Sunday, February 25, 2007

Trash journalism

You know, it really is extraordinary how much licence the press are given to spread around incorrect ideas. Any other profession would be held far more tightly to account if they were found spreading misleading information on the scale and frequency of the national newspapers.

Throughout the 1990s, as a teenager, I used to read the Sunday papers with anger as I encountered one misandric opinion piece after another by bitchy female journalists. Of course, as a teenager you give more weight than is probably due to such societal institutions as the national papers. Upon getting older, wiser and now having a website to vent my anger and incredulity, its easier to deal with this stuff. But I imagine it does have a real effect on the male youth to see how much hate is poured out against them by the national newspapers. Even supposedly intelligent ones.

Of course, the papers thrive on 'winding people up' in order to grab attention. So they probably love those kind of articles. This will probably become even more so as the newspaper business moves online more, and they are able to track better exactly which articles are read the most, and most commented on. Although thanks to the thriving men's movement online, it could end up being articles which are man-friendly which end up dominating the papers (wishful thinking perhaps, but they ARE desperate to chase the advertising revenue from companies eager to find a way to market to men).

It is baring this all in mind that I present this piece of crap:

Pow! Take that lowly man!

As far as articles go, its not half as hateful as many I've read, but its so riven with holes that if it were a piece of furniture it would collapse in 2 seconds.

Just to take one example: near the beginning of the article she claims that women are better at DIY than men. Why? Because 38% of children learn their DIY skills from their mothers compared to 34% from their fathers. Given that, for various reasons - including women divorcing the father, or the child never having the opportunity to meet their father - you would expect more children to have to learn those skills from the mother, simply because they spend more time with them. This could be the case even if mother's DIY skills were practically non-existent. It telling you NOTHING about the levels of skills that fathers or mothers possess in this area. Yet its given as evidence for women, as the headline claims: "Outperforming men" in the area of DIY.

Anyone who has even the slightest amount of logical ability can tear articles like this to shreds. Why do the national newspapers print them? because they don't give a sh*t about attacking men and boys.

Probably the most sickening bit in the article was the way that at the end, one of the key bits of evidence that women are outperforming men was that the suicide rate for men is almost 4 times as high as for women. Including this within a 'go get em girls', triumphant article is nothing short of sick and hateful. Its compounded by the fact that whenever there is the slightest evidence that women are 'suffering' in any aspect of their lives, its taken as evidence that men are sexist against them, and is used as a rallying cry of 'something must be done!'. Yet whenever men are suffering in any area its taken as evidence that they are weaker than women.

I cannot express strongly enough my disgust and contempt at these hateful, trash journalists.

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