A friend commented on my recent blogs likening me to a ‘Charlie Brooker-type columnist.’ I’m pretty sure he meant that in a nice way, although I couldn’t hope to emulate Mr Brooker, whose latest piece on the Stephen Gately article by Jan Moir last week was a clinical dismantling of the wretched woman’s logic.

Jan Moir’s response to the widespread condemnation of her column was to question how many of her critics had actually read it (how convenient to conjecture a thing that no-one can prove) and to suggest that she has been the victim of “what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign.” Hmm. Had she written a glowing tribute that proved so virally popular as her invective I wonder if she would have considered herself the beneficiary of a heavily orchestrated internet campaign? Somehow I doubt it.

When a subject trends on twitter, when a thing spreads virally, it is fairly meaningless to call it a heavily orchestrated internet campaign. Jan Moir’s suggestion (notice that these are what she peddles rather than facts) seems to be that a small number of people contrived to alert a larger number of people to the publication of her views and somehow influenced them to find her objectionable. What Jan doesn’t seem to realise is that a) this is how the internet works, and b) people are quite capable of finding her objectionable on their own.

I came across Jan Moir’s article on Friday morning before it started trending on Twitter and while it still held the original headline: “Why there was nothing ‘natural’ about Stephen Gately’s death.” Of course, Jan had no new intelligence, no insight into the work of the coroner – she had simply slung the word natural lazily between inverted commas to make crass, sweeping inferences of moral dubiety. This headline was later removed, perhaps because the Daily Mail realised that Jan Moir is no more the arbiter of what is natural than she is of what is logical.

The Press Complaints Commission has received in excess of 21,000 complaints about Jan Moir’s wicked little rant, and I do hope that some kind of censure is forthcoming. For now, enough ink has been spilled on this thick and hateful woman.

Tags: charlie brooker, MOOM
Categories: Media Talk, Si's Matters

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Media Talk, Si's Matters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.