Times Editor Roger Alton Blames 'Yummy Mummies' for News of the World Closure

Journalist Roger Alton has blamed "yummy mummies" on the website Mumsnet for the closure of British tabloid News of the World.

Alton, who is Executive Editor of the Rupert Murdoch-owned The Times, spoke in a Channel 4 News report this evening, saying the supposedly Mumsnet-inspired Twitter campaign against NoW advertisers was responsible for the loss of over 200 jobs.

[Read more: Times Editor Roger Alton Blames 'Yummy Mummies' for News of the World Closure (incl. video)]

Election Debate: The Morning after the Fight Before

Last night, all of Canada, or at least the handful bothered with the current election, tuned in to the 2011 Leaders' Debate. I'm a Canadian citizen from birth, but this is my first federal election as a voter, so I've been following the campaign with interest. I began the election with no idea which way to vote. I think I've arrived at a fairly firm decision, but not without seriously considering the alternatives.

Admittedly, last night's debate was as much about the excitement as the issues for me. So, here, in the spirit of politico-entertainment punditry, is my take on how each of the four leaders -- Stephen Harper (Conservative), Michael Ignatieff (Liberal), Jack Layton (New Democratic Party) and Gilles Duceppe (Bloc Québécois) -- did in the debate.

Stephen Harper

Tory commentators say he was calm; I say he did a James Franco and smoked weed before the show. He was incredibly placid and soft-spoken, as is generally his manner, but I thought his tone got whining and fed-up very early on. Despite the low, soft tones, he quickly began to sound defensive, exasperated and impatient when the challenges started coming in (predictably, from the outset). As far as the issues went, he seemed to go in with "Economy, economy, economy" on the brain, so he clearly thinks that's his strong point and the issue that will win the election for the Conservatives.

Michael Ignatieff

Ignatieff went straight for Harper's jugular on the issue of trust. Harper consistently blamed an election Canadians don't want on the opportunism of the other parties, but Ignatieff repeated a few times that the election was called because Harper couldn't tell the truth on "jets, jails and corporate tax giveaways." It eventually got a bit repetitive, as Ignatieff repeated the same attacks verbatim. He also got pretty grumpy a few times, and lost it when Layton challenged him on his absence record from parliamentary votes. (Layton claimed Ignatieff's attendance was a mere 30%, although it's actually a mildly better 41%, or 59% absence.) An irritated Iggy flew off the handle and snapped: "At least we get into government. You'll be in opposition forever." Though he looked childish, he successfully dodged the issue. I heard a French reporter challenge him on the same point in the post-debate press scrum, but Iggy appeared to evade the issue again, disappearing hastily.

Jack Layton

I'm not surprised that most people declared Layton the winner. He was the most impressive, and he won the debate because he has the least to lose. Conservatives naturally hail his success because they know it would be a stretch to declare Harper the winner, and championing Layton is a nice way to divide the left-wing vote. Layton was the liveliest, most coherent and most polished of the four voices. His main tack was to suggest that Ignatieff and Harper were "best friends." He was big on the social justice issues and managed to get in a few mentions of climate change, an issue otherwise hardly discussed; doubtless a manoeuvre to win over some Greens (who, to a bit of an outcry, were left out of the debate).

Gilles Duceppe

Quebec, Quebec, Quebec. Are you surprised? I'm a BC boy living in Ontario, so the BQ isn't an issue as to how I'll vote. I find Duceppe a bit comical and hysterical. I was distracted by his unintentionally funny English mispronunciations -- "ship" became "shit," "second" became "chicken," and "developing" became "dev'lopping." I only wish I knew French better so I could watch tonight's debate and hear the English leaders mangle their French pronunciations in the same way.

James Delingpole's apology

Following the atrocious debacle of the weekend, in which a member of the public was harassed after having his name and address published at the Telegraph Blogs website, climate change denialist* James Delingpole has offered something of an apology.

Predictably, he can't help but use the opportunity chiefly to sneer at The Guardian's eco-friendly commentator George Monbiot, who called attention to this bizarre behaviour.

