Myths in the Making

I was going to entitle this piece "Oh, you LIAR!" but that just
becomes obvious as you read further...

Richard Littlejohn is one of the many commentators that the Daily Mail keeps under the stairs, ready to be wheeled out whenever some splenic verbosity is required. He has recently been doing a series, a large spread that could be entitled, "Woe is us, we are all going to the dogs, the End is Nigh, etc etc". You know the type, standard Daily Mail fare.

And it wouldn't occupy my attention accept for the fact that Littlejohn decided to dive into an exploration of human rights. This is complicated political and legal territory and Littlejohn did his research. Alas for scholarship, his research limited itself to reading his own newspaper...

And so he reiterates some blatant lies that the Mail peddled. Isn't it touching that a Mail columnist - in the full knowledge of the tripe he himself writes - actually believes that the rest of the paper is solid gold fact?

One such lie, a myth in the making, is that hundreds of prisoners were awarded compensation after being refused heroin. It speaks to the sanity of Mail readers that they could ever think this could be true, but there you are. The case in question was actually about de-toxing from heroin. In the community, detox via the NHS is supported with a regimen of drugs which lessen the pains of the process. But in prisons, this support was absent, forcing the detoxers to suffer. The compensation came about because of this inexplicable disparity in treatment, which led to their being caused unnecessary suffering. Feel free to object to that, as you please, but it had bugger all to do with being refused heroin.

His whole diatribe is littered with these lies, rehashed from 'news' reports printed in the Mail. I could list a dozen others, patiently disassembling them for our joint amusement. But that would be to over-egg the pudding. You get the point - the Daily Mail prints lies like they are going out of fashion and Richard Littlejohn is either a lazy, incompetent journalist or a barefaced liar. Nothing you didn't know...