Bart Simpson was a big fan, and the prank call has always been the curse of phone-in shows – as GB News discovered this week
Name: Prank calls.
Age: The oldest known dates from 1884, and involved telephoning undertakers in Rhode Island to summon them to the homes of not-dead people.
Continue reading...The company has been addressing its historical racism and sexism, adding disclaimers to films and altering theme park rides. But these moves have stirred contempt as well as approval
Very little ammunition is required for a culture war these days, so long as your troops are primed to mobilise at the drop of a blog. Julie Tremaine and Katie Dowd, two writers for the online newspaper SFGate, discovered this last month. Their review of the revamped Snow White ride at Disneyland was generally positive, but queried a new scene showing the prince giving Snow White the all-important “true love’s kiss”.
“A kiss he gives to her without her consent, while she’s asleep, which cannot possibly be true love if only one person knows it’s happening,” they wrote. “It’s hard to understand why the Disneyland of 2021 would choose to add a scene with such old-fashioned ideas of what a man is allowed to do to a woman.”
Matters escalated quickly and predictably. Within 24 hours, the review was reported across Twitter and conservative media. Fox News ran 13 segments on the story in one day: “Cancel culture going after Snow White”; “The woke movement taking aim at Disneyland”, etc. Senator John Kennedy was brought on to express his disdain: “We are so screwed … I don’t know where these jackaloons come up with this stuff.” The UK’s Sun chimed in: “Snow White may be CANCELED” [sic]. As did Piers Morgan in the Daily Mail: “Leave Snow White’s Prince alone, you insufferable woke brats.” Then Fox News reported on that: “Piers Morgan slams consent criticism over revamped Snow White ride.” And so forth. All of them triggered by a single paragraph in an online review.
Disney increasingly finds itself caught in the crossfire of these skirmishes. Understandably, to some extent, since it is the biggest target. Already a byword for family entertainment, Disney is now the dominant purveyor of popular culture following its gradual acquisitions of Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, Avatar, Alien, The Muppets, The Simpsons and numerous other household-name properties. But having successfully captured entertainment’s centre ground, Disney now finds itself under attack on both flanks. From one side, it is criticised for its old-fashioned and bigoted legacy; from the other, it is criticised for being too “woke”. What’s an unprecedentedly powerful media corporation to do?
The novelist describes helping two writers who went on to insult her online, and condemns era of ‘angels jostling to out-angel one another’
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a detailed essay about the conduct of young people on social media “who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion”, who she says are part of a generation “so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow”.
Titled It Is Obscene, the essay was published by the Nigerian novelist and feminist on her website on Tuesday night. It attracted so much attention that her website temporarily crashed.
Continue reading...In new Guardian podcast, TV dramatist tells Grace Dent about writing Colin’s final hours
Russell T Davies, the writer of It’s a Sin, the Channel 4 drama about the HIV/Aids epidemic in the late 1980s, has revealed that the death of Colin, one of show’s characters, was partly based on the death of his partner.
Speaking to the food writer Grace Dent on a new Guardian podcast, Comfort Eating, which launches on Tuesday, Davies said he had drawn on the experience of watching his husband, Andrew Smith, die from brain cancer in 2018 to write the scenes featuring Colin’s death.
Continue reading...Move follows £200m loss caused by Covid-19 pandemic and one-off charges related to phone hacking
Rupert Murdoch has written down the value of the Sun newspapers to zero as the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic helped to fuel a £200m loss at his flagship tabloid titles.
Advertising and sales revenues at the Sun and the Sun on Sunday plummeted, with turnover falling by 23% from £419.9m to £324m in the year to the end of June 2020.
Continue reading...Former colleagues remember ‘intelligent, playful, constantly curious’ news assistant and friend
Ruben Sergeyev, a longtime consultant and friend to Guardian correspondents in Moscow from the Gorbachev era through to the Putin years, has died of Covid-19 at the age of 65.
He died on Wednesday after being admitted to hospital in Moscow. Sergeyev worked from 1988 until 2014 as a news assistant, fixer, and all-round explainer of Russia during a time of rapid change. He helped a succession of bureau chiefs including Jonathan Steele, David Hearst, James Meek and Miriam Elder.
Continue reading...Research shows PornHub has bigger audience than BBC News – and people increasingly live lives online
Half the adult population of the UK watched online pornography during the pandemic, according to a projection by Ofcom which lays bare the activities of the 26 million individuals who view adult material.
By far the most popular pornography site was PornHub, which was visited by 50% of all males and 16% of all females in the UK in September 2020 – giving the site a far larger audience than mainstream television channels such as Sky One, ITV4 and BBC News.
Continue reading...Critics say US president’s realpolitik ignores Sisi regime’s ‘hostage-taking tactics’ against dissidents
“It’s a hostage negotiation and it has been all along,” said Sherif Mansour, describing the arrest of his cousin Reda Abdel-Rahman by Egyptian security forces last August as an attempt to intimidate Mansour into silence.
Abdel-Rahman has been imprisoned without trial for nine months. Mansour, an outspoken human rights advocate in Washington with the Committee to Protect Journalists, has since learned that he and his father are listed on the same charge sheet, all accused of joining a terrorist group and spreading “false news”.
Continue reading...The Irish musician said her statement, made on 5 June, was a ‘kneejerk reaction’ against the UK and Irish media’s ‘constant abuse and invalidation’ of her mental health
Sinéad O’Connor has retracted her announcement, made over the weekend, that she would retire from music and live performance.
In a new statement posted to Twitter, the Irish musician explained to fans that she had felt “badly triggered” by a series of interviews regarding her new memoir, Rememberings, in which she writes of surviving physical and psychological abuse.
