Just got back from picking up the latest issue of The Sun from the corner shop. Oh how I laughed at the obfuscation on the front cover. Yesterday, the news that the editor of The Sun, Rebekah Wade, was arrested for assaulting her husband, the actor Ross Kemp, was all over the online and broadcast media. Kemp is currently the biggest story in showbiz in the UK - his return to the soap opera EASTENDERS has single handedly returned the long-moribund serial to the spotlight. His reputation as a screen hardman has been lampooned both in Ricky Gervais's EXTRAS, and in Tony Holland's recent self-referential gags in last week's EASTENDERS. What a delightful little inversion it was for the news sites to imply that this hulking great brute of a guy is actually a slapped-around, hen-pecked, house husband. Or, in the case of the latest edition of the thoroughly untrustworthy POPBITCH, to imply that the guy was a swingin' bi caught out by his furious missus.
So, on the cover of today's THE SUN? They run a story about Kemp's co-star Steve McFadden, being beaten up by his lover. They and their sunday edition, THE NEWS OF THE WORLD, have been focusing on McFadden's "complicated" love-life for a while now, almost as if they had a secret agenda or somefin'. And then they hide the Kemp story on a sidebar on page seven, under the diminutive, strangled-English header "and his bruv's had a spot of bovver, too". I swear, Murdoch won't be 'appy until everywan in the U.K. speaks like a poorly educated Essex teen-age-ah. Or Dick Van Dyke.
Now if this level of media-bias was on show at the BBC, The bloody Sun would be currently baying for blood right now, wouldn't it? Hypocrites.