Inside the snowflake globe: Shake the British media and you'll find a tiny world talking to itself
From the shock of someone like them having to apply for universal credit to Giles Coren going legal to be left alone, its an industry that protects its own.
After discovering that reaping is not remotely as fun as sowing, Giles Coren has instructed his lawyers. They’ve been contacting newspapers’ legal departments — a reliable source sent me an example of one of the notes — to say that the focus on him since his grim subtweets about the early death of Dawn Foster is causing distress for his family.
While there is no excuse for causing upset to young children and doorstepping people at their family home is rarely justified, Giles Coren works for The Times a paper which, along with its tabloid sibling The Sun, makes no bones about using those exact same tactics against people it deems worthy of that attention.
It’s also richer than the richest gravy for Coren to complain about familial distress after he gloated about a woman’s death just days after it happened. Coren’s glee caused distress to Dawn Foster’s mother but she neither has access to an expensive law firm nor the ability to have her say in one of several national newspaper columns.
And let’s remember what Coren wrote that caused such distress to Dawn’s family and her many grieving friends. He first tweeted at 13:15 on 20 July 2021 a message that read…
When someone dies who has trolled you on Twitter, saying vile and hurtful things about you and your family, is it okay to be like, “I’m sorry for the people who loved you, and any human death diminishes me, but can you fuck off on to hell now where you belong”?
… before deleting that after some time and replacing it with what it seems he considered a ‘milder’ version at 14:16 on the same day:
When someone dies who has trolled you on Twitter, saying vile and hurtful things about you and your family, is it okay to be like, “I’m sorry for the people who loved you, and any human death diminishes me, but,
HA HA HA HA HA HA”?
Perhaps Michael White’s family suffered distress when Coren baselessly accused him of being a paedophile and threatened to stab him. There’s a good chance that the parents of the child that Coren fantasised about killing, burning and fucking found that distressing. The catalogue of horrific things Coren has said and done — which I laid out in a previous newsletter — offers plenty of other families who have been distressed by his actions.
No doubt Coren’s children — whose distress his lawyers have particularly invoked — will experience a modicum of distress in the future when they read some of the things their father has written about them.
Will his daughter be delighted by the now notorious Times feature in which her father wrote about holidaying with her aged three as being “the most insanely romantic holiday, in some ways even the sexiest holiday” that he’d ever had?
Will his son chuckle like papa or be utterly devastated to read the Esquire article in which his dad called him — then aged four — as “a fat little bastard” and a “chubby fucker” before saying he had “an arse on him like Vanessa Feltz and a full-frontal presentation at bath time that puts one in mind of a Gavin and Stacey-era James Corden”?
Anyone in a ‘normal’ job within a ‘normal’ profession1 would be shunned by their colleagues if they talked about their children like that. And they’d most likely be on the fast track to a social Siberia followed by a social services visit and a quick hard drive check.
But Coren lives within the snowflake globe of the British media; a small world where its inhabitants can say whatever they like about people beyond its glass walls but shatter if they face the same treatment. Coren is a columnist, a class of people in British life who are allowed to both dish it out and gather up their petticoats when they get it back.
On the same day that Coren’s lawyers were warning newspapers to leave him alone, The Times featured a story on the front page of its Saturday Review about the dancer Adam Cooper with the headline “I had to apply for universal credit. It was devasting.” The ‘shock’ is there because ‘someone like them’ has had to turn to the cruellest part of the social safety net — a net that the Conservative Party, supported by The Times, has been going at with scissors for over decade now — but had it been someone outside of their group they’d merely have shrugged.
The feature opens with a paragraph that reads:
If audiences are delighted by the return of the Sadler’s Wells summer show, think how its star must feel. Adam Cooper, who leads the cast in Singin’ in the Rain, hasn’t had a proper job since the pandemic started. Along with many other freelance artists who work in the commercial theatre, he didn’t qualify for the government’s furlough scheme and had to rely on universal credit to get by. He even tried to make ends meet as a delivery driver, but demand was so high he never got an interview.
Focus on the words “had to rely on universal credit” and “hasn’t had a proper job since the pandemic started” and you see why there is so much benefits stigma.
Research by Turn2us, a national charity for people struggling financially, found that 1 in 5 people believed a majority of benefits claims were false (official statistics put the fraud rate at 1.4%.
The charity also found that the public now sees those making use of the social security system as less deserving than they did 30 years ago. There were big shifts in the late-90s and early-00s when both the Blair government and the newspapers put heavy emphasis on “scroungers” and TV companies began commissioning shows like Benefits Street.
The Times angle on Adam Cooper’s story was not — as Lower Form Of Wit noted — “isn’t it terrible that people have to be put through this indignity?” but “isn’t it terrible that one of our own people have to be put through this indignity?” The previous mention of universal credit in the pages of The Times came on July 8th in a straight news story headlined £20 increase in universal credit to end in the autumn. The move didn’t seem to cause much outrage among Times columnists
In April, Iain Duncan Smith — the architect of universal credit — was given space by The Times to argue that “remnants of the clunky legacy system continue to hold universal credit back from reaching its potential.” The only riposte to his laughable claim came not from a Times columnist or reporter, but the first contribution to the comment section which reads:
When Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith was the architect of universal credit and, to date, it has been a total disaster. My better half has been working on the front line at a Job Centre for over 25 years so he should know! It’s complicated, cumbersome and, in the most urgent cases, totally unworkable… at least be man enough to take responsibility!
