Dylan Sharpe's Ironic Justice

Like many opposed to The Sun's Page Three feature, I was part of the mad rush to dance on its' supposed grave on Wednesday. Then, when the tabloid pulled the rag out from under us all, I was smarting and bitter at their - non-existent - duplicity!

@thehoodedhack When did they lie, Tim? Refused to confirm or deny, not the same thing. Wishful thinking did the rest.
— Richard Horsman (@leedsjourno) January 21, 2015

I was wrong, I'd committed a cardinal sin of journalism by making an assumption, a leap of faith without the evidence to back it up. Call it a valuable lesson, and hopefully all of the media commentators who made the same mistake will also come away wiser and more cynical.

What they didn't need is Dylan Sharpe's superior tweet to some of the most well-known journalists, as well as a sympathetic politician who sincerely hoped her campaign had made a difference.
Even Sharpe, in his apology - published on Buzzfeed oddly, not The Sun itself - acknowledges a pot-shot at Harriet Harman was unnecessary. "Guilty of gloating", he conceded.

In reality, he has done a fantastic job of Public Relations. Not only has The Sun pulled off one of the greatest bait-and-switch moves in journalism history, Sharpe has stoked the fires by taking to that great media battlefield and throwing oil on the inferno. There's no such thing as bad publicity!

I fully expect the entire operation has galvanized the legions of otherwise apathetic white van men, who feared for the loss of the morning totty, and whose brand loyalty can only improve with this swerve towards cancellation.
I expect the increased polarisation of discussion about Page Three online will keep The Sun riding high in press coverage and media discussion.
I believe that Sharpe's jibing swipe at his detractors eggs the argument on, creating a vortex of ardent conversation that this article itself is just one bubble of.

It all contributes to a major PR coup for Murdoch's flagship tabloid, back from the dead more than Vlad Dracula. What did interest me was Sharpe's closing wish...

So there it is. I continue to be told I’m a c*nt by people who know my name, my job and one tweet I sent. Guilty of gloating I most certainly am. Icarus has well and truly plummeted to earth. But I never meant to offend and I want to apologise to all those I @’ed in that tweet. It was supposed to be funny but clearly I misjudged that one. Now I see if Twitter can forgive as quickly as it can hate….

Really. A white male employee of a sexist British tabloid, asking for forgiveness from Twitter. If this isn't a delightfully ironic parallel to the entire concept of media self-regulation, of toothless press watchdogs forgiving one another their myriad sins, then I don't know what is.

I honestly can't tell if Sharpe is concealing another 'cheeky swipe' in his apology, fully acknowledging the hypocrisy of begging for mercy from Twitter for giving the MRAs and trolls exactly what they wanted. Compare his two days experience to what someone like Caroline Criado-Perez has endured for years, and try and accommodate how disingenuous it is.

Caroline's twitter feed included this retweet that I particularly like, and find very appropriate.

The Sun's PR Dylan Sharpe's 'apology' after death threats(?) http://t.co/Mon8rBVqJY reminds me of this pic.twitter.com/OJSIbpbPCI
— Sophie Wilkinson (@sophwilkinson) January 23, 2015

However, we must resist the urge to relish Sharpe's experience of mistreatment at the hands of Twitter. As tempting as it is for an evident supporter of patriarchy to suddenly be on the grim receiving end of that institution's crude online 'justice', we should not wish that punishment on anyone.

That punishment should not exist. Nobody, no-one at all should have to endure threats of harm, death, and violence online. We should condemn those who threaten Dylan Sharpe with all the fire and fervour we condemn those who threaten Criado-Perez, or Anita Sarkeesian, or Brianna Wu, or anyone else who has dared come out and state that women are treated as second-class citizens.

Nobody is a second-class citizen - and the last person who should be regarded as so is Dylan Sharpe. Even if it seems like he doesn't agree with the concept.

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One closing thought - much of the debate about Page Three swirls around rendering the models as mere objects, objectification being a major plank of feminism, I believe. To counter that, Channel Four conducted a brilliant interview with author Germaine Greer, Harriet Harman MP, and model Chloe Goodman - you can watch it here.