Here's the actual apology:

And why did I pull [the article]? Because I made a stupid mistake, that’s why. When I posted up the letter quoted above, I neglected to remove the sender’s name and address. This was careless but not, I promise, vindictive. And I deeply regret any distress or hassle which may have been caused to the person I named. When I read some of the comments below my blog and realised what I’d unwittingly unleashed, I removed the person’s name from the blog; then later, all the comments pertaining to the person; then later, I pulled the blog altogether – embarrassed, ashamed and rather wishing it would all go away. Thanks to Monbiot it hasn’t. But what I would really like to say to the person I named is: I’m sincerely, totally and unreservedly sorry. (And if it’s any consolation, you should see some of the hatemail I’ve been getting from Monbiot’s Guardianista chums).

Fair enough.

I am still unconvinced by Delingpole's explanation of his outrage, however. The charge is that similar (but not exactly the same, I believe) letters were sent by different individuals to 200 different Conservative MPs and parliamentary candidates, which Delingpole thinks is evidence that a global warming lobby is behind the letters. Highly likely, but I am not convinced that is the problem Delingpole wants us to think it is. And it is a huge problem for him. Significant enough that he suggested it was "nauseating," a case of "stalking" by "eco-bullies," and the work of a "disgusting eco-fascist organisation." He even proposes "f--- off" would be the best response from Edwin Northover, the Tory PPC who received the email.

I don't buy his defense of his hysterical overreaction. To explain, here's how I replied to his blog on the Telegraph thread:

James, I have great difficulty believing you would get so hysterical (and you appear not to know how blatantly hysterical and unhinged your rants sound) were it an anti-AGW who had sent a letter as part of a campaign by an anti-AGW group.

The letter itself was so innocuous, the charge of bullying and stalking is just ridiculous. Unless MPs and PPCs are really so thin-skinned, in which case they’re in the wrong business.

I can’t help but see a parallel with last week’s ruling in the US that corporations should be free to provide unlimited finance to political parties. The argument I heard from the political right was that a corporation was protected by the First Amendment (free speech) just as surely as an individual. Every group is made up of individuals. An individual pressing a PPC or MP for answers is valid, but several individuals making a coordinated effort to press for answers is bullying? It was very clear in this weekend’s debacle who was bullying who.

Granted, Monbiot has a political axe to grind with all this, but even if he’s a broken clock… you know the saying.

*Denialists, feel free to educate me on the appropriate inoffensive term for someone who denies anthropocentric global warming.

Why is the Daily Mail still here?

While browsing the website of the Press Complaints Commission (in relation to James Delingpole's appalling behaviour at Telegraph Blogs this weekend - I haven't lodged a complaint, but I don't doubt many people have), I noted the following regulation:

The Press, whilst free to be partisan, must distinguish clearly between comment, conjecture and fact.

How on earth are the tabloids still going?

'Climategate' arguments take nasty turn

There has been invective on both sides of the climate debate, and never more than since so-called Climategate, the scandal rather euphemistically dubbed the "Climactic Research Unit hacking incident" by Wikipedia. The scandal is that climate researchers at the University of East Anglia were caught manipulating data in an effort to bolster scientific evidence for anthropocentric global warming.

In the immediate aftermath, the media was full of environmentalists, global warning campaigners and scientists trying desperately to downplay the controversy, alongside climate change deniers having a field day hailing the revelations as a harbinger of the wholesale collapse of the man-made global warming theory.

Neo-conservative commentator James Delingpole of the Daily Telegraph blogs has emerged as one of the most popular (and vitriolic) online voices decrying climate change and keeping Climategate alive. His tone is generally both strident and nasty, if tongue-in-cheek - not just on this, but on any politically charged subject.

On Sunday, George Monbiot of The Guardian reports, Delingpole overstepped the mark severely by publishing an email correspondence from a member of the public to a Conservative Party parliamentary candidate, along with the name and address of the sender. The email was described outlandishly as "nauseating," and a case of "stalking" by "eco-bullies." He suggests a suitable response to the email would be "f--- off," and asks which "disgusting eco-fascist organisation" might be sponsoring the emails. According to the article, several Tory candidates have received "similar" emails, suggesting they were part of a campaign.

