Ever? Even by accident?
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
She's positioned herself on the right of many subjects. -
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
In the early 90s, when she wrote for the Guardian, she positioned herself as a kind of idiosyncratic ethical/moralising socialist (sort of). I remember a couple of times half-agreeing with her. So help me God.Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
She was pro the smoking ban on The Moral Maze once.Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
I think she makes it her business to be wrong about everything.
She's a wrongstress.
(FWIW, I'm a non-smoker who was against the smoking ban, paradoxically enough.)Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
I like the word wrongtress, Clive.
Phillips usually works on the basis of not liking one side of an argument, and throwing the kitchen sink full of shit at them. It's perhaps surprising that she didn't look at this issue and say "interfering bureaucrats" and steam in. She must really hate smoking.Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
She once pointed out, on the Moral Maze, that stepfathers and casual partners commit much more child abuse than biological fathers. This, at least, has the virtue of being true. Though of course the conclusions she went on to draw (ban divorce and let single mums starve, as far as I could tell) were batshit insane.Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
Yeah, I saw that. The Mail is now officially impossible to satirise, I think.Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that, but I'm not sure the linked story is the one to prove the point. The Today programme ran essentially the same story a few days ago if I remember rightly. Even the headline "Facebook can give you cancer" is, by the normal over-sensationalising, trivialising and over-simplifying norms of tabloid journalism, a not particularly distortive rendition of the basic thesis that a decline in face to face interaction may be having a physiological impact on individuals which is reducing their ability to fight disease (and obviously over-use of facebook etc. is likely to be a factor in reducing face-to-face time).The Mail is now officially impossible to satiriseComment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
Lord Mauleverer wrote:
Oh well, then.I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that, but I'm not sure the linked story is the one to prove the point. The Today programme ran essentially the same story a few days ago if I remember rightly.The Mail is now officially impossible to satiriseComment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
This is far from obvious. I signed up to Facebook so that I wouldn't miss out on invites from friends with whom I wasn't in regular face to face contact. I can quite confidently say it has increased my face to face time.(and obviously over-use of facebook etc. is likely to be a factor in reducing face-to-face timeComment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
Wyatt, cut the arsey tone. I'm not defending the Mail or even defending this "bad science" type reporting of non-systematic research. I'm just saying that a Mail piece which reports the same story in pretty much the same way as the BBC is maybe not the best example of the Mail being in a class of its own.Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
Lord Mauleverer wrote:
Well, I was going for jokey more than arsey, but whatevah. The point is, it's not that on this one story the Mail is all that much crapper than the BBC, but that the paper has an obsession with "stuff that gives you cancer" that has become a standing joke.Wyatt, cut the arsey tone. I'm not defending the Mail or even defending this "bad science" type reporting of non-systematic research. I'm just saying that a Mail piece which reports the same story in pretty much the same way as the BBC is maybe not the best example of the Mail being in a class of its own.
The Beeb's journalistic coverage of science is also generally atrocious to a comedy extent, by the way, and that doesn't mean the Mail's isn't.Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
OK, sorry if I was overreactingComment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
Excellent comment on that article that seems to have bypassed the Daily Mail moderator's 'piss-take' detector:
Bravo, Robin.I think the real issue people are forgetting here is that using Facebook MUST be having some effect on house prices?
- Robin, Rhondda Valley, WalesComment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
Here's a gentle, but pointed, takedown from a fellow Spectator blogger (and an old mucker of some of us on this board).Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
The Mail's campaign against social networking sites continues.
What do they want to happen exactly? For all these sites to be shut down?Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
Susan Greenfield being her rigorous, cautious and self-effacing self again, I see.Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
Well, DMGT does own some dating websites, so maybe they see Facebook etc as competition.Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
Disco Sea Shanties wrote:
I think they're worried that people might develop a sense of community - even a virtual one - and that this might undermine their paranoia-peddling.The Mail's campaign against social networking sites continues.
What do they want to happen exactly? For all these sites to be shut down?Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
I think the Mail are worried that one day a Leftist site will emerge with a similar agenda to MoveOn which of course in itself is a kind of social network. If a similar site took off over here the boost it would give the entire left would be huge, whereas you just can't imagine a comparable right wing site ever being as successful or credible, as it would just be a crucible for the usual unhinged doublethink and bad science which nobody, bar the Spectator, can do with more panache than the Mail anyway.
Also I think the continuing development of the internet as a media will only damage the press in the long run and I don't think the Right, or at least the floating centre ground that have historically been more susceptible to right wing thought than left, and who make up the core of the Mail's readership, have engaged with the internet as much as left leaning types.
The Mail will carry on regardless of course but its popularity and impact will be hugely diminished.Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
I think that's pretty far-fetched, to be honest. I think they just don't hold with this new-fangled malarkey, or calculate that their readers don't.Comment
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Has Melanie Phillips been right on any subject?
The competition from the Web isn't far-fetched, just to explain, but it doesn't come from social networking sites so much as from online news and entertainment, together with blogs.Comment
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