Tuesday, March 31, 2009

British Press Awards: Mail wins prizes

For some reason, the British Press Awards - which used to be used to reward the best of UK journalism - has given its scoop of the year award to the Mail On Sunday. It's scoop?

The Jonathan Ross-Russell Brand story.

Now, I might be missing something here, but how exactly is writing a story about something that had been on the radio eight days before count as a scoop? It had been on the radio. Surely, if someone deserves a prize for letting people know that Brand and Ross had left messages on Andrew Sachs' answerphone, it should go to Radio 2 for broadcasting it just after it happened?

Still, it's exciting to know that copying stuff down off Listen Again now passes for the best of investigative journalism. I'm going to transcribe last Sunday's Archers omnibus. I fully expect to be picking up a Pulitzer within the year.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What an absolute joke. Is this actually an award for best example of making a "scandal" out of nothing? Honestly, if you'd waited and posted this in a few hours my comment would have been "Good one, Simon! you nearly had me there!"

Robin Carmody said...

They only started all that shit because they knew Obama would win, and they wanted a parochial victory to detract from the pain of their global defeat - their biggest defeat, in fact, since Suez. Its aftereffects are still fatally diluting the Sunday-night 1Xtra show of their ultimate enemy, Tim Westwood, and all because they - unlike Brand's audience, who I don't see complaining about Gardeners' Question Time - do not leave well alone what is beyond their own tastes and interests (which shows that the Mail has never really understood the full implications of laissez-faire, in any sense).

Another reason may be the fact that the last week of October is when it is most blatantly obvious that the old England of apple bobbing and pennies for the guy has been eroded not by mass immigration but by American-style capitalism, and to get that fact off people's minds at that time of year is precisely what they want (because every person who has previously "blamed the blacks" but then realises the true cause represents a lost sale for the Mail, or for one of the other papers that joined in).

There is also the fact that, if the Mail and its ilk had had their way, Andrew Sachs would have been left to, in all likelihood, die in the Holocaust. He owes his very life to the fact that British governments did not always kowtow to the Mail's every demand. By getting into bed with them he betrayed his own existence.

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