The casual callousness of the Cooper interview is like the sharp hypocrisy of Coren wailing about distress being caused to his family. The residents of the snowflake globe only recognise pain is real when it happens to them. They have taken Mel Brooks’ line “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die,” as not just a funny and observant line but a maxim for living. Things only truly matter when they make it through the glass walls into the columnists’ own narrow lives.
It’s also an iron law of the British media that newspapers should ignore and even loudly reject the notion that they have any influence on culture and politics. So it was that in the very same edition of The Times Saturday Review — a few pages on from the Cooper feature — an interview with Nish Kumar contained the following passage:
… The 35-year-old stand-up comedian has acquired a reputation as the comedy equivalent of that Private Eye creation Dave Spart. As the host of the satirical TV show The Mash Report, Kumar became an early combatant in the culture wars that started out on the margins of Twitter and Facebook and now seem to dominate much of our daily conversation.
As the journalist, Chaminda Jayanetti replied after I posted the passage on Twitter: “… The Times complaining that culture wars are part of ‘our daily conversation’ is like Nigel Farage complaining there’s too much talk about immigrants.” I did a rough count of the number of pieces published by The Times about or significantly mentioning ‘culture war’ in the past month. There had been 26. The number has ticked up by three this morning thanks to the latest edition of The Sunday Times.
The only people who would compare Nish Kumar to Dave Spart — a tiresome parody of the hard-left that ceased to be funny in about 1978 — are those who have not actually watched or listened to any of his work but have instead gorged on the bad faith interpretations of him offered up by newspapers including… The Times but especially its sceptic sibling The Sun. The tabloid gleefully reported the end of The Mash Report with the headline “NISH MASH BOSH!”, celebrating it as a win for Director-General Tim Davie in his “war against woke lefties”.
Clive Davis, author of the Kumar interview, goes on to note that…
[Kumar is] exceptionally articulate, he listens politely, and he sometimes makes fun of himself.
… ‘compliments’ that feel qwhite loaded. But the biggest takeaway from the piece is the way that Times journalists distance themselves from the actions of their colleagues at The Sun (“It all came to a head in 2019 when tabloid headlines chortled over the sight of him being booed…”) and their own paper’s role in the promotion and amplification of the culture war.
Davis fails to mention that The Times also reported on the incident at a charity event when Kumar was not only booed but pelted with bread rolls. His colleague, Patrick Kidd, wrote…
There is a time for comedians to provoke and a time to please. And when your audience has paid £149 a head to be entertained at a swanky charity Christmas lunch, it is probably unwise to make overly partisan cracks about those three contentious B words: Boris, Brexit and Bercow.
… and went on to accuse Kumar of “playing the race card”
Still, it’s not a surprise that Times journalists think it’s so different when they do it when The Times’ lawyers, as noted by The Guardian’s Jim Waterson, believe that Times readers are a completely different species to Sun readers.
Going through arguments in Mike Ashley’s latest legal case, Waterson spotted The Times’ lawyers “trying (and failing) to convince a high court judge that words in the English language mean something different to Times readers because Times readers are inherently just so much cleverer than the general public”. The relevant passage from the document reads:
Counsel for TNL [Times Newspapers Limited] submitted in writing that the hypothetical reasonable reader is taken to be one who is representative of those who read the publication in which the statement complained of was published i.e. The Times. Reliance was placed on case law where it was said that in respect of The Times this hypothetical person is ‘amongst the more highly educated and better-informed members of the public’… it was argued that the “ordinary reader of the print and digital version of The Times can be taken to be educated, informed, and discerning, and, as such, able to follow articles on complex topics, such as the articles giving rise to this claim”.
The judge didn’t buy that argument remotely:
I do not consider that the words would mean one thing to the claimed ‘educated, informed and discerning’ reader (whatever that means) and something else to those claimed to be less educated. The hypothetical reasonable reader is not someone who is to be identified according to letters after their name. I proceed on the basis that such a person is simply someone who understands the English language… I do not consider these articles would mean something different if they were being read by readers of The Sun as opposed to The Times.
That’s as close as a high court judge is allowed to get to saying, “What the ever-loving fuck are you talking about?”
What the TNL counsel tried to argue in court is a belief that is displayed in the pages of The Times and Sunday Times every day: We are a special breed and our readers understand that. It is a They Live approach that suggests if you have the special glasses you can look at the pages of those newspapers and see the true message.
But there can be few legal arguments in the history of jurisprudence as flimsy as suggesting readers who consume and enjoy Giles Coren columns on a regular basis are superior to other members of the public. That’s something that should certainly cause distress to their families.
“Normal” is used here in an entirely comparative sense to the utterly bizarre world of the media.