Bartlett's Bizarre Bazaar

Perhaps not. But Janet Street-Porter is, at best, a lazy columnist.

The column bearing her by-line that was printed today in The Independent is, for a large part, a faithful copy of the ‘Foreigners Are Stealing Christmas’ story printed in The Sun on Wednesday. The JS-P article is not a simple restatement of independently gathered facts, but bears the rhetorical imprinteur of the article in The Sun. JS-P repeats the dishonest trick that has been developed by The Sun to aid the fabrication of xenophobic propaganda. The Sun and JS-P both open their articles by describing how ‘Christmas is being banned to avoid offending ethnic minorities’. They both then support this statement of how the world is by citing examples of something Christamassy being altered for reasons that are categorically unrelated to ‘avoiding offending ethnic minorities’.

Why would JS-P attempt to forge an image of the world in which ethnic minorities are a cause of events that are rolled into one laughable title; ‘the banning of Christmas’?

Five Chinese Crackers is providing a public service by digesting the tide of hate-filled bullshit that is rising in the British press. FCC has, as usual, a superb takedown of relevant article in The Sun. The comprehensive shredding of the fabricated image of the world presented by The Sun would equally apply to the JS-P column, printed in a supposedly quality paper. I write ‘would’ because the JS-P column is a second-hand impressionistic reproduction of the tabloid story and as such has an even looser association with ‘evidence’. The Sun article, in comparison, is rigorous, balanced journalism. In fact The Sun article is bullshit. And that leaves the JS-P article as a diarrheic stain on a page.

Of course, JS-P might not have copied her column from The Sun. She might be an independent bigot.