‘It is a vicious paper…’

Paula Murray…

Heard of her? Doubt it, or at least not until recently – unless of course you’re a reader of The Express (or it’s stable mates) where she was, nay is, a reporter – I use the term loosely.

Anyhoo, on the 8th March she authored a piece of trash about the survivors of the Dunblane tragedy of March 1996, a piece that the editor of the Sunday Express decreed worthy of publishing, so too did Derek Lambie (Editorial Director of the Express Group & Editor of Scottish Sunday Express) – who, h’allegedly, was responsible for bumping it onto the front page…

For anyone not familiar with The Express here’s a briefing for you;

The Daily Express was founded in 1900 by Cyril Arthur Pearson, publisher of Pearson’s Own and other titles. Pearson sold the title after losing his sight and it was bought in 1916 by the future Lord Beaverbrook.

It was one of the first papers to carry gossip, sports, and women’s features, and the first newspaper in Britain to have a crossword. The gossip aspect gives an indication as to the quality of it’s journalism, then and now.

It moved in 1931 to 120 Fleet Street, a specially-commissioned art deco building. Perhaps the single most beautiful thing about an otherwise reprehensible rag.

Under Beaverbrook the newspaper achieved a phenomenally high circulation, setting records for newspaper sales several times throughout the 1930s. Its success was partly due to an aggressive marketing campaign and a vigorous circulation war with other populist newspapers.

Beaverbrook also discovered and encouraged a gifted editor named Arthur Christiansen, who showed an uncommon gift for staying in touch with the interests of the reading public.

The paper also featured Alfred Bestall’s Rupert Bear cartoon and satirical cartoons by Carl Giles.

Another infamous front page story of these years bore the headline:  “Judea Declares War on Germany”, published on March 24, 1933 – the day Hitler became Führer after the Enabling Act was passed.

In March 1962, Beaverbrook was attacked in the House of Commons for running “a sustained vendetta” against the Royal Family in the Express titles.

In the same month Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, in one of his famous unguarded moments, described the Express as “a bloody awful newspaper. It is full of lies, scandal and imagination. It is a vicious paper.”

Core source: Wikipedia

Prince Philip might be a bit of a foot-in-mouth merchant – and the bane of the PC Brigade – but, then as now, I find him refreshingly frank at times, even if a tad outré. Ironic that HRH did the official opening of the Northern & Shell Tower when the N&S publishing company moved in – the same company owned by Richard Desmond, current owner of… The Express group.

Desmond is a vile specimen IMVHO. Whilst Wiki‘s heavily censored/monitored entry suggests his money came from his innovative (at the time) creation of that celebrity driven dross magazine OK!,  it is generally accepted the source of his wealth was less than low brow.

Basically, Dirty Desmond floated up to his current ‘status’ on a sea of pornographic effluent, a sea he still sails on with the largest of yachts.

Still, I’ve yet to hear of a media baron whom I’d happily dine with; Beeverbrook, Rothermere, Maxwell, Murdoch, Black, et al, every one of them distasteful individuals AFAIC.

Daily Wail editor Paul Dacre, commented in the British Journalism Review (2002):

“Richard Desmond is an appalling man. He is bad for British journalism. He’s bad for public life and he’s bad for civilized standards. For Tony and Cherie Blair to court him so assiduously speaks volumes for their moral elasticity. As long as I’ve got energy in my body, I’m going to devote everything to try to see him off.”

Seven years on and Dirty Dick is still there…

So, The Express is still a vicious rag, I’m sure HRH would agree, a tediously tawdry Tory tabloid. One only has to see who is, and has been, associated with it to see it’s a vile piece of shit – bile merchants of the first order; Rosie Boycott (at least she jumped off the SS Porno once Desmond took the tiller), Peter Hitchens (paleoconservative, with a scowl to match), Frederick Forsyth for starters. (Loved Freddie’s books as a younger man but not too keen on his politics.)

And now, or rather recently, the children of Dunblane piece, of which Graham Linehan writes;

The Express wins the race to the bottom

March 18, 2009

The Dunblane Massacre was an atrocity almost beyond imagining. A man named Thomas Hamilton walked into a school in a small Scottish town in March 1996, and shot dead sixteen children and one teacher. It was not what we’ve since come to think of as a ‘normal’ school shooting as it was a primary school, and all the children were aged between five and six years of age. We were filming an episode of ‘Father Ted’ that week, and on the night of the recording, no-one, the audience or the cast, felt terribly inclined to have a good time; difficult to throw your head back and laugh when all you could think about were those kids, their parents, the town…but most of all, those kids, those kids, those poor kids…

…

That basic human reaction, that powerful urge to protect those children, has always been something I presumed was shared by most other human beings. But a lady named Paula Murray has disabused me of that particular whimsy.

