I’m not really familiar with the woman, but I am familiar with the Daily Mail, who write nonsensical stories throughout the day, devoid of facts, heavily biased, and most of them opinion-led, despite claiming overwhelming to the contrary.
Lines like “we’ll never know if” and “who could say what might happen if” are the sort of things you can expect to find.
A good journalist might attempt to find out “what if”, or better still – check if there is any likelihood of that actually happening or having happened. However, non-scandalous fact-based stories don’t seem to sell papers as easily.
The article that has got up most of the Twitter users’ collective noses today, is a questioning piece that suggests that the late Stephen Gately must have died from something other than the norm, and that people don’t just die suddenly for no reason.
It tries to suggest that all people wait til they’re old and grey to leave the earth, unless they get run over, take drugs, or contract cancer (and we all know just being male give you cancer).
This has been debated at length already, and here are the best three opinion pieces on why Jan Moir is a clueless idiot.
1. This is childish but funny, and frankly it’s an article with about as many facts in it.
(http://notsowunderbar.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-there-is-nothing-natural-about-jan.html)
2. This one breaks it down into the points she has got most wrong, including the gay-bashing and linking of unrelated celebrity deaths.
(http://enemiesofreason.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-there-is-nothing-natural-about-life.html)
3. Charlie Brooker in The Guardian. Some points similar/identical to #2 above, but then expanding in some areas.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/16/stephen-gately-jan-moir)
I’ve commented on The Guardian one, but in the time it took me to type my comment, there had been another 73 comments posted.
Here’s what I wrote:
I don’t know why, but I found myself drawn to the bit where she claims nobody young and apparently healthy ever dies suddenly, or of a medical problem they don’t know they have.
Nobody.
Like Dermot Morgan
or Martin Kelly or Natasha Richardson.
Those people were all old though, yeah? Like 40+!Nobody under 40 ever dies from an undiagnosed health condition…
Except Christopher Price, or to coin a recent article, this recent example where the DailyMail argued that a young girl was killed by a cancer jab, despite having no proof and the health organisations saying that she clearly wasn’t.
In some reports, they even used wording like “the health trust would give us no further information” to make it sound like they were being denied scandalous information, when the actual fact was that [the trust] had no more information and were still running tests.Why anyone reads the Daily Mail is beyond me. I’ve seen more factual information written in limericks on toilet walls.