mediawatchwatch.org.uk

Our old friends at Mediawatch-UK – who kindly lent their name to this blog, sort of – have a nice, spanking-new, colourful website, just in case their fifteen and a half followers were getting tired of the old one. The first image that greets you, though, is that of a handgun whose barrel points like the finger of Lord Kitchener. But, instead of the mustachioed figure behind it, there’s a menacing blur of a face, hair covered with a dark woollen hat. Surprisingly striking image for John “Massa” (“I love the Black and White Minstrels”) Beyer and co.

What isn’t new, though, is the tired old rhetoric: violence on television equals violence in the streets, using the recent stabbings and shootings – regrettable and sad though they are – to “prove” the equation. And there’s the amazing claim that Mediawatch-UK alone – or so they’d like you to believe – were responsible for “having achieved effective legislation in 1978 which made all child pornography illegal” (back in the days when it had the more cumbersome title of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, headed by the far more entertaining Mary Whitehouse – or “the late great Mary Whitehouse”, as the website calls her; gosh, sizzling, original phraseology, that!). Nice that they’ve given a free plug to what they would no doubt see as gratuitous violence, wrestling, with a reference to the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment group). Oh, that’s a typo. Oh, look, it’s not the only one: “and wwe [sic] publish regular reports on a variety od [sic] media issues”. Couple that with willy-nilly mixing of quoting styles and inconsistent capitalisation conventions, and you have a website that’s bright and new, and tickety-boo, and just the thing to teach impressionable youngsters how to present good English.