A Note on Being Hacked

No, we weren’t hacked. It was a joke, what with Twitter being in news over being hacked and all. Thanks to everyone who joined in, willingly or unwillingly. It was a lot of fun.

The roots of this idea came from another parody account I set up a while ago that never really went anywhere, mainly because I didn’t have the time to pay attention to it and only a few tweets in it had already begun to feel repetitive.

That account was @protestm0vement and was a direct reaction to @protestmovement who tweet the most backward, illogical, moronic, counter-productive stabs at protest I’ve ever seen. These are the sort of people whose singular inability to grasp any of the central issues they tweet about actually harm their argument.

Thus when Twitter was hacked it seemed a perfect time to go back to that idea, but with a much larger audience.

There is another point though, which has been a theme of ours for a while – never ever trust anything you read on Twitter. We love our followers very dearly and are genuinely thankful for the attention they give us, but I’m kind of amazed that as many people believed it as they did.

How can we legitimately combat the misinformation and underhanded techniques of the real Daily Mail if something as obviously fake as our ‘hack’ is taken at face value? We all do it, we all read tweets that seem to justify our pre-existing opinion and we take those tweets as fact – but the truth is that unless there is a link to a verified and legitimate source then it shouldn’t be trusted.

We weren’t out to make fools of anybody and we’re not trolling for more followers – we’re just trying to find new ways to keep the account fresh, and poke fun at some other targets in the process. If you did fall for it, though, don’t feel bad. Yesterday we tweeted

GAY MARRIAGE: Conservatives insist “it’s Adam and Eve, not an all-you-can-eat cock buffet.”

…and someone still thought it was real.

 

All Grown Up

Believe it or not but here at DM Towers we do and make points with our jokes – we don’t just exist just for the sake of topicality or for attention. We bang on about the importance of satire for a reason. There comes a point though – and with the Mail it happens roughly every 6 months or so – when you wonder what the fucking point of it all is.

I’m assuming you’re here – in the first instance at least – because of a link I added to a particularly revolting tweet…

CELEBRITY: 14 year old Elle Fanning looks like she wants a good fuck as she poses in saucy Halloween costume.

…or something like that. I’m also going to assume that you’ve seen the inspiration article on today’s MailOnline. If not, here’s a screen grab via MJRobbins (brought to my attention by IanWatoop)

Finally, here’s a link to the story as it currently stands. It’s important you look at both because, if you pay close attention, you’ll notice a few subtle differences.

As I type this Twitter is currently imploding at this story; and quite rightly so too. There’s so many pernicious and perverted elements it’s kind of hard to know where to focus – the creepy (and now removed) “showing off her womanly curves” byline, the (also now removed) “wasn’t afraid to flaunt her curves” sentence, the fact that this was pulled from a 14 year olds personal Instagram account, the bizarre reading of a sexual undercurrent in what is effectively a child posing in fancy dress…

Much has already been written about the Mail’s preoccupation with underage starlets (such much so, in fact, that every time I write about this subject I have to include that sentence as a get-out-clause to avoid having to summarise it all) so I’m just going to make 2 brief points and get out of here. I’m strongly beginning to suspect that accounts like DMReporter aren’t actually helping, and maybe we’re drawing attention to something that might gently fade away if we stopped pointing and laughing. Anyway…

1. I was at Halloween event last year and I passed three young teenage girls dressed in the usual low-cut short skirt outfits which are so popular. As I passed them one of the girls had a wardobe malfunction and her boob popped out, right in front of me. What did I do? I looked away. I did that because I’m an adult, and that’s what adults do. For a grown man a 14 year-old tit is not sexy. It’s not to be ogled. It’s part of a process. It is the same – if you will – as an breastfeeding boob.

If you are an adult journalist, as I’m assuming the vast majority of Daily Mail journalists are, and you write about the womanly curves of a 14 year old, then there’s something wrong with you. No ifs, no buts, no nothing. If you pull a picture of a pubescent teenager from the internet and write about how she’s ageing nicely, or growing up fast, or that she has enviable curves then you’re directly contributing to a culture of sexualisation and child abuse. End of. I don’t give a fuck what your editor told you to write. You are not fit for the title journalist and serious consideration should be given to your right to work among children at all.

This is especially pertinent to the Elle Fanning article because the sexual content is invented. Not that I’m condoning their leering over 14 year old Kardashians but I can at least understand how photos of them in bikinis lead to an article about them being in bikinis – in the case of Elle Fanning they had to find the sexual content. They couldn’t write ‘Elle Fanning enjoys dressing up for halloween’ as that doesn’t sell papers, or links, so they had to make up material about her looks, about how’s she’s nearly of age, about how she’s eager to be an adult – about how, in a couple of years, she’ll be legally fuckable.

2. I think it’s about time we stopped viewing the Daily Mail as an ideological enemy. When this account was first started I wrongly assumed that the Mail was a rightwing institution and that that was their primary motivation, but I now realise I’m wrong. The Mail follows money and they will say or do or print anything which gets them that money. This is why they set up Samantha Brick for a fall, or why they let Liz Jones write about famine, or why they attached a creepy paedophilic subtext to pictures of a 14 year old girl.

They simply don’t care what you, or their readers, or their detractors think. We all organised ourselves into a big huff over this Elle Fanning thing. We all clicked the links, shared the outrage, passed on the news and the only thing it has achieved – the only thing – is the removal of two sentences from an article. They don’t give a fuck about anything except hitting their required view numbers for a day, and we all helped them. Shit. I helped them.

