Tim brings news of a bizarre attack in the Daily Mail on, of all people, Owen Barder, who is a blogger, authority on international development, civil servant and a friend of this blog. I won’t go into the details (Tim does) but suffice to say the mouth-breathers at the Mail don’t seem to have anything better to do then trawl the internet looking for public servants whose characters they can assassinate because they happen to have (or had) an opinion not shared by the paper which said “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”.
Obviously the people who produce the Mail are nasty cowards, but we already knew that. What I didn’t appreciate until today was how pathetic they are. To rational people, Owen is not a worthy target for such a hatchet-job: he is just a hard-working, scrupulously decent civil servant who, like many intelligent and principled people, has developed his own opinions out of reasoned deliberation rather than some deep-seated fear and loathing of a complicated world, which I think is the case with Daily Mail writers. But we are not dealing here with rational people.
Owen Barder is the epitome of what can be so good about the civil service. The Daily Mail, and its ‘reporter’ Simon Walters, are the epitome of what is so very wrong about the British press. I doubt they’re capable of feeling shame, but they really fucking should.
Update: It’s really heartening to see so many bloggers giving this story the reaction it deserves: in addition to Tim (who I should have complimented on his willingness to wade through shit to point out just how ridiculous the Mail story is, there’s Alex, Unity and Justin that I know of. At least four people,including myself, have left comments on the Mail story (okay, I’ll link to the thing if I must) pointing out how they’ve effectively managed to bring shame on a newspaper known for supporting the Nazis - none of these have yet been published, further evidence of the kind of people we’re dealing with.
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