I have seen both the draft and the paper – so I have little doubt charitable interpretation is actual fact, or very close to it. It was, indeed, a long time ago, but I don’t see why it would have changed, or why would it be substantially different elsewhere in the world.
Mind you, the self-irony you cited is usually not there. Instead, this is treated as more like a minor con, and their own opinion of this work is more bitterly cynical: The world is full of bastards and suckers, and you have to be one if you don’t want to be the other.
4832068
There is evidence besides the person whom you cite. If you look at the article, the authors do a reasonable job of weaving in The Sun's favoured themes, as outlined above, into the text in a manner that might not be immediately obvious to anyone who is not looking for them.
The level of skill on display would therefore rule out anyone who would be incapable of a quick Google search to research the basic themes of Frankenstein. Either:
They're phenomenally lazy and unprofessional.
Or:
Neither they nor their Editor gave a shit about the actual themes of the book. They knew full well, and didn't care.
Looking into the authors, Gary O'Shea and Thea Jacobs, in a little more detail, I could find neither of them on Linkin, but both have a presence on Twitter. Regarding qualifications, I can find nothing for Mr. O'Shea, but Thea Jacobs appears to have an undergraduate equivalent qualification from an institution called News Associates.
They proudly declare themselves to be a Reporter and a Journalist respectively. I don't think that such pieces are what they had in mind when they set out on their careers.
Given that at least one, and probably both, trained to undergrad level, and both are competent in social media, I find it impossible to believe that they are incapable of researching or understanding a standard set-text like Frankenstein.
The question then becomes not: "Are these people cynical", but rather: "Exactly how cynical are we talking?". Or perhaps: "How sophisticated is their cynicism?"
For example, was this written as a quick way to poke fun at left leaning students and academics, thus scoring political points with the bosses, or was it a more involved ploy to gain ad money by goading people to click on the website, as yourself and the commenter I quoted would suggest? Maybe their deadline was a couple of hours away and they slapped this together at the last minute without too much thought.
It's possible, of course, that several of those are true.
We may never know.
One interesting thing to note is that The Times, a fellow Murdoch publication, covered the same story and made the same points, though nobody noticed or cared until after The Sun's piece, likely because The Times was much more conservative in it's language.
The Sun, on the other hand, chose to openly insult the "SNOWFLAKE" students for making the correct interpretation of the novel. I would argue that that actually supports the central thesis of this blog: that you will have a much, much harder time getting away with being wrong if you're wrong whilst also being a dick.
I know at least some people – intelligent, left-leaning, well-educated, and very gay people – who read tabloids like The Sun as a form of comedy. I've implored them not to, pointed out that every page view they get is another advertising penny.
Wait... Frankenstein?
The fucking masterpiece exactly because it was so sympathetic Frankenstein?
Like, I don't even buy the "Victor was the real monster" angle. It is a beautifully tragic story of two beings who, in pursuing what they thought right, brought each other to ruin and tragedy. Victor wanted to advance science. Then his monster wanted to find companionship. Then Victor betrayed the monster to, right or no, save mankind. Then the monster ruined him in revenge. It is a cycle of hate.
If there is any political hay to be made, it would be a warning to the secular world - the "liberal" world - to not forsake morals, else reckless science shall cheerfully invent that which destroys or damns us.
Paraphrasing Doctor House, "if arseholes where to get their facts straight, there wouldn't be arseholes".
Also, I've come to various cases of fact-checking not happening in journalism, and it baffles me that one like this happens in modern times, under democratic society. This is some serious dictatorship-level move. A society that deals with this more than once a month is a society that has to pay attention to other red flags going on.
Take care, pal.
Wait. That's the article?
That's the ENTIRE article?
That has to be the most shoddy, lame excuse for journalism I've ever seen. It just some bullshit, sensationalistic headline and a couple quotes from two professors, which are the complete opposite of the subheadline. Of course, I don't expect anyone that would believe such far-right garbage to have the common sense or intellectual ability to make such a determination, frankly, it's amazing they can even read at all. (Yes I'm biased, deal with it.
)
But there's no counter point. Not even an attempt to disapprove their comments. There's barely enough information to even make sense of what the article's trying to say. I just...
Then again if they had added more information they'd just prove the Professor's right.
4832742
That's the complete article; I quoted it in It's entirety.
I'm pretty sure this blog post is longer, even with said quote removed.
4832051
Frankenstein very much appeals to me, I think it is interesting that one of the seminal works of Science Fiction hit upon the question of the moral status of artificial intelligence. I think that is one of the most important questions of our own future, right up there with expansion beyond our world. How we handle it may actually be one of the great filters of the Fermi paradox.