Delingpole's description alone is worrying. Stalking? Bullying? Disgusting? Nauseating? Eco-fascism? Worthy of an F-off? All conclusions extracted from one email? You might be surprised how placid and inoffensive the actual email was:

From: XXXXXXXX
Date: 2010/1/22
Subject: Conservation Query
To: XXXXXXX

Dear Edwin Northover,

I was concerned to note the results of a survey of 140 Conservative candidates for parliament that suggested that climate change came right at the bottom of their priorities for government action.

I hope you can reassure me that you recognise the importance and success of climate change action by the UK government at home and internationally.

Can you clarify that:

You accept that climate change is caused by human activity?

Do you support the target to achieve 15% renewable energy by 2020?

Do you support the EU imposing tougher regulation to combat climate change?

Kind Regards,

XXXXXXXX

I am quite dumbfounded. Regardless of the scientific rights and wrongs of climate change, why such a wildly disproportionate reaction to a person exercising his perfect right to ask some questions of a potential parliamentary candidate? Perhaps it was part of a campaign. And? Is this illegal? Is it morally objectionable? Is it deserving of such an unfettered attack? He later says his concern is that it may be "concerted campaign by a green lobby group, masquerading as the work of concerned individuals." However, the two are not mutually exclusive. It's perfectly possible to be a concerned individual and join a collective campaign in a course of action.

But, of course, it gets worse. Delingpole published the name and address of the email's sender. A Google cache of the article shows the name and address missing, but this is a cache of a later version. Only a few lines down the thread, the first comment to mention the identity of the correspondent assumes everyone already knows it from the article. Further down, another commenter quotes from the article, and the name and address remain intact. Eventually, Delingpole himself says he published the details, but later removed them.

If you spend any time at Telegraph Blogs (personally, of the political commentators, I've only found one author I respect), you'll have noticed that no matter how objectionable their content, the commenters the site attracts are far, far more extreme. In my experience, the average commenter votes BNP and would happily set back gay rights to some time in the 1950s.

So it is unsurprising that a disturbing and vicious attack followed from Delingpole's irresponsible post. Within a couple of posts, a commenter had identified the address on Google Maps and posted a photograph of the emailer's house. If I were that man, I would feel very threatened by this. I imagine Delingpole would feel similarly intimidated if a bitter enemy had posted details of his address and photographs of his house online.

Soon his phone number too was posted, and other commenters were posting other personal details.

Ironically, amid all this, someone chimes in to condemn the email as "intrusive and abusive lobbying."

Within a few hours of the post, a commenter was claiming to have personally telephoned the man in question:

I tried to telephone XXXXXXX on the number helpfully posted in this blog, but he’s out until tomorrow. Perhaps he is out ‘tackling climate change’? – anyway his missus didn’t seem to know where he was.

Delingpole later interrupts:

It’s a bit late but I’ve taken out the bit where the sender of the email is named. And I really think it’s wrong to ring up the chap or bother him. It’s not him I was getting at. I’m after the green organization which encouraged all this mass letter-writing.

Did Delingpole not notice that half his followers were unhinged enough to abuse the information he'd so carelessly published? Anyone to the left of Enoch Powell could have predicted this outcome.

Eventually, the entire discussion thread and the original post were removed.

I find this very worrying. James Delingpole, who has the affront to make hysterical claims of bullying, fascism and stalking, is himself engaged in a very nasty piece of bullying.

And how did he get hold of this email sent to Edwin Northover, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Leyton and Wanstead? Did Northover himself pass this on?

I have read the Telegraph daily since the mid-1990s. I've always found the quality of the journalism very high, but the shrill, hysterical, increasingly extreme right-wing tone of Telegraph Blogs has left me with much less faith in the newspaper. Delingpole's outrageously misjudged, vindictive post has finally stepped over a line. The Telegraph ought to ask some serious questions of this incident.

