Friday, June 15, 2007

History is in the hands of the revisions

Victoria Newton is doing well this morning - unlike a lot of journalists, she's not fallen for the 'Shar Jackson pregnant with Kevin Federline's baby' story. In a report datelined June 14th, Newton reports the denials:

KEVIN FEDERLINE'S ex SHAR JACKSON has laughed off claims that she is having his fifth child.

Reports in the States suggested that BRITNEY SPEARS’ estranged husband was having a baby with Shar, already mum to two of his kids.

But today she joked: "I didn't know I was pregnant until this morning when I watched it on the news.

"I want to thank the news for telling me what's going on in my uterus.

"It's not true unfortunately."

This might come as a surprise to, erm, Victoria Newton's readers, who the day before had been told that Jackson was pregnant with Federline's baby. How can Newton explain this positively quantum pregnancy?

She doesn't need to - the paper has simply replaced the original 'she's pregnant' story with the current 'she's not pregnant' one
All that remains of the original story is a Google News search result, pointing now to a story which says the opposite of what it said twenty-foru hours before.

There's an interesting BBC Editor's Blog entry on the problems of this sort of tidying up of history, by the way.

Still, this isn't the worst thing in the The Sun this morning. Instead, that honour goes to one of the papers' unfunny Photoshop mock-ups. By way of illustration of a story that the Doctor Who finale will be shown at Gay Pride, they run a 'gay Dalek' picture.
We say 'gay dalek', what we meant was some lazy homophobia.

Just for the benefit of any Sun illustrators who might be around, and who seem to get their impression of gay men from 1970s sitcoms:

Being gay doesn't mean you like pink
Being gay doesn't mean you're going to dress like a leatherman
Being gay doesn't mean you have a limp wrist
Being gay doesn't mean you're effeminate
Being gay isn't a punchline in itself.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Didn't Victor Lewis-Smith invent gay daleks for TV Offal?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Sn2TT0DkvY

Oh yes.

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