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Friday 31 July 2020

Piers Morgan - Photo Pants On Fire

The perpetually thirsty Paul Staines and his rabble at the Guido Fawkes blog were crowing loudly earlier this week at a howler by the Guardian’s picture desk, after a piece by Owen Jones on the anti-Semitic outburst of grime artist Wiley was mistakenly illustrated with a photo of Kano. “Owen Jones felt forced to apologise this morning after the Guardian illustrated his column on grime artist and antisemite Wiley for [?] rapper Kano” they told.
And what's more, Ron

What had happened is that Jones had filed his piece, and the Guardian then added the photo. This is common practice; given the nature of copyright, and the circulation numbers, publications need to be sure they give appropriate credit to whoever holds the rights to the image. That is left to the picture desk. Some understood this; others pretended not to.
So it was that Jones ended up having to tell someone who goaded him with “It’s easy to say it wasn’t me” by pointing out “Do you want me to pretend that I had something to do with this? No newspaper columnist ever has any say over the image used with their column. That doesn't make this any less unacceptable”. Point made? Not as such.
Because it was at this point that former Screws and Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan intervened to tell Jones that he knew more than the Guardian man. “This isn’t true. I never let any column go to print or appear online without reviewing it first, including all pix. Precisely for this reason”. What say Jones to this alleged voice of authority?
I have never heard of any columnist being given approval over the image used with their columns in advance. That's never happened once in the near decade I've worked for newspapers, and I had absolutely nothing to do with what happened yesterday whatsoever”. Case closed? Nah, Morgan was only just getting warmed up.
I don’t understand why any columnist would ever let a column go to print or online without having sight of the final version. Where’s the personal responsibility here?” Sniffy, much? But Nadine Batchelor-Hunt had seen enough. “There's a difference between seeing the final version of the *text* of the article & then seeing photos the editor is going to use - I've never had an editor show me photos they're gonna use … So don't do this, Owen has had so much sh*t over something that's not his fault already”. Indeed he had.
And almost as Luke Savage concluded “Piers Morgan is talking nonsense to try and discredit Owen Jones. Maybe his own brand is so big he gets final. approval on everything, but I'm sure he knows this isn't the standard throughout media”, the cavalry arrived. From a most unexpected direction - Morgan’s own outlet, Mail Online.
Owen Jones received a DM telling him “this from Piers is completely untrue. I (and many other) reporters have had to upload a Piers column. There is no ‘final approval’. The editor asks for the relevant images, pic desk upload them, and reporters put them in the article and caption them. The article is then set live. Piers does not review it before this happens”.
All that was left was for Tim Robinson to administer the coup de grace: “How strange that Piers would now choose to die on the hill of whether pictures that go in a newspaper are accurate or not”. Ah, shades of that inglorious exit from the Mirror.

Once again, the Old Media faithful prove their ability to talk well, but lie badly.
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12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ha ha ha, the Graun getting it wrong, how unusual.

Lookng at today's edition I thought I'd picked up The Gleaner by mistake, but can I trust it's accuracy? Not that it matters, it's the message that counts.

Anonymous said...

Morgan?

Pffftttt.

A sort of male Jess Phillips....and just as credible.

Anonymous said...

@anonymous who isn't me

"sort of male Jess Phillips"

Oh, come on man, that's going a bit far. I've spilled my fair share of bile on this blog but even I think that's an outrageous slur on Piers. ;)

Rosie said...


Morgan trying to screw Owen Jones whose accuracy is then verified by D Mail Online. Piers Morgan is truly only interested in Piers Morgan despite his rants against that pathetic Tor Minister for Social Care. Owen Jones cares far more for other than he does for himself. Guardian error. It wold have been nice to see a Guardian editor's apology.

Euwe Dogberts said...

"It wold have been nice to see a Guardian editor's apology."
'Kano: an apology. This article mistakenly carried a photograph of Kano when it was first published. The Guardian apologises unreservedly to Kano and our readers for the error, which has now been corrected. We would also like to clarify that Owen Jones was not involved in this error' - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/29/twitter-boycott-racism-social-media-wiley-newspapers

Anonymous said...

@Euwe Dogberts

Welcome. I've not seen you here before. And your first act is to defend The Guardian? How is Kath? Closer to being sacked in ignominy I hope.

Newport News said...

@20:26
Yeah, right. Call out The Guardian and leave it to the Murdochs and Rothermeres eh?

There's an interesting article in today's Guardian about a radical cult: "[I]t supported free speech for racists, and nuclear power; it attacked environmentalism and the NHS. Its most consistent impulse was to invoke an idealised working class, and claim it was actually being harmed by the supposed elites of the liberal left."
The cult was called The Revolutionary Communist Party and Cummings, aided by Bozo Johnson, appears to be an ardent fan of them.
See - Claire Fox awarded life peerage.

Anonymous said...

@10:56

I think you'll find there was a very tedious article repeating information that Tim had already revealed in October of last year. https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/10/spiked-to-write-tory-manifesto.html The Guardian should have been shouting this from the rooftips THEN but instead it chose to discredit the beliefs of a man I consider to be a mild Keynesian. I certainly was amongst my colleagues.

There was an interesting sequence of articles I linked to (https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/07/lets-play-labour-blackmail.html) revealing that "the striking finding was that the violations of journalistic standards were across the board, with higher-end journalism (BBC, Guardian) if anything more unbalanced, more unprincipled than the rest." So, yes, I do think that that calling out The Guardian is justified.

Here's me @16:37 comparing Spiked to the Red Army Faction: https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/07/bbc-gamed-by-right-again.html. And here's me attacking the idea that 'cancel culture' exists and quoting Catherine MacKinnon to support what I consider to be the self-evident truth that women AMAB are women. https://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2020/07/cancel-culture-it-really-isnt.html

The Guardian is nothing but free market propaganda slightly obscured by a superficial coating of half-hearted identity politics. As such, to my mind, it is far more of an insidious danger than obviously far right publications. I may be wrong but to prove it you're going to have to do better than a smear involving RCP cunts. Still, smears is what The Guardian and its supporters specialise in.

Anonymous said...

@10:56

That probably was a little stronger than is deserved given that you've previously expressed suspicion about the 'antisemtisim' narrative. Without context, I can see how my original post could look like the shit churned out at Spiked. Sos.

I still hate The Guardian, have done since 2003, and won't stop now. Except for Steve and Martin.

Newport News said...

@17:13
Okay, you've proved to me that you're easily riled and very tedious.

Anonymous said...

@10:56

BTW: I don't think Cummings is sympathetic to the RCP; that's all on Johnson. Cummings has his own special flavour of batshit: disaster theory. Christ, what I'd give for a Conservative Party which was actually consistent with the principles of Disraeli. Which would most closely resemble Corbyn's Labour Party, ironically enough. Or not so ironically, as the case may be.

Anonymous said...

@10:56

In the interests of pedantry: definition of ad hominem:

1 : appealing to feelings or prejudices rather than intellect// an ad hominem argument
2 : marked by or being an attack on an opponent's character rather than by an answer to the contentions made made// an ad hominem personal attack on his rival