fridgemagnet

Blink and you would have missed it. In Saturday's Guardian, Charlie Brooker (created the fabulous tvgohome.com some time ago, produces a few TV shows, writes TV reviews) wrote about Bush's debate in a fairly full-on manner. Nothing you've probably not read already, but he's got a good turn of phrase:

Quite frankly, the man's either wired or mad. If it's the former, he should be flung out of office: tarred, feathered and kicked in the nuts. And if it's the latter, his behaviour goes beyond strange, and heads toward terrifying. He looks like he's listening to something we can't hear. He blinks, he mumbles, he lets a sentence trail off, starts a new one, then reverts back to whatever he was saying in the first place. Each time he recalls a statistic (either from memory or the voice in his head), he flashes us a dumb little smile, like a toddler proudly showing off its first bowel movement. Forgive me for employing the language of the playground, but the man's a tool...

...Throughout the debate, John Kerry, for his part, looks and sounds a bit like a haunted tree. But at least he's not a lying, sniggering, drink-driving, selfish, reckless, ignorant, dangerous, backward, drooling, twitching, blinking, mouse-faced little cheat.

But it was this bit that apparently got up the noses of the Freepers:

On November 2, the entire civilised world will be praying, praying Bush loses. And Sod's law dictates he'll probably win, thereby disproving the existence of God once and for all. The world will endure four more years of idiocy, arrogance and unwarranted bloodshed, with no benevolent deity to watch over and save us. John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, John Hinckley Jr - where are you now that we need you?

No! He's threatening the President with assassination! And thus begins another of the usual "astroturf" mass email campaigns, the perpetrators of which I'm sure 90% are quite happy with jokes about killing politicians as long as their name is Clinton, and would be appalled to see Ann Coulter's drivel pulled from national newspapers as a result of an email campaign by British lefties.

What did the Guardian do in response to this flood of e-whinging? They pulled the piece. I'm speechless. Well, not quite. Two immediate reactions were:

1. Spineless cowardly toads, giving in to a bunch of smirking arrogant hypocritical censorious partisan gits who aren't even in the same country and don't buy the paper;

2. You're making a rod for your own back here. This will happen again and again now. This is what they do. They won't stop. The Guardian, along with the BBC, is a hate figure for the US rightist wingnut brigade, and this will be treated as a victory.

My email of complaint to the Guardian, which makes similar points in a slightly more measured fashion:

I wish to complain about your pulling of the Charlie Brooker piece from the Guardian website, apparently as a result of an campaign by right-wing US net users.

Having read the original I can see no particular reason to remove it - as Mr Brooker says, the section about assassinating the President was clearly a joke, and only the most humourless or blindly partisan reader could take it as otherwise. Such jokes are made constantly in all sorts of media about all sorts of people and it is only the Guardian's high profile on the internet as a source of "leftist" and "anti-American" news that has made it a target in this instance. (Many of the forums and blogs which have led the campaign will have quite happily published jokes about killing President Clinton.)

It is worrying when newspapers seem vulnerable to this kind of organised, politically-motivated intimidation, and you can bet that it will not be the last time that they try this. Such tactics are used continually in the US and giving in to them just encourages their use.

The piece should have remained; adding the comment that now exists on the page concerned would have been perfectly sufficient. For the future of the Guardian as an independent news source, mass political email campaigns of fake grass-roots outrage ("astroturf") should simply be ignored as being what they are - part of a desire to quiet the voice of anyone who disagrees.

If you want to read the full article, incidentally, I've mirrored it here. Please feel free to pass that URL around and mirror it yourself.

Just to clarify here (and this should be obvious if you know me at all, but in case some idiot is reading): while I thought Brooker's piece was quite funny if a little OTT at times, that's not the reason I'm posting this. My position isn't "freedom of speech for people who fit my own prejudices". I don't campaign for Ann Coulter to be prevented from writing, even though I can't stand the woman. Hell, a good 50% of what I read in the papers makes me angry, and the other 50% usually makes me sleepy.