Leveson: wrap it up

Today I watched John Prescott appear giving “testimony” to the Leveson “Inquiry into Media Ethics”.

Prescott. “Ethics”?

Last week it was Cherie Blair. Cherie Blair? Ethics?

Time to wrap up this media-lawyer circus.

Am I the only one  who considers the “star” witnesses appearing on BBC News-24 etc at the Leveson enquiry tend to be rather faded stars who once quite famous, but are no longer so? Are they seeking, as faded stars often do, to add lustre to their less then lustrous persona. Hello,  and fellatio to you, Hugh Grant!.

They also seem to be people caught doing naughty things. Why is their testimony so insipid? Is Leveson, basically, a government-approved tufty hunter? I rather fear he is.

Polly’s forecast for your Sun this Sunday

Oh dear. Polly Dutt-Pauker does not like the idea of the Sun on Sunday at all.

Guess Rupert must be doing something right…at last. But please, spare us the Yellandist “isn’t this boy who’s been forced to dress like a girl by his mad parents just toooo cute” stuff, will you?

WEATHER: It is currently 16-deg C in Tuscany, misty, but with a sunny day with low cloud promised for tomorrow. Forecast for SUNDAY: 15-deg C, with 90 per cent chance of grumpy frosted clouds and wild, violent outbursts of tacks, razorblades and hellfire, giving way to  scattered servants and free-ranging, scudding interns. A low-level depression named MARR descends over an unknown Tory MP who doesn’t go to church. Scattered things. MONDAY: Settled boredom, with John Humphreys tweeting Alan Rusbridger about how awful the weather from Italy has been on Today (lowlights repeated ad nauseum on BBC News 24).

Twitter journalism

Via Charles Crawford comes this interesting infographic thingummy about the rise of iPhone journalism from frugaldad.com

While I think Mr Crawford is over-egging it a bit to say all this means “goodbye photo-journalism” – really outstanding photo-journalism requires much the same high level of technical skill, a “good eye” and luck as it has always done, whereas iPhone journalism really requires minimal skill and maximum good luck in being in the right place at the right time – I think Frugaldad’s comment that the huge strides being made in smartphone technology, combined with their interconnectivity with social media websites such Facebook and Twitter, make such phones a formidable weapon in the journalist’s arsenal.

But a word of warning: as Riyaard Minty of Al-Jazeera comments, the citizen photo postings of the uprisings in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and now Syria are “the primary lens” through which these events have been brought to the world’s attention – “primary”, as in “first”, not (as some befuddled editors of national newspapers and 24-hours news channels seem to think) the “only” lens.

Because just as a bunch of random tweets and Facebook messages thrown together do not a news story make, a bunch of iPhone photos from the scene of an ongoing news event, while immediately gripping, do not necessarily tell the whole story. Context is everything, and it requires a skilled journalist to pull together all the disparate, if related, elements together into something like a coherent whole.

Hitler’s son and Chaplin: The sordid truth revealed!

Today’s Daily Telegraph – rapidly stitching into its hair-weave the jester’s crown of Britain’s silliest paper – has not one, but two exciting historical revelations:

First up: Charlie Chaplin may have been …French!

Charlie - or should that be "Charlot"?

Second: Hitler had a son, Jean-Marie Loret, by a Frenchwoman he met while moseying round the Maginot Line during WWI:

Hitler only had un fils

I can’t see why the Telegraph doesn’t have the nous to put 2 and 2 together to get the real answer:

Charlie Chaplin was really the Frenchman Jean-Marie Loret – the son of Adolf Hitler!

It explains so much! Those who might quibble about discrepancies in dates of birth in my marvellous new conspiracy theory can, I feel, safely be denigrated as “birthers”, “deniers” etc etc.

Now I must go off and write a book, put together a viral YouTube video, get the backing of Al Gore, George Monbiot and the BBC, and I’ll be rich, rich, I tell you!!!