All my Christmases have come at once with an early gift from the Daily Mail‘s new Corrections and Clarifications column. “We are happy to make clear that Winterval did not rename or replace Christmas,” the newspaper writes today, in response to reader complaints about a Melanie Phillips article.
For media blogging nerds like me, frantically typing this post in a slightly darkened spare bedroom to get rid of the sense of ennui and despair, this is a truly amazing day. For years we’ve been banging on about media myths and stuff having been made up; for years, we’ve been patronised or ignored, while politicians like Eric Pickles have happily bought into the bogus mythology as it suits their agenda.
My fellow media blogger Kevin Arscott should take a bow for his stellar essay on Winterval, its origins and its development as a fable that apparently showed the PC Brigade had gone well and truly mad, rather than the throwaway marketing exercise from Birmingham City Council it actually was. Many other bloggers have been pushing the issue for years now. No, Winterval didn’t replace Christmas, we said. No, Christmas wasn’t renamed Winterval, we said; that wasn’t it at all.
The more noise we made, the more it seemed that the stories would return. Winterval was the politically correct way of referring to Christmas; it was taking Christ out of Christmas; it was part of the PC killjoys’ attempts to de-Christianise Britain and bring us all into an Iron Curtain world of secularist misery. The myth kept on coming back — every year, at Christmas time, or before.
These “X is being banned” stories are all essentially the same, when you boil them down. Whether it’s poppies being banned by troop-hating fast food franchises, England shirts being banned by immigrant bus drivers or Christmas being banned by killjoy councils scared of offending minorities, the tale follows a standard pattern. The totemic object — the poppy, the England shirt, the baby Jesus — is being rejected because of a prevailing spectral force of injustice — political correctness, jobsworths, The Left and so on — and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Get angry now!
People do get angry. Facebook campaigns begin. Statements in CAPITAL LETTERS reverberate around Twitter. A little later down the line, when the anger has subsided and the truth is revealed to be not quite as terrible as it was at first made out to be, it doesn’t get put right, and so sits around to be woken up again at the next Remembrance Day, or Christmas season, or England appearance in an international tournament.
Now, thanks to the Mail‘s sensible and ethical new policy of correcting and clarifying where possible, there’s the chance to see these things rectified. There it is, in black and white: Christmas was not renamed Winterval. Whenever someone tells you it was, you can point out that the Mail admitted it wasn’t. You can even link to the original piece, where a correction has been made underneath the article.
Amid the praise that should be given to the Mail for correcting the Phillips article, there is a slight note of caution. This may well be seen, as Phillips said herself in the original piece, as “the Left” (capital L essential) “muzzling rational debate”. Why, it’s even got to the stage nowadays where you can’t even say something that isn’t true in a national newspaper without having to correct it, thanks to the Left! The forces of political correctness and the Thought Police have become so insidious, they’ve managed to make Paul Dacre willingly clarify Daily Mail articles in the Daily Mail.
Well, I don’t think anyone on The Left (I might capitalise the T as well, to make us sound even more SINISTER) wants to see “rational debate” muzzled. It’s the “saying things that aren’t true” bit; for some reason — we’re just awful people essentially, and hate freedom — that winds us up a bit. By all means let’s have a rational debate about how THE LEFT (it’s nicer all in capitals, I think) are shutting down debate by only allowing handsomely paid right-wing columnists to say the same things repeatedly all the time.
But saying things that aren’t accurate in a mass-circulation newspaper isn’t a very good thing to do, morally or journalistically. Get the facts right and we’ll have a debate about the rest.
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