Fancy That!

The Good Old Days

Ian Hislop did write that pisspoor piece of abject, deadtree snobbery in Private Eye a few days ago that got so far up my nose. Paul Waugh in the Standard says the snivelling cub scout tried to justify his position thus:

He made the point that the McBride emails scoop was published first by national newspapers rather than on Guido's own blog, partly because it was the papers that took the legal risk and partly because of the wider exposure and impact.

Which sounds awfully similar to this, from the Hackwatch feature in this month's Eye:

Congratulations too [to Paul Staines] for his belated realisation of the superiority of the "dead tree press" in choosing to print not a word [of the smear emails] on his own "Guido Fawkes" website and hand them over instead to the Sunday Times and the News of the World.
That allowed Rupert Murdoch's lawyers to take on the legal risks and potential costs over which the fearless Fawkes had been fretting for some time...

Hmm, not like Hislop and the late Peter Cook, then. Independent, 2006:

"When I took over, I made a number of very pompous statements about how I was really going to cut the libel bills and this shoddy approach to libel wasn't going to exist any more. Then over the coming years, I managed to enter the Guinness Book of Records for the most money ever lost and hit a number of just huge payouts." Particularly painful were awards to the late Robert Maxwell and to Sonia Sutcliffe, the wife of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, who won £600,000 in libel damages from the Eye, although this sum was reduced to £60,000 on appeal.

So Hislop is apparently saying it's hyprocritical of Staines to have a sugar daddy like Peter Cook Rupert Murdoch and thus not have to worry about the consequences of publishing risky material. Fancy that!

(It's also rather interesting that Hislop's become such an institution, rather than digging up the dirt on parliament and all its evil works, he's now giving evidence to Select Committees, using his own articles as 'material'. Fancy that, again (sort of).

The last word came from Hislop, who for an anti-establishment figure sounded remarkably traditional on the shape of the meeja. He has no plans whatsoever to put the Eye online. "If you want to find out what's going on, buy it. Don't try and get it for free".

Charming. Well, ta Ian, but I think I'll pass.)