I'd be curious to know what Nicole, 22 from Bournemouth thinks about the debate swirling around her decision - and it is hers - to appear on Page Three.

Armageddon Will Not Be Televised

There has been a flurry of online interest in the surfacing of the fabled 'doomsday' tape from the vaults of the Cable News Network.

Ted Turner, founder of the first dedicated news channel in the US, famously claimed on the launch of his channel in 1980, that

"We gonna go on air June 1, and we gonna stay on until the end of the world. When that time comes, we'll cover it, play 'Nearer, My God, to Thee,' and sign off."

Now, a former CNN intern has proven that this was indeed Turner's plan. Hunting through the famous news network's video archives, Michael Ballaban found the clip that is only to be played upon confirmation of the end of the world. Thankfully it isn't specified what form that confirmation will take.

Created during the 1980s, with the Cold War ever at risk of going hot, we shouldn't question the merit of creating an emergency broadcast for use in the likelihood of worldwide Armageddon. We might question the choice of music, which was rumoured to be the final song played by the band on RMS Titanic.

What is surprising is, well, the surprise this discovery is being met with. Perhaps, being British, I have a more phlegmatic attitude towards "We interrupt this broadcast...", as the BBC and the British Government's plans have long been well known. In 2005, the media was discussing recently declassified files detailing planned broadcasts should a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom be confirmed, drawn up as early as the immediate post-War period.

Such a broadcast was laconically referred to as the "four minute warning", so named for the brief period between confirmation of inbound missiles and their impact on target within England. This in fact was the maximum possible time for British-based detection systems, and it could have been even less time.
On confirmation, the Wartime Broadcasting Service would have been activated, overriding all existing BBC transmissions to inform in classical, RP tones, the grave news.

Delivered by familiar BBC Radio Four continuity announcer Peter Donaldson, part of the broadcast has been spliced, aptly enough, into the song Four Minute Warning by Radiohead. Peter also briefly discusses recording the automated warning on this clip from The Culture Show.


These painfully real-world examples are chilling, but far more people are familiar with the fictional portrayals of nuclear devastation in England. The leading example must be Threads, the BAFTA-award winning drama produced in 1984 and broadcast to record viewing numbers for the week.

Set within the northern English city of Sheffield, it explores the true reality of nuclear war on a very personal level, introducing us to characters and their lives which are unfortunately being led in the vicinity of a high-priority strike target. Below is an amateur trailer of this powerful and eye-opening show.


The following year, Threads was shown again on the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In conjunction was the first ever showing of The War Game, a documentary from the 1960s that had been banned by the BBC. Although they have never stated precisely why, the bleak nature of the psuedo-documentary style would no doubt have swung a great deal of opinion against the nuclear arms race.

The War Game does indeed make for disturbing viewing. To show it in the Eighties, when nuclear weapons had become even more powerful than the cruder atomic bombs of the post-War period that featured in the production, must have been even more disturbing.

Or perhaps people were numb to the dangers of nuclear warfare? Perhaps they'd become accustomed to the reality of annihilation, delivered so calmly by familiar BBC voices ever since the end of the Second World War?

This is why I regard the surprise and fascination surrounding the CNN tape with some bemusement. I don't doubt every network has such an ominous pre-recorded piece, for such a dire emergency. We've had ours for quite some time.

The Hiroshima Peace Memorial
Taken by Aiden on November 24, 2006.

Doctor Who: The Caretaker versus Remembrance of the Daleks

Coal Hill School occupies a magical place in Doctor Who history, ever since William Hartnell abducted two schoolteachers back in 1963. The last time the TARDIS landed in East London, his Seventh incarnation had a confrontation with the Daleks and Davros that consistently ranks high amongst fans – not only for McCoy’s run, but for the pre-2005 episodes as a whole.

Last week, we had another episode set in that venerable education establishment, and I decided to stack Remembrance of the Daleks against The Caretaker in a versus review!

Blogging Anniversaries and PR Failures

It was a pleasant surprise to be notified by the professional networking website LinkedIn that my other writing project - The Blogging Goth - has been running three years as of August. Very much a labour of love, I haven't always been able to devote the time to it I'd like - more official demands on my time always have to take a priority!

