How the Sun does the work of the dead cat dealers
So…. Huw Edwards has been outed as the BBC star whose life the Sun decided to destroy over the last week.
Today, that man is in hospital for the foreseeable future and his wife had to make a statement to the world about her marriage.
Now, I’m not condoning men having affairs or cheating on their wives, I left my first husband because of his relationship with another woman. It was just awful and painful and humiliating. But I imagine having my business, my pain, the pain of my children plastered all over the papers and I would have been utterly broken. If I had to watch the man I was married to collapse and end up in hospital, his mental health destroyed because someone else decided to lie about what happened, sensationalise it for nothing, just because they could, everything would have been so much worse.
Huw Edwards reads the news. He isn’t a politician, he isn’t a prince, he isn’t a priest. Huw Edwards isn’t responsible for the failures of Government during the pandemic, he isn’t overseeing the worst refugee policy I’ve ever seen or driving people into poverty with appalling welfare policies or the cost of living crisis. He reads the news.
It appears that the Sun knew that the accusations were dodgy on Friday, after a lawyer contacted them on behalf of the young person at the centre of this to tell them that the story was rubbish. They apparently ran 39 stories over the last 6 days about the BBC presenter. They alluded to criminal behaviour and fed the ghouls and the ghastly that immediately labelled this as perverted and the victim as a child.
Why would they do that? Why would they set out to utterly destroy a man who really hasn’t done anything to justify this level of hatred?
Well, there appear to be a number of theories. Some think that The Tories want to undermine, destroy and privatise the BBC and the Sun is helping them with that. The BBC response to this story has been woeful, their internal processes seem to be chaotic and ineffective.
But is that really what’s going on?
I think it’s more likely that the Sun is being used to feed us the dead cat stories needed to obscure the failures of the Government.
Slapping a metaphorical dead cat down on the kitchen tables, the settees, the pub bars, the coffee tables of the country seems to be the Sun’s stock in trade. Creating shock waves, the distraction means we turn away from what’s really important and are distracted for long enough for the real stuff to slip past.
If the news, the papers, social media is talking about Huw Edwards, they are not talking about Boris Johnson’s failure to hand over evidence to the Covid enquiry.
If we are embroiled in the sleazy details of someone’s sex life, we are not paying attention to the hideous Refugee Bill going through Parliament just now. If we are angry at Huw Edwards then we are not angry at the poverty and inequality rampant in the UK just now.
Whipping up a mob over some bloke’s sex life serves only to obscure the real problems facing people. The intention is distract us from the hardships we might be facing and to project the blame and anger away from those responsible.
There is more than a whiff of homophobia about these stories too. The suggestions that we are seeing that Huw Edwards, like Derek Mackay, and Philip Schofield, were messaging younger men seems to have singled them out for targeted humiliation in a way that others are not. There is reported to be a bloody politician under investigation for several counts of raping women that no one is plastering on the front page of anything.
In today’s broken and judgemental, bigoted and strangely puritanical world anyone is fair game if they have the potential to be a distraction.
Don’t be fooled. Don’t let Murdoch and the powers that be, con you into thinking Huw Edwards is the devil incarnate.
He isn’t. He is a sad, ill and broken man. Stupid and sleazy he may be, but dear God almighty he did not deserve being used as a tool to protect the Government from scrutiny.
We get the press we deserve. Let’s demand better and for fucks sake let’s hope this is the end of the lies, misreporting and sensationalism that the Sun has made its stock in trade over the years. Cruelty surely should not be rewarded. Close it down now.
#DontBuyTheSun
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