The thing is – this makes them more dangerous. There’s few things as offensive as desperate, grasping capitalism and that’s what the Mail now represents. If they were true to a sliver of their projected morals then articles about underage Kardashian’s cavorting in bikinis could not sit next to outrage at the BBC grooming children for penetration by Jimmy Savile.

It is simply not possible to miss the connection between the two. It’s just not. They are absolutely 100% doing this deliberately. If marijuana is a gateway drug then the Daily Mail is a gateway publication. It is deliberately creating and exploiting the sexual appeal of underaged girls for money. I can cope with much of the Mail’s output but this really is beyond the pale. It’s making me question whether or not I really want to be associated with this smutty little rag any more – even under the guise of parody – because all we’re really doing is contributing to their success.

There’s a final point, actually, which I’m trying very hard to not make melodramatic or exaggerated. It has become painfully obvious from the Savile reporting of the past few weeks that his taste for young children was widely suspected, if not known. I’d suggest we need to do the same thing with the Daily Mail. A worldwide publication spending as much time as they do obsessing over the bodies of pubescent children is not normal. Maybe, like Savile’s cigarbreathed leering, we’ve come to accept it as part of the culture…? Maybe we should stop?

Savile Row

I think it’s fair to say that Jimmy Savile has ruined the image of creepy old men who live with their mothers forever.

The papers must be kicking themselves. After all the fearmongering,  suspicion, calls for mob justice, support for vigilantism, printing of rumours, linking to race and casual calls for rewriting / enforcing / scrapping of child protection laws depending on specific story requirements they missed a literally all-singing, all dancing pantomime villain right in front of their eyes.

I know. D’oh, right?

Look at this man. He is exactly what the papers have been warning us about. He is the tabloid definition of a paedophile. He couldn’t look more like a child abuser if had a giant net and was dressed like the Hamburglar. And he was in plain-sight – literally cavorting next to children on TV, giving them hugs and offering special favours.

He was buying silence with charity money. And given his own room in children’s hospitals where he would prowl up and down the wards. He had the keys to mental health facilities and was allowed special access to vulnerable patients. He was an actual, proper, real evil mastermind. It’s like unmasking the President as the villain.

I met him once, and he told me I was far too pretty for him (I’m not).

Furthermore he was fully enabled by the BBC who, not content with just procuring children for one of their biggest stars to abuse, were also offering sanctuary to a nest of paedophiles by giving them broadcast positions. Worst of all this became an officially sanctioned cover-up, going as far to yank a Newsnight investigation from the airwaves for fear of damaging their own reputations.

The press, and the Mail especially, are going all out to push their lone gunman theory – that the BBC, the giant unified autonomous thinking-as-one unit were the only enablers; no-one else knew. Certainly not the Mail who are as gee-whiz-golly-gosh shocked as the rest of us. Apparently everyone knew but no-one told us.

This is horseshit.

They’re trying to convince us that over the course of 40 years one of the most famous people in the country ritually abused children and not one of their writers had heard a thing? With their Leveson exposed network of insiders, tip-offs, corrupt policeman, hidden cameras, hacked phones, fake sheiks and overwhelming willingness to print unfounded rumours we are expected to believe that they knew nothing…?

Again: horseshit.

The papers knew. Most likely not the full details but they heard the same rumours, they ran in the same crowds, they mixed with the same people. For them not to have heard *something* and wanted to investigate would require a monumental failure of an entire network of information gatherers across a dozen newspapers and broadcasters, both legal and illegal, in an industry funded by lurid and shocking stories. It literally makes no sense at all.

The thing is – we all thought it too, right? Not really. Not really really. But kinda. We all thought he was weird, but we assumed harmless. And we were right to do so – because it is inconceivable that someone so famous, so known, who has so many interactions, with so much power, could be doing such things. He worked in an industry where nothing is private. If Richard Bacon gets thrown off Blue Peter for a line of coke how could Jimmy Savile possibly be fucking kids for forty fucking years?

I love the BBC dearly and I would defend them until the heat-death of the universe but even I’m not going to sit here and pretend this isn’t a disgusting and catastrophic failure on their behalf. They’re not the only ones though – from left to right, red-top to blue-top, our press utterly and completely failed to unmask a corruption that was directly in front of them. And that is unforgivable.

Our media is a prime contributor to the sexualisation of teenage girls.There is no point discussing Savile as part of a larger societal acceptance – “it was the culture back then” – if you’re not going to acknowledge that that culture absolutely exists now, and it is more pervasive and accepted than ever before. As Graham Linehan pointed out on Have I Got News For You this week, searching the MailOnline for the phrase “all grown up” says all you need to know.

Why did the Mail choose to report on an affair John Peel had with a 15 year old girl and not mention David Bowie’s deflowering of 13 year old Lori Maddox? Because Bowie is alive, and he would sue them. Reporting on Peel is just a small hit-job; aiming at the larger target of the BBC, but in the process it dilutes the crimes of Savile in the public mind; he becomes just another cartoon hate-figure.

They’ll now echo the shock and disgust across countless articles, reprinting the same stock images of Savile’s leering cigar chomping next to the newest nubile paparazzi GEMMA ATKINSON SHOWS OFF HER ENVIABLY TONED FIGURE AS SHE GOES JOGGING IN A CROP TOP AND SHORTS headline and never ever make the connection.

To give the story due credit though, it’s been a goldmine for jokes. That last sentence may seem odd given the 900 or so words I’ve just written above but it’s ok – it’s satire, innit? Satire. This is my favourite joke we’ve written – very few other people thought so, admittedly, but I’m reprinting it here anyway.

EVIL BBC: “Jimmy Savile left messages on my voicemail bragging of sex with my granddaughter” claims Andrew Sachs.

Yours,

Disgusted of Europeland