Thursday, August 11, 2011

Bad Journalism


"The historic Roman city of Gloucester, on the edge of the Cotswolds, was turned into a “war zone” on Tuesday night as rioters launched copycat attacks on shops and cars."


The headline on their front page is "Mobs on Rampage In Cotswolds" ! The Telegraph sub-editors are bigger morons than the rioters, and that's saying something.


How about

"The formerly historic city (until the 60s redevelopment**) of Gloucester, fifteen-odd miles from the edge of the Cotswolds, had some arson attacks on Tuesday night as a mixture of the Tredworth 'youth'* and a few local wannabes launched copycat attacks on shops and cars."


I can't wait for their next headlines.

Trouble in Southampton - "New Forest Burns"
More trouble in Brum - "Avon Runs With Blood As Shakespeare's County Ignites"
Leeds - "Yorkshire Dales Torched"




* Gloucester has an Afro-Caribbean community - big enough to have had a reggae programme on Severn Sound - presented by the late and much lamented Ivanhoe Campbell (not forgetting the sister Evadne with the Jamaican recipes).


** Dalrymple :

"Gloucester is a small cathedral city of about 100,000, where the city council has conclusively demonstrated that with the right combination of 1960s urban planning and an undiscriminating welfare policy, the degraded inner city conditions of much larger conurbations may be successfully reproduced in small country towns."

6 comments:

JuliaM said...

Note the demographic of those charged, and spot the odd one out...

Anonymous said...

Wasn't there a 3 day riot in one of the estates in that area (near Cheltenham) a few years ago, which managed to go completely unreported by the press?

Laban said...

That was the Hesters Way Firework Riot.

Anonymous said...

Hesters Way Firework Riot - reminds me of this:

Nothing to see

TL said...

Wonder how the British media will report the following when it eventually makes its way to our shores... Black Flash Mobs

Anonymous said...

Ah yes Gloucester. A quite surprising sink-hole. One of those places that makes you realise that the sewers of Britain bigger cities are overflowing into the rest of the nation.