Asad Hashim

This piece by the excellent Simon Jenkins at The Guardian.

An autumn sun was shining. A late rose bloomed in the garden. The blackbird was in song. Then the BBC did its bit. No sooner was the morning news over than the radio cried: “Now for rape … We should warn listeners that this programme contains explicit descriptions of rape.” Just the thing for a nice cup of coffee.

A presumably female audience was then treated to a morning menu of unrelieved misery. After rape, Woman’s Hour gave them codeine addicts, war widows, thigh-high boots and heroin-dosed children taken into care. A discussion on how to survive brain damage offered some light relief.

This fare was not exceptional. A Martian listening to Radio 4 today would assume that the females on planet Earth were a genus of raped, harassed, child-oppressed, drug-addicted, underpaid and joyless victims, living in a perpetual state of dependency and bowel cancer. Not since Genesis have women had a worse press.

Also, this from The Guardian’s Sportsblog, on sportswriting.

The last thing the sportblog needs is an essay straddling the disparate worlds of media studies and amateur psychology, especially on a subject as esoteric as the American media’s bizarre obsession with the British media. But it’s my blog, so here goes. I promise to keep it short.

Sports journalism in America has long had a very high opinion of itself. This was justified in years past, when the likes of Jim Murray, Red Smith and, latterly, Rick Reilly established themselves as the finest sportswriters in the English language. That tradition has faded in recent years, although the self-regard has not. The upshot is a refusal of some – though not all – American sports journalists to face up to their own failings, the most grating of which is abject sycophancy towards those whom they cover. Rather than address this, and other, flaws, it is much easier to address what they perceive to be the flaws of others, not least because it reinforces their own sense of misplaced superiority.