Continue reading...Technical problem traced to network run by Fastly brings some sites down entirely
A massive internet outage has affected websites including the Guardian, the UK government’s website gov.uk, Amazon and Reddit. The issue made the sites inaccessible to many users for more than an hour on Tuesday morning.
The outage was traced to a failure in a content delivery network (CDN) run by Fastly. It began at about 11am UK time, with visitors to a huge number of sites receiving error messages including, “Error 503 service unavailable” and a terse “connection failure”.
Continue reading...Female genital mutilation has revived under Covid but activists are pushing hard to save girls at risk
It was when the phone started ringing with calls from worried mothers in Somalia that Ifrah Ahmed knew she was making an impact. The women told her their daughters had been bleeding for hours after undergoing female genital mutilation and asked what to do. Ahmed told them to seek medical attention, and probably saved lives by doing so.
The mothers called because they had heard the story of a 10-year-old girl who had bled to death after being cut in central Galmudug state in July 2018. It was the first confirmed death in years in a country where any complications arising from FGM are generally denied and it gained worldwide attention. The death was first revealed by a local activist who had been trained by Ahmed’s foundation in how to use the media to publicise her work.
Continue reading...Journalism has been outlawed in all but name since the coup, with reporters and editors fleeing the country or leading double lives to survive
As a cyclone rolled over the Bay of Bengal on 24 May, American journalist Danny Fenster, 37, contemplated the brooding skies near a terminal window at Yangon international airport.
For a while, the threat of foreigners being seized at the airport by Myanmar’s military was real, but after watching international reporters exit the country safely in April, the Michigan native was more worried about turbulence.
Continue reading...Information minister blames use of platform for ‘activities capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence’
Nigeria’s government has announced an indefinite suspension of Twitter in the country, two days after the social media company removed a post from president Muhammadu Buhari that threatened to punish regional secessionists.
The information minister, Lai Mohammed, said the government had acted because of “the persistent use of the platform for activities that are capable of undermining Nigeria’s corporate existence”.
Continue reading...Meera Syal and Jennifer Saunders star in Audible’s new spoof, Raj! Plus: a tense history lesson in GunPlot, and Unearthed offers gripping plant-themed tales
Raj!
Meera Syal and Jennifer Saunders give standout performances in Audible’s new pod drama, spoofing life in British-controlled India. Ineffectual governor Henry arrives in a rural province, “allergic to emotions”, part of an unwieldy bureaucratic structure, and unwilling to acclimatise. As well as the lines you might see coming (“can’t imagine the British ever going for Indian food!”), there is plenty you might not, in this tale of blustering Brits, and Syal’s Rajmata side-eyeing and sticking it to the man.
Hannah J Davies
Victoria’s supreme court fines the Age $450,000 and News Corp more than $400,000 for contempt of court over coverage of cardinal’s initial conviction
A dozen of Australia’s largest media organisations have been fined more than $1m for contempt of court over their coverage of Cardinal George Pell’s sexual abuse conviction.
On Friday the Victorian supreme court justice John Dixon ruled the 12 organisations had “usurped” the role of the court by breaching a suppression order on Pell’s now-quashed conviction for child sexual abuse.
Continue reading...Reported change comes after the Facebook oversight board said that the same rules should apply to all users
Facebook is reportedly planning to end a policy that effectively exempts politicians from content moderation rules.
The Verge reported on Thursday that the social media company is expected to announce its new policy on Friday. The change comes as Facebook faces increased criticism, from journalists, lawmakers and its own employees, for allowing world leaders and politicians to use its platform to spread misinformation, quash criticism and harass opponents.
Continue reading...Publishing staff, in rows over authors from Mike Pence to Woody Allen, are voicing their reluctance to work on books they deem hateful. But is this really ‘younger refuseniks’, or a much older debate?
In the 1960s, Simon & Schuster’s co-founder Max Schuster was facing a dilemma. Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and armaments minister, had written a memoir providing new insights into the workings of Nazi leadership. As Michael Korda, Schuster’s editor-in-chief, recounted in his memoir Another Life, Schuster knew it would be a huge success. “There is only one problem,” he said, “and it’s this: I do not want to see Albert Speer’s name and mine on the same book.”
In the liberal industry of publishing, the tension that exists between profit and morality is nothing new, whether it’s Schuster turning down Speer (the book was finally published by Macmillan), or the UK government introducing legislation to prevent criminals making money from writing about their crimes.
Continue reading...As Imran Khan’s government moves to outlaw virtually any criticism, media figures fear ‘darkest era’ of press freedom
Gathered before a solemn crowd, Hamid Mir, one of Pakistan’s best-known journalists, spoke defiantly. “Do not ever enter the homes of journalists again,” he said. “We don’t have tanks or guns like you, but we can tell the people of Pakistan about the stories that emerge from inside your homes.”
Mir may have been addressing journalists in Islamabad on Friday, but his words were not directed at them; they were a clear message to Pakistan’s all-powerful military establishment.
Continue reading...All eyes now turn to whether this makes an easing of England’s Covid measures on 21 June more likely
Good news is broadcast across Wednesday’s front pages, as editors seize a rare opportunity to report on hope in the battle against the coronavirus.
Many papers suggest that the first day without a single Covid death for 10 months means the complete easing of lockdown restrictions will go ahead in England as planned on 21 June.
Continue reading...President Sergio Mattarella forced to abandon dedication after officials noticed mistake on stone plaque
The Italian president, Sergio Mattarella, was forced to abandon a ceremony dedicating a road in Rome to one of his predecessors, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, after officials noticed the name on the stone plaque was misspelled.
Instead of “Azeglio”, the street marker said “Azelio”. Mattarella had already turned up to the event on Tuesday, alongside members of Ciampi’s family and the mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, before the embarrassing mistake was noticed, with the lettering showing up clearly through the translucent cloth covering the plaque.
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