Troll Britannia

Journalism. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it. Nowadays it can be seen as quite an intrusive and soul-destroying term, conjuring up the thought of wild-eyed toffs scribbling away madly at their meticulously organised desks.

But the thing is, when it’s done right, it’s brilliant. There are a countless number of fantastic writers out there who work their hardest to bring us interesting, productive and well-written articles for our hungry eyes and minds to devour.

 

However, on the other side of the coin, there is an increasing number of journalists who seem to delight in deliberately writing articles with the sole purpose of igniting controversy, and not in a positive way. The definition of journalism states that it is ‘a method of inquiry and literary style that aims to provide a service to the public by the dissemination and analysis of news and other information.’ So, essentially, it’s a public service. Clearly no one bothered to inform these people.

The first person that comes to my attention is Katie Hopkins. She is actually the woman to inspire this article of mine; I wrote about her in my blog about a month ago, which you can find here. You don’t have to spend very much time reading about Katie or listening to her views – she’s a frequent guest on ITV’s ‘This Morning’ on the sofa debate section of the programme – to come to realise that she is a very nasty piece of work indeed. She refers to ‘attachment parenting’ (or AP for short) as “one step away from C-R-A-P parenting”, thinks that the name of someone’s child is “an efficient way of working out what class that child comes from”, and more recently, referred to Kelly Osbourne as “a purple-headed dwarf with a face like a bitter lemon”. Please note that this is only the tip of the iceberg where Hopkins is concerned. If you want more, a simple search of her name into the YouTube engine will provide with an evening’s worth of entertainment.

Next up is Liz Jones, who recently appeared on Celebrity Big Brother but was a name in her own right through her weekly column in the Daily Mail which is, at best, darkly comical. but more often bordering dangerously on slanderous. You only have to read her column on how Holly Willoughby ‘betrayed women’ by posting a picture of herself with no make-up on Instagram, (apparently denying fact that women need make-up is “denouncing womanhood“ to see what I mean. Please, stop laughing, pull yourselves together, I haven’t finished yet. This brings me smoothly to her good friend Julie Burchill, who posted an article not so long ago about transgender women, referring to them as “dicks in chick’s clothing”. The article was quickly pulled by The Observer within just one day after hundreds of complaints by outraged readers, including myself.

 

And of course, I can’t write this article without referencing the king of the trolls himself, Richard Littlejohn, another Daily Mail joker. He falsely accused blogger and general all-round paragon of all things awesome Jack Monroe of “quitting her £27,000 a year job to live on benefits’ and ‘sitting at her laptop complaining about cuts”. Fortunately, Jack answered back both on her own blog and in her column in the Guardian in her usual classy style, shattering his lies, shutting down his bullshit and basically showing him up for the utter embarrassment that he truly is. But, most astonishingly, Littlejohn posted a blasphemous and hateful article on the tragic Lucy Meadows story, the transgender woman who took her own life due to the turmoil surrounding her gender and sexuality issues. It was believed that Littejohn’s article, in which he claimed that Meadows was “not only in the wrong body, but in the wrong job’ due to the fact that she would be ‘confusing young children”, was the trigger for Meadows’ suicide. As of today, Littlejohn is still employed under the Daily Mail, which says everything you need to know about their principles and morals.

 

Now, please allow me to recall the definition of journalism. ‘A method of inquiry and literary style that aims to provide a service to the public by the dissemination and analysis of news and other information.’ Has anybody seen anything that even resembles this definition in the articles I’ve posted? Am I missing something, or are these people not journalists at all, but merely professional trolls?

It is completely beyond me how these people can sleep at night, knowing that they actually read over what they’ve written and think that it’s acceptable. It pains me further to know that their editor has also re-read it, and said, ‘All looks good to me, let’s get this bad boy published!’ and pressed ‘submit’. I can’t comprehend how someone would want to live knowing that they are causing distress, anger, misery, and fury to people. What is their drive? Money? Power? Fame? It’s a question that will probably go unanswered.

These vile, heinous people could easily dress up their churned bullshit as ‘freedom of speech’, and I’m sure the journalists’ shield law protects them mightily against anyone looking to fight against them. These people live off the controversy, the gasps, the discussions that arise from their column. They feed off it like flies feed of faeces. Which I think you’ll find is quite an appropriate analogy.