People really love slagging-off media studies don't they. My mum was a media studies lecturer when I was growing up. It was incredibly healthy to have someone able to talk critically about what that box in the living room was beaming out.
This idea that it is intelligent to be able to critically appraise what's in novels, but not what's on the TV, is so deranged.
I also had an English teacher who would show us films and then frequently pause them to show how they were made, what they were trying to say, the way lighting and music were trying to make us feel a certain way.
Almost everyone spends a significant part of their life watching the screen and being influenced by it. The idea that it is somehow lazy or intellectually subnormal to care about that, and try to understand it, is properly bizarre.
The only conclusion you can really come to when someone slags off media studies is that they are trying to make up for their own intellectual insecurity.
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Really is incredible to think that the Tories announced compensation for victims of two scandals, then did nothing to arrange the money. Labour has had to put aside a massive chunk of the money they secured yesterday to fulfil a promise the previous government made.
You can criticise Starmer and Reeves for all sorts of things - insufficient honesty at the election, insufficient bravery now - but it is astonishing how comprehensively the last government ran the country into the fucking ground.
And this is on the faintly superficial end of things. I'm not even mentioning the asylum policies which froze the system and therefore ate money on accommodation costs, or the totally imaginary spending plans, or the tax cuts they knew we couldn't afford.
OBR document unveiled by Reeves says the previous govt "did not provide the OBR" with all the information available to them and their spring Budget forecast would have been "materially different" if they had.
This is absolutely ferocious knives-out politics. Properly murderous.
I suppose there's a smell of blood, so journalists are circling for it. But if there's anyone in the world who gives a genuine dried fuck about Taylor Swift's driving arrangements I'd be astonished.
There's a lot going on here. 1) The press has a right-wing bias and broadcasters follow its lead, so media doles out a much harder time to Labour than Tories. We'd probably forgotten the full extent of this.
There'll now be an awful lot of talk about becoming-the-story and lack-of-narrative and press relations. Fine. Whatever. But that wasn't her role. It was to unlock the machine and get things done. The current noise is just the daily nothing-clatter of Westminster life.
The government will require a carefully organised undistractable approach to delivery if it's going to demonstrate improvement. And that won't come from constant briefings and hysteria. It'll come from the missions.
There's no intellectual debate to be had about what's happening. It's not about immigration, or integration, or Islam. It's about a bunch of violent thugs blaming Muslims for a terrible crime, being instantly disproved, and then continuing with their bullshit anyway.
If you start saying we need to change policy, or reconsider an approach to anything at all on the back of this violence, you are basically legitimising it. You are laundering the reputation of Nazi thugs.
There's really no complexity here at all. They're cunts. The reptile part of the human brain. They threaten the safety of Muslims and Asians in general. They need to be universally condemned by politicians and stamped on hard by police. That's it. That's the response.
Lots of things can be true at the same time. 1) In opposition, Labour knew the Tories were playing a stupid, irresponsible little game with their future departmental spending & tax cuts. And yet they played along anyway, because it was inconvenient to do otherwise.
2) The figures, particularly on asylum housing costs, were worse than we realised. Labour said wonk and wonk-adjacent critics would change their tune after the statement. They were right. Conservative irresponsibility was, as Reeves says, worse than we thought.
3) The core point is that the Tories basically sabotaged the state. Freezing asylum applications, even though it would cost millions in hotels. Promising tax cuts even though officials were earning them that the prison system was about to collapse. It's truly unforgivable.