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Sunday 24 July 2016

Carole Malone - The Poor Victim

The Mirror titles are the only national papers that support the Labour Party. Or perhaps that should read “usually support the Labour Party”, because they are becoming uneasy at the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn continuing to be leader, and so going from lukewarm support to outright hostility. And there are few more hostile parts of the Mirror than that occupied by their very own Sunday Glenda, Carole Malone.
Ms Malone recently got her facts and her history horribly wrong when she talked of Lenin and the Gulag (not contemporaneous), and tried to suggest that Corbyn supporters were behind threats to MP Luciana Berger, when that was down to a far-right provocateur. But she is nothing if not a real trouper, and so has returned to the fray today to blame her lousy research on anyone and everyone else. Cos she didn’t do it.

She does not make an auspicious start: “I don’t suppose the Corbynistas thought I’d write about this again. I’m sure they thought the insults, the intimidation, the trolling would silence me, that it would put me, a mere woman, in my place. Nope, sorry. No can do”. You can’t claim the moral high ground when you use nicknames coined by the perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog.

And pointing out that something is wrong is not intimidation or trolling. But do go on. Ms Malone, like Dan Hodges, uses Angela Eagle as first witness: “She and her staff have suffered so much abuse she can’t now do her job as an MP because the police have advised her if she goes ahead with meetings in her Wallasey constituency she could be in danger”. No they haven’t. She is continuing with meetings.

Not so heavy on the research, eh? But there’s more: “last week I was branded a liar because a death threat to MP Luciana Berger - which was initially thought to be from a Labour supporter - turned out not to be. Which gave Corbyn’s nasty little gang carte blanche to abuse me, to call me a liar, to trash everything else I’d said about the intimidation and the bullying of women”. She got it wrong, that’s all.

Had she bothered to find out, she’d have known Ms Berger’s threat did not come from anywhere near the Labour Party. It’s no use blaming others for not getting your facts right - something that newspaper pundits find so hard to accept is that the days when they could just churn out any old rubbish and few would know any difference are long gone.

Still, let’s cut to the question Ms Malone wants answering: “So why are people refusing to accept the ugly truth - that Corbyn’s Labour has given free rein to a vicious gang of bullies and misogynists who don’t want women in politics?” The answer is that there is no defined gang, vicious or otherwise, and the number of women who turn out to cheer Jezza on tends to give the lie to Ms Malone’s simplistic victimhood.

There are many things one could criticise about Jeremy Corbyn (policy definition is often poor or haphazard, he’s a poor Commons performer and speaker, doesn’t get after the Tories when he should, is not well-liked outside his own party or sometimes within it, gives too many hostages to fortune, isn’t cutting through with the electorate, looks like he’ll lose the next election big time), but Carole Malone gets sidetracked and misses them.

The problem here is not Corbyn. It’s Carole Malone’s crap journalism and research.

6 comments:

sigil said...

Thanks Tim. Now Toynbee, Cohen, Behr, Kuenssberg, Marr, even Suzanne Moore... please!

Anonymous said...

How different are the pundits today compared to say 1990? Answer: None

They still churn out crap - crap stories, crappily researched and written. Gobbled up by a gullible public.

The difference is web/social media. Pundits are now ROUTINELY exposed for what they say and do.

Keep up the good work!

regards
The Professor, Middlesex, England

Anonymous said...

Even members of the public who don't follow politics are starting to realise something very odd is going on in the mainstream media.
Together with the recent EU referendum, the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn has been dominated with visceral gut feelings and emotional opinions rather than logical, substantiated facts.

This is the politics of spin and shallow marketing. It's end product is noise made up of sound bites for cheap churnalism.

The usual suspects have been doing this for over 20 years. The most recent events will come out in the wash, probably in the form of a wiki leaks data dump.

The squalid 'chicken coup' should make interesting reading.

Anonymous said...

Malone is merely another right wing motormouth.

Has she looked at a map yet to discover where Eagles' constituency actually is?

If she can't get that right......

As for the Mirror, Tim......Have you forgotten Cecil King's treason? And that Peter Wright identified him as an MI5 agent? Have you forgotten Maxwell's lying propaganda about Arthur Scargill during the Miners Strike? Have you forgotten how quickly Mirror Group was sold to Trinity after the Mirror one-moment-of-glory headline "ROTTEN TO THE CORE" when Heseltine destroyed the mining industry and confirmed everything Scargill had forecast? Have you forgotten the dismissal of Paul Foot? Have you forgotten the appointment of Murdochite Piers Morgan as editor?

In fact the Mirror had a brief moment of social democracy under Hugh Cudlipp and the employment of journalists like John Pilger. Since then it's targeted anybody in the Labour Party who had the guts to try to restore party principles. Far right phonies like war criminal Blair have been promoted.

Malone?.....Pffftttt.

Anonymous said...

Welcome to the matrix...
Quite apt - especially the bit in the film where a colleague sells out his team mates in return for being plugged back into the mainframe for a fake steak dinner... " just make me rich...and important".
Life imitates art.

Anonymous said...

I've always thought that 'The Mirror' was an unfortunate choice for naming a newspaper, since the defining characteristic of a mirror is that it gets everything back-to-front.