However I was inspired by the anniversary, and immediately had a good topic to cover - the , due to be held in Kettering this coming weekend. Fans were torn between awe at the stupendous line-up, and resentment as Alt-Fest's juggernaut progress eclipsed older and more established festivals - outbidding for artists and drawing off fan-bases.
implosion of massively ambitious alternative music festival Alt-Fest

A greater exploration of the rise and fall of Alt-Fest is available on The Blogging Goth, but the ultimate conclusion seems to be that ambition soared a little too high - with around a million in the red even after their successful Kickstarter campaign.

The real issue of note to media, PR and journalist types in my readership is the communications blackout from Alt-Fest itself. Even now, we aren't sure of the details - and rumours continue to burn up forums and social media. But when bands started being quietly let go, they saw their obvious responsibility to alert their fans to the oncoming disaster.

If Alt-Fest management had the foresight necessary, they'd have preempted an unwanted release from the bands with a statement. As we understand it, eleventh-hour negotiations were ongoing with various investor types and other revenue sources - and the organizers chose to maintain radio silence, even going so far as to delete inquiries from their social media presence.
Instead, the rumours and contradictory tweets and status updates from the artists engaged to play took on a momentum all of their own. The vacuum of comment from official sources was rapidly filled with suposition, rumour, and the unsubstantiated but increasingly convincing statements of withdrawal from the engaged artists - and then, the site for the festival and the PR company professionally engaged to promote them both withdrew themselves!

I see this as a valuable lesson to all media professionals. As a journalist, I was one of the minority who held on stubbornly for an official statement - in an era where social media takes priority in all communications strategy, my role as a gatekeeper of accuracy and verifiability does not fade away. If anything, it becomes more important, and in my opinion, transcends that of "first with the scoop."

I have that luxury as a blogger, without a profit margin or exclusivity to concern me - what does concern me is the prioritizing of, well, priority over accuracy.

In the end, it was a twenty-four hour cycle from the first signs of collapse to the Alt-Fest official statement of cancellation. Throughout it my twitter feed was a regular flux of links and statements I judged independently to be informative, prompt, based in fact and occasionally even amusing. Crucially, none of it was orginating from within Alt-Fest until the very end.

What we were left with is a raft of concerns. The UK alternative scene must now deal with the toxic fallout of an expensive, collapsed festival that will sour relations between artists, promoters, locations and fans. The PR industry will now have a textbook example of Kickstarter backed, grassroots organizers utterly failing to be up to the task, and potentially reneging on their employment of such communications experts. And through it all, a wealth of simple marketing mistakes that at least might be a valuable - sorry, expensive - lesson for anyone following in their footsteps.

Had the Alt-Fest team been able, somehow, to arrest their financial freefall they would have found that by neglecting their previously vast and robust communications structure they had alienated their entire customer base. You cannot re-prioritize your PR situation for anything. 

Centuries of Conflict

This is the centenary year of the outbreak of World War One - the 'Great War', the War that would end them all. Of course, it wasn't to be - and social media is alive with heart-rendering images comparing the devastation of WWI with the fighting in the Gaza Strip.

What concerns me is that caption - "Have We Learnt Nothing?" How can we allow such violent warfare to unfold a full hundred years later?
The answer is, of course, because we've let it happen before.

In 1814, the Sixth Coalition of nations finally put a stop to Emperor Napoleon I's megalomaniac plans - briefly - in a conflict that raged from Haiti to Cairo via Madrid, Berlin and Moscow. In the newly-minted United States of America, a national anthem was born in the shape of 'Star-Spangled Banner' and a new capitol was born after the British stormed Washington DC, burning the White House. Fighting reached around the planet a hundred years before the continental powers took to the field in the first industrialized war.

For the first time in two hundred years, Europe is not riven by vast international war. This isn't to belittle the savagery of the Middle Eastern conflict, any of them, but to point out that this century has finally begun, if not in total peace, then in far better shape than the past two.

The staggering death toll of the First World War was only eclipsed by the even more horrendous Second. Those figures will stand in eternity as the greatest loss of human life in recorded history. They cannot be equated with any other conflict on record, in simple internet propaganda like this.