Wednesday 21 January 2015

Charlie and Chloe

The Charlie Hebdo cartoons do not appear in the latest Private Eye. Jolly good. Have you got the message yet?

Media women defending Page 3, will your future copy be illustrated with topless pictures of yourselves? Or is this just the only way that the common girls can get into the papers, bless them?

Germaine Greer was right on last night's Channel 4 News. In The Guardian, she pointed out, the men are the news and the women are the advertising.

But Chloe Goodman the Page 3 girl, as she would presumably prefer to be known, was more articulate than either Greer or Harriet Harman.

So, how about this: the return of Page 3, but with News in Briefs replaced with a full-length opinion piece by the model? That would at least bring the views of any working-class women into the media.

How about an opinion column by a working-class woman in any of the newspapers, or on any of the websites, that campaigned against Page 3?

I must say that certain people, such as Brendan O'Neill and Toby Young, are being very brave in being more Murdoch than Murdoch on this.

Young has already been sacked in favour of Louise Mensch (oh, the shame, the shame!), and seems determined to burn his bridges.

I am somewhere between a friendly critic and a critical friend the spiked and related network, as I am of many things, such as Blue Labour, and such as various phenomena within the Church.

But that network appears as concerned as Toby Young is to ruin what had, in its case, been a blossoming friendship with Old Uncle Rupert.

Meanwhile, Thomas Bailey will be up to his eyes in his A-levels, but it is well worth re-reading his Lanchester Review piece from last year on opposing Page 3 as a heterosexual teenage male: breasts are great, but they are not news.

6 comments:

  1. As you have been saying in various places, Katie Price is now a Sun on Sunday columnist of strong opinions but it took Page 3 to discover her. That is wrong.

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    1. Indeed, it is. Especially since it proves that they are there. The trick is to go looking.

      Very few state-educated people of either sex have ever written for the tabloids. Kelvin MacKenzie went to the same public school as Nigel Farage and PG Wodehouse.

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  2. Someone should give a column to Tom Bailey. He is only marginally younger than the Huffington Post lot, full of undergrads doing it for free. Carola Binney was still at school when she was given her blogs for both the Telegraph and the Spectator. But she is not as good as him.

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    1. I know several like that. Tom should be fine; good public school. But what about the rest? Alas, 'twas ever thus.

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  3. Laura Lacole on This Week right now. Very clever and outspoken, wiping the floor with Caroline Lucas.

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    1. Shouldn't have taken Page 3 to discover her, then.

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