And the Conservative Party should be asking some questions of its candidate Edwin Northover to determine his part in this farce.

[Edit: In the thread, Delingpole admitted to publishing the name, but not specifically the address. However, the user theunbrainwashed posts what appears to be a direct quote from the article, which includes an address. This still suggests Delingpole was the first to supply the address.]

[Later edit: This thread confirms that both were published. I am really baffled by this. Either Delingpole had a deliberate aim in publishing the man's name and address, or he experienced a spectacular lapse of judgment. What journalist overlooks such details as a private name and address?]

The legacy of Oral Roberts

The late Oral Roberts was a healer, an exorcist, a preacher, a televangelism pioneer, an ecumenist and a cultural icon whose life and message united popular religion with the American Dream.

By his own admission he was a businessman. Early on in the post-war Pentecostal healing revival he distinguished himself among his contemporaries by running his ministry on a savvy business model that eventually made it a multimillion-dollar non-profit corporation. It is no coincidence that Roberts was instrumental in the founding of the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship, an organisation at the forefront of the charismatic movement of the 1960s and '70s, when the once-ridiculed Pentecostal experiences of tongues, healing and prophecy broke into the traditional, more respectable churches and denominations worldwide.

In the early days he vowed to touch "neither the gold nor the glory," and proved remarkably resilient to public scandal over the years. Despite his increasingly ludicrous and manipulative pleas for funds, Roberts survived six decades of ministry without the moral and financial scandals that brought down other televangelists.

His message was a simple promise of health, wealth and salvation: Jesus wants you to be saved, healed and prosperous. It was a message that struck a natural chord with ...

Read the full article (by yours truly, David L Rattigan) at The Guardian's Comment is free.

David L Rattigan on the Dr William Lester Show

I'm pleased to be the guest on Dr William Lester's radio show tonight for the second time. William and I will be talking about Hammer horror, and perhaps touching on other classic horror subjects, such as the Universal films of the 1930s and '40s, and the Amicus anthologies of the 1960s and '70s.

You can tune in online at Game Con Radio. The show is from 10pm to 12 midnight ET/7pm to 9pm PST. Alas, for listeners in the UK, that's 3 to 5am GMT!

The real crime of the balloon boy hoaxers

Police now say (admittedly a long time after everyone else was saying it) that there's evidence the family of "Balloon Boy" Falcon Heene are guilty of a hoax. They may face criminal charges.

May I suggest an appropriate charge? Child abuse.

If Thursday's story had been merely a hoax UFO, I might have appreciated it at the level of a prank, or even a social experiment. That there was possibly a 6-year-old boy trapped inside the runaway balloon made it very, very scary, however. And the possibility that the parents had lied in order to get the media's attention would be reprehensible.

But the aspect that really appalls me is not that they lied to the media or wasted police time. The thing I find despicable is how Richard and Mayumi Heene paraded their family in front of TV cameras and drew them into the hoax.

Just hours after the incident, the parents had cameras in their living room and were subjecting their three boys to national and international live TV coverage. In at least two separate interviews, young Falcon was very sick. The first time, he had to run out of the room and could be heard vomiting in the background while his family continued with the interview. His mother had to be prompted by the news anchor to accompany him to the bathroom. The second time, he vomited into a container live on air, but the father carried on with the interview regardless.

Then came Falcon Heene's telltale admission: "You guys told me it was for the show." Richard's later attempts to explain away the remarks and feign outrage at suggestions of a hoax were embarrassing displays of poor acting. But he roped his kids into the charade. As he wiped away tears in front of the cameras, the boys nervously tried imitating him, rubbing their eyes as their father sobbed about how he held Falcon the night of the incident and told him how much he loved him. Heartbreaking - and unabashedly manipulative.

It's not just the parents' manipulation. They've used their children in pursuit of their five minutes of fame. They've taught their boys how to manipulate and how to lie, and that is despicable.

If Richard and Mayumi Heene are to face charges over the balloon fiasco, let it not be for a hoax, for wasting resources, or for lying to the police. Let it be for shamelessly exploiting and abusing their own sons.

