Paper Monitor
11:06 UK time, Monday, 19 October 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Laydees and gentlemen, welcome to the main event. It the red corner, weighing in with (a headline later amended to "A strange, lonely and troubling death...") is Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir. And in the blue corner, fighting fit and champing at the bit, . Also in the Mail.
On Friday, Moir claimed that the Boyzone singer's death "strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships". She wrote:
"The sugar coating on this fatality is so saccharine-thick that it obscures whatever bitter truth lies beneath. Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again."*
Today - after a weekend in which the Mail and the Press Complaints Commission have been blitzed with complaints, and the offending article no longer crops up in searches on the Mail site - it's Street Porter's turn.
"What exactly was bothering Jan? The fact Stephen was gay, the fact he was in a civil partnership, or the fact that he or his partner might have enjoyed sex with someone they had just met?"
The Guardian's media editor to the Trafigura super-injunction:
"Moir, or her editors, or both, misjudged the speed and breadth of the real-time web and social media in their power to highlight and pressurise at speed and with force. To see the Daily Mail taught a lesson about public outrage in the electronic age would no doubt have raised a weak, battered smile at the ´óÏó´«Ã½."
*There's no "weak, battered" smile from on-off ´óÏó´«Ã½ man Charlie Brooker in as he takes issue with Moir's contention that there must have been something in Gately's lifestyle that led to his death:
"I dare to challenge the renowned international forensic pathologist Jan Moir, because I personally know of two other men (one in his 20s, one in his early 30s), who died in precisely this way. According to the charity Cardiac Risk in the Young (c-r-y.org.uk), 'Twelve apparently fit and healthy young people die in the UK from undiagnosed heart conditions' every single week."
Meanwhile, on to another matter entirely.
Remember SamCam's spotty dress that spoke a thousand words (Paper Monitor, 9 Oct)? More than one commentator wondered how she'd got her hands on a dress that sold out within days of going on sale back in spring.
Well, the Mail has not let it rest. runs its headline.
"Sir Stuart [Rose], who bumped into David Cameron's wife at a social event, was only too pleased to oblige and ordered his staff to comb the company's 600 stores to find the dress... After some days of searching, a sample size was located in a size 14 - two sizes too big for Mrs Cameron. So one of the store's dressmakers was enlisted to tailor it."
Erm, Sir Stuart, Paper Monitor has an M&S swimsuit that doesn't fit quite right. Fetch that seamstress, there's a good chap.
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