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Mick Hume
Can the police solve a murder on Facebook?
The media circus surrounding the Joanna Yeates case reveals what can happen when a murder inquiry gets mixed up with a PR campaign.
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| Monday 3 August 2009 |
Tim Black
Bobby Robson and the decline of British decency
He was by all accounts a lovely bloke. But behind the effusive eulogising there lurks a disdain for today’s allegedly crass football fans and players.
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| Monday 23 March 2009 |
Frank Furedi
After Jade, whose death will we watch next?
The salacious reports of Jade Goody’s physical demise confirm that death is the new sex: a form of voyeuristic entertainment.
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| Monday 23 March 2009 |
Brendan O’Neill
Jade and the tyranny of ‘anti-racism’
Everyone remembers the tabloid witch-hunting of Jade Goody. But the broadsheet witch hunt was far more terrifying.
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| Monday 23 March 2009 |
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick
Jade and the dangers of smear testing
Cancer charities hope that ‘Jade’s legacy’ will be more uptake of cervical smear tests. This might not be a good thing.
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| Monday 2 March 2009 |
Mick Hume
Should private tragedies be for public consumption?
Reactions to the untimely death of the Tory leader’s young son reveal much about the problems with the media and politics today.
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| Monday 2 March 2009 |
Tiffany Jenkins
Modern society’s jaded view of life
As Jade Goody’s slow death in public shows, dying is celebrated as one of the few things that still seems to unite us.
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| Monday 23 February 2009 |
Brendan O’Neill
Jade, Diana and the myth of public hysteria
Commentators are made uncomfortable by Jade Goody because she’s a product of the degenerate celebrity culture that they helped to institute.
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| Thursday 4 September 2008 |
Brendan O’Neill
Jade Goody and her ‘celebrity cancer’
The respectable media are outraged by Jade’s illness-as-publicity-stunt. Yet they’re the ones who made cancer a subject for public titillation.
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| Tuesday 8 April 2008 |
Mick Hume
Diana’s death: new myths for old
If you believe that this decade-long circus has all been Mr Al-Fayed’s fault, you’ll believe anything.
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| Thursday 17 January 2008 |
Brendan O’Neill
Princess Diana: off with her figurehead!
Bitchiness, backstabbing, cults, conspiracies: the inquest into Diana's death shows the triumph of backward court politics over republicanism.
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| Friday 31 August 2007 |
Mick Hume
Why Diana is always with us
Ten years after Diana died, an emotionally-correct, victim-oriented Britain, bereft of real heroes, still clings to the princess.
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| Thursday 24 May 2007 |
Mick Hume
'Maddie' and the media in Britain AD (After Diana)
The three-week emotional outpouring around the missing Madeleine McCann has laid bare much about British culture today.
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| Thursday 14 December 2006 |
Mick Hume
Diana report: an accident waiting to happen
Read Mick Hume's Notebook in The Times (London).
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| Friday 8 September 2006 |
Mick Hume
How long before we have Goodbye! magazine, with pics of celebrity funerals?
Read spiked editor Mick Hume's Notebook on Steve Irwin in The Times (London).
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| Thursday 7 September 2006 |
Rob Lyons
Crikey! He was only a TV presenter
He wasn’t a pope or royalty or a great leader. So what explains the international public mourning for croc-wrestler Steve Irwin?
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| Monday 28 November 2005 |
Rob Lyons
George Best: grief shouldn’t be a national sport
Alongside the celebrations of a great footballer, the response to the death of Best brought out the worst in contemporary society.
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| Monday 4 April 2005 |
Brendan O’Neill
Pope John Paul II: fast-tracked to celebrity sainthood?
How he became 'the Greatest Pope' - by dying.
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| Tuesday 9 March 2004 |
Frank Furedi
The politics of the lonely crowd
Protest movements get personal.
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| Friday 5 March 2004 |
Brendan O’Neill
Tears of a crowd
Patrick West’s Conspicuous Compassion is a snapshot album of the rise of public mourning rituals.
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