Licence for prejudice: You died young... and you're gay

Jan Moir's column about the late Stephen Gately is an ugly and infuriating display of prejudice, even by the Daily Mail's standards.

Moir's tack put me in mind of the character of Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) in the 1997 comedy As Good as It Gets. Intimidated by Frank Sachs (Cuba Gooding, Jr), Melvin shouts for the police and threatens, "Assault and battery," adding with triumph, "and you're black!"

Analyzing the circumstances surrounding the untimely death of pop singer Gately, Moir pieces together a few apparently suspicious details before revealing the clincher: And he's gay.

What were those suspicious details? Gately and his civil partner Andrew Cowles had been out clubbing; they returned to their apartment with Georgi Dochev, a young Bulgarian man; Cowles and Dochev went into the bedroom while Gately remained in the living room. Gately had "at least smoked cannabis" that evening.

Quite slender details on which to hang a concrete theory, but Moir gives it her best shot, jumping from the few available facts to the statement "Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one." To do this, she discounts the results of the post-mortem, and reveals an astonishing medical ignorance: "Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again." Even I know this is not true.

The byline refers to the "sordid details" of Gately's death. Moir says that its circumstances are "more than a little sleazy." Gately and Cowles "took" the young Bulgarian to their apartment (how suggestive a little verb like "take" can be) and "a game of canasta ... was not what was on the cards." She ends boldly: "[Once again] the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see."

Sadly, this ooze has seeped only out of Moir's imagination. That's not to say the scenarios she suggests are not possible, but how does she leap from possibilities to such certainties? Aha. With the all-important final detail: And he's gay.

It is clear Moir already has a chip on her shoulder about gays, and in particular the idea of civil partnerships. She betrays this with her assumption that if they are to be legitimate, civil partnerships should be held to a higher standard than straight marriage:

Another real sadness about Gately's death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.

Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened.

There is no more a happy-ever-after to civil partnerships than there is to heterosexual marriage. But for Moir, the failure of a handful of celebrity couples in the public eye somehow throws the whole concept of civil partnerships into question.

Few other people are held to such high scrutiny or expected to maintain such high standards in order to earn legitimacy. No one holds up OJ and Nicole Simpson as reason to question interracial marriage. These blacks, always going on about tolerance, but just look at OJ and Nicole. What about Jade Goody and Jack Tweed? Cervical cancer? We all know what's going on there. I'm sure there are some very happily married chavs out there, but you can't help but ask the question whether these sort of working-class, council estate types should be allowed to get married in the first place, eh? Jade and Jack was one thing, but now there's Jordan and Pete.

The folly of this kind of reasoning speaks for itself; its underlying prejudice is obvious.

Moir thinks that Gately's relationship status warrants a more intrusive kind of coverage. She complains that the story was reported "as if Gately had gently keeled over at the age of 90 in the grounds of the Bide-a-Wee rest home while hoeing the sweet pea patch," and protests that the "sugar coating on this fatality is so saccharine-thick that it obscures whatever bitter truth lies beneath."

Why is it so imperative that Gately's death be reported in more detail? That the "bitter truth" (remembering that this bitter truth is so far just speculation) be revealed? Clearly it has nothing to do with a general ethical principle or a journalistic standard that applies to young and old, straight and gay alike. No, this is for one reason: because Gately was gay.

Gately was gay: therefore otherwise negligible details become suspicious; therefore his negatives - not that she has any firm evidence for their existence - can be applied to an entire community and used to put an entire group of people and their relationships under public scrutiny.

Gately's sexuality is the one fact that, for Moir, sets his death apart from others. It is the justification for innuendo and contrivances that reveal only the prejudice of their author.

Update: The Daily Mail website has changed the headline from "Why there was nothing 'natural' about Stephen Gately's death" to "A strange, lonely and troubling death...". The byline in the sidebar was changed to "Jan Moir on the tragic end of Stephen Gately" from something I can't remember exactly, but which definitely made reference to the "sordid details" of Gately's death.