cops and, er, journalists

I have finally woken from my blogging slumbers. Oddly enough, it’s always when I seem to have other writing to do that I am drawn back to wordpress. Well, that and actually having access to a computer that can display the bloody site properly…

But this is really something worth spreading – tell your mum. The NUJ have published a video about how police have become increasingly obstructive to press photographers covering demonstrations and public protests. The findings of this well produced short documentary will ring true for anyone who has been on a protest in the UK in the past few years, whether in a press capacity or as a genuine malcontent. It shows the pigs generally bossing people about, pushing and shoving as if they actually owned the fucking country, and tellingly shows that they are not afraid to try to quote dubious sounding pseudo-legislation to justify it.

Unfortunately WordPress won’t let me embed it, but you can link to the film here to watch it. In fact I recommend that you do watch it.

The conclusion to the film, with which I am broadly in agreement, says that the behaviour of the police is indicative of the general erosion of civil liberties that began with Thatcher and has continued through successive neo-liberal governments. Deny dissent the ‘oxygen of publicity’ and it can’t catch the public imagination. Instead we get people showing their dissatisfaction through simply refusing to get involved in politics or political life at all – leading to the common attitude that ‘it’s all shit, but there’s nothing I can do about it so I’m going down Wetherspoons to get mindless on WKD’.

Filed under: cops, media , media, police, UK

richard godwin is rubbish, I am better

Somethimes a writer pens such an awful piece of ripe, stinking, self-serving bollocks that it is the solemn duty of other writers to rinse it as much as possible in the hope that we can bully the perpetrator into never, ever writing anything again.

Today Richard Godwin, music critic on my favourite bastard-Tory newspaper The Evening Standard, committed such a crime.

He’s writing about a recent stag do he went on where, basically, they rode around Cornwall or somewhere on bikes, got pissed a lot, then went to see the Eden project. But oh! How he tells it!

Godwin can’t decide whether he’s Chaucer, Dickens or Shakespeare; but he does his best to sound like all three. The trip is a ‘jaunt’, his friends are ‘fellows’, ruckus is ‘ribaldry’, drinking alcohol is ‘imbibing’, and jokes become ‘japes’. It’s like the Famous Five Go Mad in the West Country. Enid Blyton couldn’t have done it better.

The flowery pomposity of the language reminded me of Reader’s Digest. You know, that bit where the old biddy readership gets to write in with humorous tales of their exciting lives. Two of the most annoying bits are where he uses ‘Thence” and then “Alas” to fit his two of his sentences into their paragraphs. I swear on my life, I honestly thought we were living in the twenty-first century. The way Godwin tells it, I saw the whole episode in sepia.

I don’t think that there is any excuse for this kind of writing, it betrays a really bad understanding of our modern language, an ignorant carelessness even. People just don’t talk like that, and as journalists we should be trying to reflect the new paradigms of modern communication. Okay, so there were some long words there, but I honestly couldn’t find better ones to fit so I’ll let myself off.

So far I’ve just stuck to slamming Godwin’s style, but I think there is some deeper shit behind it. Insisting on writing like a Victorian diarist reveals something about a person: they want to sound clever. They think that inserting a load of long-up, convoluted words in to their writing will somehow lend it credibility and authority. It doesn’t. I’m sure that Godwin is a really clever bloke, but he basically writes like a ponderous old fart.

Aaaagh! I feel I could go on for ever, but I’ve got to go to the shops so I’ll wrap it up.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps that’s the house style at the Evening Standard and poor Godwin’s been forced to write like a knob. In which case, Richie I’m very sorry. By all means have a go at the standard of writing on my blog, I’m sure I’m crap too in my own way.

Filed under: media , evening standard, media, writing