The secret diary of Mark Frith

Pull on your rubber gloves, and let's rummage once again in the diary of former Heat editor Mark Frith.

Mark decides to make a stand for press freedom:

Today we've run our Leslie Ash piece with a sidebar entitled: What Does She Look Like? - featuring pictures of a Canary Rockfish, Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars, Jack Nicholson as The Joker and Janice from The Muppets.

I read the piece through three times before it went off - are we being just a little too cruel? In the end I decided that we had to go with it because it is completely in sync with what our readers will be thinking.

In offices, colleges and front rooms right now, people are discussing this picture - and they're not being kind.

Aha! That's alright then. It's okay to be snide about the picture, because people will be looking at the picture and being snide about it. What's the Eminem defence? "'cause I'm only givin' you things you joke about with your friends inside your living room"?

Of course, Frith doesn't stop to think why people are talking about the picture in the first place - because the media published it for people to be snide about in the first place.

And even if people are being snide, does Frith have to join in?

Apart from exposing the howling lack of human feeling that sits in the place where his mother must have hoped a soul would have formed, what the hell is the point of a magazine which merely lists the cruel jokes its readers would have already made?