Paula is the journalist who thought it was well past time that the survivors of the Dunblane massacre were given a tabloid punching. To that end, she befriended a group of them on Facebook and collated their photographs and comments. Clearly aware of the legal guidelines in place to protect those under eighteen against invasion of privacy (and the specific instructions that the Press Complaints Commission issued regarding the Dunblane children), she waited until they hit eighteen. Then she wrote this.

The story continued inside under the headline “SICK MESSAGES SHAME MEMORY OF CLASSMATES”, referring to the normal, teenagery stuff they were saying to each other on their profiles… As others have pointed out, the gist of the story is that these kids are showing disrespect to their dead classmates by… being alive.

…

I don’t know. I think the line that has been crossed here is different to all the other lines the press routinely cross.

…

So, I think it is up to us to take a stand for those kids who had their privacy so ruthlessly invaded. Paula Murray set out to finish the job that Thomas Hamilton started, except this time, character assassination (of the most pathetic, intelligence-insulting kind) was the aim, and the weapons were a Facebook account and an editor with a moral centre as atrophied as her own. If there is a line beyond that one that the press can cross, I think we should make it harder for them to do so.

So! What can we do? Here are a few suggestions:

1) Stand up and be counted. Matt Nida has started an online petition which you can find here. When he’s got a decent number of names, he’ll be submitting it to the editor responsible for the story, the publishers and managing directors of Express Group Newspapers, the PCC, Downing Street and all media outlets who may be able to help shame the Express Group into action by making public the strength of national feeling about this.

2) Email your personal complaint to the Editorial Director of the Express Group about the conduct of Paula Murray and Scottish Sunday Express, Derek Lambie, who was responsible for placing the piece on the front cover. The Editorial Director is Paul Ashford, and this is his secretary’s email address, so please try to avoid being abusive to her – it’s not her fault! – and preface your email by asking Jo to pass your letter on to Mr Ashford.

jo.dimond@express.co.uk

3) Write to Express Group publisher Richard Desmond. He keeps his email address well hidden, but you can write to him by snail mail at:

Richard Desmond
Northern and Shell Building
10 Lower Thames Street
London EC3R 6EN

4) Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads suggested targeting the advertisers, which seems like a marvellous idea. I’ve written a template letter here. Tim’s blog has a full list of advertisers, but here are a few selected contact details to get you started – and it may be more effective if we all write to the same companies.

Marks and Spencer
SpecSavers
Asda
Tote Sport

EMAIL TEMPLATE

Dear Sirs,

I regret to inform you that I will be boycotting your company until such time as you see fit to withdraw advertising from the Daily and Sunday Express newspapers, or until the Sunday Express publishes a front page apology for their March 8th 2009 attack on the innocent survivors of the Dunblane Tragedy.

Yours sincerely,

…

7) If you have a Facebook account and would like to vent with likeminded folks, here’s a group set up to protest the story.

Again, thanks to everyone on Twitter who helped me write this post by providing links and hosting the original story after it was taken down. Sorry if the post goes on a bit…as they say, I didn’t have time to write a shorter piece.

Thanks for listening.

Goto Graham Linehan’s blog (‘Why, that’s delightful…’) to read the article in it’s entirety and comment.

[I trust Mr Linehan doesn't object to my copying, almost wholesale, his contribution to this debate in an attempt to take it to a wider audience (not that I have a massive readership ).]

I’ve followed up with various emails, as suggested, plus ‘signed’ the petition (sig #4239). Will you?

Alas none of the UK tabloids are worthy of the tag ‘newspaper’ in this day and age of gossip, character assassination, celebrity tittle tattle, and that multi-mi££ion pound commercial venture termed football – and scant few ever were.

–|–

Oh, and I’d like to think that Desmond and the Express cabal are now rueing the day they signed Murray up as a ‘news reporter’, but some how I doubt it as she fits their pathology perfectly; just plain nasty. Besides, there’s no such thing as bad publicity in the newspaper game, and with a nation keen to gawp at any train crash (a similar rationale to the success of OK!) I suspect the Express circulation will only increase over the furore.

Ya Boo!

---

Elsewhere in the Blogosphere more of the same can be found on Chicken Yoghurt, The enemies of reason, Paperhouse, and Bloggerheads has given La Murray the same treatment she gave the Dunblane kids… And more from Mr Linehan too  (relating to Idea15‘s comments on his original piece in this regard), and here.

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