No more facts! I’m off to become a fake news media baron
Fake news is all the rage. And why not? After all, traditional news outlets have a frustrating habit of telling the reader things he or she may not wish to hear. Whereas fake news sites tell the reader exactly what he or she wants to hear all the time. Much better.
To cash in, I’ve created my own fake news empire, consisting of numerous websites, each tailored to a different political demographic. That way, no one need ever be confronted by a fact they don’t like ever again. Here are just a few.
The Jezuit
A news site for Corbynistas. It reports that Jeremy Corbyn is now entering his second uniformly successful year as prime minister, following the landslide election triumph that delivered him an unprecedented Commons majority of 651. Injustice has been eradicated, war abolished, and the Conservative Party reduced to a solitary hedge funder, currently on the run from the authorities somewhere between Kidlington and Stow-on-the-Wold. Readers are warned to ignore any MSM outlet that claims Mr Corbyn is merely Leader of the Opposition. This is a classic Blairite smear.
The Metropolitan Line
A news site for the liberal elite. It reports that Brexit has been averted, after four million northern Leave voters agreed to back down in exchange for a Sky Sports HD package, a crate of Boddingtons and something called a “bacon barm”. Other popular stories include “Revealed: The Hot New Opinion That Will Make You an Inherently Superior Person Just for Expressing It” and “The Rest of Britain: Where Is It, and Do They Have Uber?”
Liam Fox News
A news site for Eurosceptic Tory MPs. It reveals that Brexit has in fact already taken place, but has proven such a roaring success that the horrified liberal media, in league with Brussels, has deliberately covered it up, pretending that there are years of difficult and potentially unhappy negotiations yet to come. Thankfully, trade is already booming with our friends in the Commonwealth – or “the Empire”, as they now insist on being known. Only this week, Liam Fox visited the Polynesian archipelago of Tuvalu to tie up a trade deal, thought to be worth pounds.
I’m always interested in the evolution of language. There was a fascinating example the other day in the hard-Left newspaper The Morning Star. “Final Liberation of Aleppo Is In Sight,” it proclaimed. In the past, I gather, “to liberate” someone meant “to set them free”. But now, evidently, it means to murder them. Then again, perhaps the old sense still applies, and they meant that the Assad regime is liberating women and children from the burdens of this wretched earthly life, allowing them to begin a new and better existence in the world beyond. Quite noble, really. Incidentally, Jeremy Corbyn – a longstanding contributor to The Morning Star – said he didn’t “agree with” its Aleppo headline. He added, however, that he also “frequently disagree[s] with headlines in the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Mail”.
Classic Corbyn. I condemn this headline, and all other forms of headline…
New research suggests that fewer teenagers than ever are smoking. Less than 5 per cent of those aged 15 or below, apparently, have even tried a cigarette.
Remarkable to think that, just a couple of generations ago, practically everyone smoked – and many started at a very young age. In his wonderful sequence of memoirs, The Smoking Diaries, the late playwright Simon Gray wrote that he started smoking in 1942 – at the age of just six. All his friends smoked, too.
“Our smoking was exhilaratingly furtive,” he recalled lovingly, “the deep, dark, swirling pleasures of the smoke being sucked into fresh, pink, welcoming lungs, it took me just three or four cigarettes to acquire the habit and you know there are still moments now when I catch more than a memory of the first suckings-in, the slow leakings-out when the smoke seems to fill the nostril with far more than the experience of itself, and I regret the hundreds and hundreds or thousands of cigarettes that I never experienced, inhaled and exhaled without noticing…” What an irresistibly vivid writer he was. Even though you know it was smoking that killed him, his rapturous, meandering lyricism makes you almost want to start yourself.
If you’ve got a teenager, make sure they don’t take up reading. It’s a very dangerous habit.
A colleague has just bought her first flat – and discovered something all homeowners know. The happiest night you spend in a home of your own is the first.
I remember the first night my wife and I spent in our house. We weren’t moving our stuff in until the weekend, so the house was completely bare: no television, no pictures, no furniture, nothing. Not even a bed. All we had was ourselves. We slept on the floor in sleeping bags. I loved it. So exciting. I felt like a child going camping.
I’ve often thought I would have been very happy to keep it like that. Once all our possessions were in place, it just wasn’t the same. I somehow doubt, though, that my wife would have agreed to live in an unfurnished house. This may be a difference between men and women: men often harbour an ascetic, atavistic fantasy of surviving heroically on the bare minimum, no fuss, no frills, no Nescafé Dolce Gusto Melody 3 Coffee Machine in black by De’Longhi. Dreamily they picture their home as little more than a roof. A shelter. A cave.
If all the wives in the country went on holiday abroad together for a single week, they’d probably come back to find us roaming the streets in squirrelskins, hunting cats with sticks and eating out of bins.