The lowest point in British journalism

bigbelly · 12-03-2007, 02:17 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Jason the Yank:
Wouldn't exactly call Heat magazine "journalism."

Well said. I wouldn't even wipe my arse with Heat.

I met one of their 'journalists' once. She's still the dumbest person I've ever met four years later.

They need to ban gossip rags anyway. What purpose do they serve apart from preventing young girls from getting an education by reading important things?

retired_body_break · 12-03-2007, 07:57 AM

To be fair to Heat, it's not as though he's ever going to see it.

Stings · 12-03-2007, 07:59 AM

****s sake shanyi

retired_Angela Adams · 12-03-2007, 08:59 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Argel:
Haha, oh dear. Somebody at work gave me her stickers and I've stuck that Harvey one on my name plate.

Might take it down tbf.

What a state

retired_Fit · 12-03-2007, 09:07 AM

Quote:

I find magazines like this fascinating, in that they live in an almost symbiotic relationship with these dead beats. The magazines openly abuse these people, asking what right they have to be famous, berating everything about them and yet at the same time providing the very medium through which these celebrities survive.

I cant even pick one up, one of the major supermarkets has the latest copies right near the till and even seeing the covers annoys the hell out me. It's the same people week in, week out and either someone is fat or thin or hooking up or breaking up. They wouldnt be in existence is people didnt read them all so someone is reading this rubbish !

Ventil · 12-03-2007, 01:12 PM

Charlie Brooker's take on it all.

Quote:

Heat magazine - the tittering idiot's lunchbreak-pamphlet-of-choice - has caused a bad stink by printing a collection of comedy stickers in its latest issue. Said stickers are clearly designed to be stuck round the fringes of computer monitors by the magazine's bovine readership in a desperate bid to transform their veal-fattening workstation pen into a miniature Chuckle Kingdom and thereby momentarily distract them from the bleak futility of their wasted, Heat-reading lives.

Article continues
Most of the stickers are baffling to anyone who isn't a regular reader - there's one of Will Young sporting a digitally extended chin, a shot of a man's head on a crab's body accompanied by the words "Roy Gave Me Crabs", and a photo of the editor looking a bit like a monk. So far, so hilarious.

But one consists of a shot of Jordan's disabled five-year-old son Harvey, with the words "Harvey wants to eat me!" printed next to his mouth. In other words, we're supposed to find Harvey's face intrinsically mirthful and/or frightening. Ha ha, Heat! Ha ha!

Jordan herself is on the cover of the same issue, as part of a montage depicting Stars Who Hate Their Bodies ("Jordan: SAGGY BOOBS"), so chances are she wasn't in an especially upbeat frame of mind when she later stumbled across the snickering point-and-chortle demolition of her blameless disabled son nestling in the centre pages. She immediately lodged a complaint with the PCC. Personally, I'd have caught a cab to their offices, kicked the editor firmly in the balls, taken a photo of his stunned, wheezing, watering face and blown it up and hung it on my wall, to be contemplated every morning over breakfast.

Of course, Heat's always had a psychotically confused relationship with celebrities. On the one hand, it elevates them to the status of minor deities, and on the other, it prints clinical close-ups of their thighs with a big red ring circling any visible atoms of cellulite beside a caption reading "Ugh! Sickening!". This is what the misanthropic serial killer in Se7en would've done if he'd been running a magazine instead of keeping a diary.

This might seem a bit rich coming from someone (ie me) who regularly says cruel things about public figures for comic effect. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed I scrawled some fairly abusive things about Jordan myself in this weekend's Screen Burn column in the Guide, for instance. Isn't Heat effectively doing the same thing, only with more gusto, not to mention photos?

Good question. Thanks for asking. My defence, in as much as I've worked it out, runs like this: people on TV aren't real people. They're flickering, two-dimensional representations of people, behaving unnaturally and often edited to the point of caricature. They're fictional characters and it's easy to hate them. Everybody hates someone on TV. But you never really hate them the way you'd hate, say, a rapist. Because they're not really there, and with one or two exceptions (TV psychics, say), they're ultimately harmless. Put Vernon Kay on my screen and I'll gleefully spit venom at him. Sit me next to him at a dinner party and I'll probably find him quite charming, unless he does something appalling. That's not hypocritical, it's rational.

In fact, in my limited experience, the more unpalatable you find someone's TV persona, the nicer they turn out to be in real life. Recently I was walking down the street when someone I'd written something nasty about suddenly darted across the road and introduced himself. Almost immediately, I started apologising for the article, explaining (as above) that people on TV aren't real people and so on. At which point he looked faintly crestfallen. He hadn't read the piece at all, but he'd seen a TV thing I'd done and just wanted to say how much he enjoyed it. Then he asked what it was I'd said that was so bad, so I found myself sheepishly repeating it while staring at the ground. There was an uncomfortable pause. And then he laughed and said it was all fair game and not to worry. And I thought, who's the dickhead in this scenario? Because it sure as hell wasn't him. I'm the dickhead. I'm always the dickhead: always have been, always will be.

Even so, and speaking as a dickhead, there's surely a world of difference between tipping cartoon buckets of **** over someone's TV persona, and paying a paparazzo to hide behind a bush to take photos of their arse as they stroll down the beach in real life, so you can make your readers feel momentarily better about themselves because ha ha her bumcheeks are flabby and ho ho he's bald and tee hee she's sobbing. And even if you accept that degree of intrusion, on the basis that these people rely on the media and yadda yadda yadda, how insanely superior and removed from reality do you have to be to invite your readers to laugh at a photograph of a small disabled boy whose only "crime" is a) being disabled and b) having a famous mum with "SAGGY BOOBS"?

Each week, Heat opens with a featurette called Everyone's Talking About . . . detailing the latest showbiz scandal. Last week, it was Everyone's Talking About . . . Marc Bannerman. This week it ought to read Everyone's Talking About ... What Total C***s We Are. And maybe it will. We shall see.

:thup:

retired_hautemarley · 12-03-2007, 01:19 PM

Not the lowest but apparently Feyenoord's Drenthe has been linked with a £9m move to Chelsea. :thup:

dreamer · 12-03-2007, 03:42 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by SirZ:
Not the lowest but apparently Feyenoord's Drenthe has been linked with a £9m move to Chelsea. :thup:

Ha! link?

retired_heather · 12-03-2007, 04:44 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Argel:
Yeah well I'd be dissapointed in my GF if I walked into the toilet after her and it smelled

this was actually a heated debate at our table yesterday. couple of my mates couldn't stand the image that women produce faeces aswell.

retired_khabmth · 12-03-2007, 04:59 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by BJG123:
<BLOCKQUOTE>Originally posted by SirZ:
Not the lowest but apparently Feyenoord's Drenthe has been linked with a £9m move to Chelsea. :thup:

Ha! link? </BLOCKQUOTE>

BBC rumour page, great journalism that too.

The lowest point in British journalism

Grab a beer, sit back and relax.

The lowest point in British journalism