Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

Inspired by the Independent’s diary item today (3rd bullet point), here’s an incomplete list of clothing items or styles that the Daily Mail deems to be the “ultimate fashion faux-pas”:

• Kelly Brook’s see-through leggings

• Gwyneth Paltrow’s dark roots

• Gordon Ramsey’s black shirt with black tie

• Jordan/Katie Price’s white bra under a black jumper

• Holidaymakers’ socks with sandals

• Claudine Palmer (no, me neither) wearing the same outfit twice

• Esther Rantzen’s food in her teeth

• Britney Spears’ white socks and high heels

• Pink and Shakira wearing the same dress to an awards show

• Jordan/Katie Price wearing the same outfit three times

And that’s not counting those styles which the Mail counts as merely a faux-pas, rather than an “ultimate faux-pas”…

That Andy Gray sacking timeline in full:

• 18th January 2011: Andy Gray’s lawyer is in court, attempting to force private investigator Glenn Mulcaire to reveal which News Of The World journalists were using him to hack into Gray’s mobile phone voicemail during 2005 and 2006.

• 22rd January 2011: An unknown Sky Sports employee or associate leaks an off-air audio recording of Andy Gray and co-presenter Richard Keys discussing assistant referee Sian Massey (and other females in the world of football) in quite obviously sexist terms. The comments were made on 22nd January, ahead of the Wolves - Liverpool match.

• 24th January 2011: Amidst a growing backlash against Gray and Keys, Sky Sports decides to suspend both from that evening’s live football match coverage, calling their comments “totally unacceptable”.

• 24th January 2011: An unknown Sky Sports employee or associate leaks an off-air video recording of Andy Gray and fellow Sky Sports football reporter Andy Burton discussing assistant referee Sian Massey in sexist terms ahead of the Wolves - Liverpool match

• 24th January 2011: An unknown Sky Sports employee or associate leaks an off-air video recording of Andy Gray making sexist comments towards his co-presenter Charlotte Jackson in December 2010.

• 25th January 2011: Andy Gray is sacked by Sky Sports for “unacceptable behaviour”. Richard Keys and Andy Burton remain in their jobs, despite a further off-air video recording of Keys showing some quite blatant sexism.

Now, it’s pretty obvious that I’m anti-Murdoch (more accurately, I’m pro media plurality, as I’m also very much against Richard Desmond’s ownership and cross-promotion of Channel Five and 2 national newspapers), but I can’t help but feel that Gray is experiencing exactly what it means to cross News Corporation.

Despite being an employee of one arm (Sky TV), he is suing another (the News Of The World) and attempting to expose their nefarious and illegal practices. Now someone within Sky (because how else would these unbroadcast clips make it into the public realm?) is leaking damaging information about him, and this has resulted in him losing a job that he has held for nearly 20 years.

He might not be to everyone’s tastes in football commentary and analysis, but it’s clear that he really does know his stuff, and that he cares deeply about the sport. Compare this to Keys, who is just a presenter, and a pretty poor one at that, and yet has managed to hold onto his job (at time of writing).

They are both equally guilty of sexism, and have the same number of damaging clips in circulation, yet only Gray has been sacked. I feel that both should have lost their jobs, if it was indeed Gray’s “unacceptable behaviour” that cost him his job. How is his behaviour any different from that of Keys?

It’s for that reason that I think Gray is being a little unfairly treated, and that this has something to do with the fact that he is currently suing News Corporation. It’s a bit of a conspiracy theory, I know, but I think it holds some weight.

It’s not just Gray that is at issue here; it raises wider points about media plurality. Showing any kind of dissent in one arm of a media conglomerate can result in you being hounded by all of the others, and that’s just for employees. For those on the outside, they can expect a multi-platform character assassination.

It’s also a bit of a closed shop, in which case the public simply doesn’t find out about certain things. The Sun, one of News Corporation’s newspapers, decided not to cover the brewing storm on Monday regarding Gray and Keys, despite every other newspaper finding space to talk about it. If you’re a Sun reader, you’d have had no idea that this sexism row even existed, which is dangerous when you consider that The Sun is the biggest-selling daily in the UK.

Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian newspaper, did a live Q&A yesterday on his newspaper’s handling of the latest Wikileaks release, as the Guardian was one of a select bunch that got prior access to the thousands of documents. The Guardian had similar access to the previous release (Iraq and Afghanistan war logs), and my question concerned how this release was any different:

How much lead time did the Guardian and its colleagues (NYT, Spiegel, etc) get on the Wikileaks documents?

On the assumption that it’s more than a few days, does this imply that Wikileaks is actually more interested in creating news stories around these kinds of document releases than it is in the content of the documents themselves? On a general reading of the media coverage, there seems to have been more stories about the fact that the docs were being released than the actual content, which was a similar story on the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs. The coverage and response to the docs themselves has been muted.

Yes, there are a lot of docs to get through, but would you say that data-/civilian-journalism has not yet been effective when it comes to this kind of release?

And his response, a few hours later:

We have been ploughing through the cables for many weeks. I agree that much of the Iraq/Afghan reaction followed the pattern you describe. One of the reasons for staggering the release this time was to try to avoid the feeling of one giant “dump” of data where no one story can find enough oxygen.

It’s true, this release has been a bit more staggered so far, although we’re only 48hrs into the news cycle of this set of documents. Today’s headlines are different from yesterday’s, and concentrate on different areas.

Even for a news-fiend like myself, too much of the coverage seems to be about the release actually happening, rather than the content itself. We see the name Wikileaks everywhere, but there’s nothing that has yet stuck in the mind with regards to stories arising from the documents.

I appreciate that lessons have been learned, and that news organisations are having to adapt to the kind of data that Wikileaks and similar parties produce (such as the Telegraph drip-feeding the MPs’ expenses coverage last year, which was aided by the fact that they had exclusive, expensive, access to the data), and staggering this release is one step forward.

marginalgloss replied to your link: Woo! Day off next year!

A national holiday would be great, but I don’t think it’ll happen. Once the CBI get word they’ll be all ‘waaaaah we’ll lose £8.4 billion in hypothetical moniez!!’ and so the government press release will be much the same.

Heh, reminds me of those stupid stories about how Facebook and Twitter cost the UK economy £XXX billion per year. That “study”, by the way, was conducted by a company which specialises in finding people jobs. Quelle surprise.

Oh, and also the one about 1st November being “the most miserable day of the year”. As “discovered” by the Canary Islands tourism board, no less…