News International agreed to pay Clifford one million pounds in exchange for feeding the paper exclusive stories over the next several years.
Probably my favourite line from the NY Times investigation into the British newspaper News Of The World’s phone-hacking scandal.
Max Clifford is a celebrity PR who will be the link between a celebrity and a newspaper when they need to either deny or promote a story. He is notorious for giving a newspaper a particular story/angle if they promise to bury a different damaging story about one of his clients.
A common example is when a newspaper has evidence of a celeb’s drug use. Clifford then negotiates a tearful “coming out” interview with the celeb instead of an outright exposé, which could be more harmful to the celeb’s further career.
The article as a whole isn’t particularly insightful if you’ve been following the story over the last few years, but it’s a very good overview if you haven’t. It really does show how the “dark arts” employed by British newspapers don’t just tread the line between legal and illegal, but trample all over it without a care in the world.
Daily Mirror (EXCLUSIVE!)
Daily Star (EXCLUSIVE!)
The Sun
All three tabloids splashed a big picture of Cheryl Tweedy (is she still technically Cole? I don’t keep up with this kind of thing) making a first public appearance since a bout of malaria.
Surprisingly, only two of them had the gall to label it an EXCLUSIVE…
The Poke has come up with the solution to the Daily Mail’s secret editorial formula, which dictates the content of the newspaper each day.
It’s tremendous stuff, with my favourite stations being “Immigrant Cancer”, “That Meerkat”, and “Romp”. For what it’s worth, I live at “Sex Education”.
There’s nothing like spreading some Europhobia which is in fact entirely false, and then having no shame in completely contradicting yourself a mere three weeks later. Well done, Daily Express!
(Hat-tip to Tabloid Watch)
If you include Metro, Britain has 11 daily national newspapers. Of those, eight had a large picture of the woman in the US/Russian spying arrests story on today’s front page. Photos of the other arrestees came there none.
She was variously captioned “Femme fatale”, “The redhead under the bed”, “The beauty who spied”, “Red menace”, and “The spy worthy of a Bond film”, as yet again the British newspaper industry showed that whilst a spy story is always interesting, a spy story with a photogenic woman involved is most definitely worthy of a front page splash.
For me, I thought it was a really good story anyway, with the details of the spies’ activities and attempts to keep things secret somewhat laughable. It’s as if their methods were based on crappy 60s TV shows, or a bad James Bond film (possibly an oxymoron there). It’s a solid story, yet the addition of a pretty woman has increased its interest to news editors. Are we, the readers, that shallow?
The three newspapers which didn’t use a large photo of her on the front page were the Sun, Daily Star and the FT. The latter two didn’t mention it at all, although the Sun did put a small photo of her on the front page, with the caption “Sexy spy”. As you could’ve expected, the Sun and Star’s websites have gone overboard on her.
Interestingly, the Star’s article has a video showing her Facebook profile, which seems to be where all of the other photos have come from. It’s quickly becoming the norm for photos taken from Facebook to be illustrating news stories, which perhaps should serve as a reminder to crank up those privacy settings.
In an effort to keep track of the absolute rank hypocrisy that the Daily Mail engages in seemingly daily, here’s the latest example:
But it’s definitely the BBC who is in the wrong for showing a few members of the crowd during the tennis, isn’t it?! Fucking hypocrites.
Sunday Mirror journalist arrested over fan intrusion into England dressing room
A journalist for the Sunday Mirror named Simon Wright has been arrested by South African authorities investigating how an England fan was able to get into the England football team’s dressing room shortly after their match against Algeria.
The South African police have said they “had reason to believe the incident was orchestrated” by Mr Wright, which the Sunday Mirror has denied. Would a journalist do this kind of thing to get a story?
Just to make things clear, guess which newspaper and journalist got the EXCLUSIVE interview with the intruder afterwards? That would be Simon Wright for the Sunday Mirror.
I smell something more than a little fishy here…
IT’S WAR. We will fight jeering Jerries on the pitches.
Today’s front page headline on the Daily Star.
Is anyone else bored by the relentless xenophobia from the British tabloid newspapers ahead of tomorrow’s game? Can we not just get on with it without harking back to the wars? It’s boring now, and utterly pointless.
