(h/t Guest Who)
Some 16 hours ago the BBC's media editor tweeted the following:
Scoop: John Humphrys is joining the Daily Mail as a columnist. My very distinguished former colleague, who left @BBCr4today in September after 32yrs, starts on Saturday. Replaces Peter Oborne. Will range beyond politics. Suspect BBC will be in his sights from time to time!
He when then visited by a multitude of not-so-heavenly Corbynistas and FBPEers, so 2 hours ago he tweeted again:
If you want proof that, from a low base, Twitter has got so much worse so quickly of late, I recommend combining acclaimed BBC journalists and The Daily Mail in a single tweet. Btw on a point of information he voted Remain, and wrote a Sunday Times column for many years.
(For those wondering about the meaning of the title of this post, in his book John Humphrys revealed that his then colleague Sarah Montague "gave him a hard time" for reading The Daily Mail.)
Yes, I've never understood this snobbery about the Mail. Over the years I've regularly read at intervals, the Guardian, Times, and Independent. I can honestly say the Mail is the intellectual equal of the others, it's just (a) they tag on a lot more tabloid-style stories and (b) they are socially conservative sometimes (which for the Montagues of this world is the same as being unintelligent).
ReplyDelete...colleague Sarah Montague "gave him a hard time" for reading The Daily Mail
DeleteIn the world of the BBC it is the readers, (not the newspaper), that are always made fun of. That has always struck me as strange as it is pretty hard to know what is in the readers' minds. (My grandparents bought The Sun because it was the best for horse racing and the cheapest paper, another staid elderly aquaintance bought The Daily Mail for its pull-out TV guide). I guess what they are really saying is that if something is popular then the plebs like it and if the plebs like it then they don't, because they really don't like the plebs.