Err nerr nert er perrty
Oh no we saw him with her and them today.
Ed Sheeran has
hit back at[disputed] a report that claimed he attended a New Year’s Eve party at J.K. Rowling’s Scottish residence.
Denying a claim about oneself is not hitting, back or forward or any direction.
This isn’t just random, you know, this constant resort to claims of “hitting out at” and “hitting back at” and “gouging out the eyeballs of” in reference to people saying things. It’s of a piece with the frenzied rhetoric about putting trans people at risk by not endorsing every word any trans person says. Nobody is punching anybody; we are disputing claims. The two are not the same.
The “Shape Of You” singer took to his Instagram Stories last night (Jan. 21) to contest the original report by The Sun newspaper.
There you go. To contest. Not to hit back at; to contest. Skip the pretend violence in future. Metaphors are dangerous in journalism, especially when the journalists are hacks.
The story claimed that Sheeran was rumoured to have attended the event at Killiechassie House in Perth and Kinross, Scotland alongside other celebrities such as actor Daniel Craig and musicians U2 and The Pretenders.
Yo. The story was of a rumor. Level 2 from the beginning, see? When the story is about a rumor in the first place, it’s silly to pretend it’s about a fact.
Writing on his Instagram Stories, Sheeran responded to a post by broadcaster India Willoughby: “Respectfully, India Willoughby, and any other journalist who has reported both these stories, neither are true. I spent New Years with my friends and family”.
…
India Willoughby responded on X/Twitter writing: “Hi @edsheeran- this is great to hear. I used the word ‘reportedly’ about JK Rowling’s NYE party, because it was widely reported by UK and international media at the time. I also reached out directly to you in the first wk [sic] of Jan via Twitter to ask if the story was correct – but no reply. Delighted to hear you didn’t go!”
So India Willoughby is in charge of who goes where?
I did not know that.
My memory may be faulty, but it certainly seems like this biasing, emotive language wasn’t always the norm in mainstream journalism.
It definitely wasn’t. Journalists were supposed to subtract emotion, not add it.
I’d be morbidly curious to know if Daniel Radcliffe attended, given how he behaved like a little shit towards JKR initially.
Surely he wasn’t invited?
My bad, my brain replaced Craig with Radcliffe.
Brains will have their little jokes.
That sort of hyperbole has been standard tabloid-ese in UK for a very long time. Indeed, it was probably The Sun wot started it back in the 70s. It’s now so ingrained that I suspect nobody here even notices it any more.
“Yo. The story was of a rumor.”
Par for the course in all news regarding celebrities.
Nullius in Verba:
Eh, there was a period when the emotive language, at least, would’ve been frowned upon, but that was relatively short–a few decades, at most. Prior to that, honestly, the old newspaper types would’ve been right at home with Rupert Murdoch. I used to work at the Chicago Tribune, and got to see a ton of the old newspaper archives. Anything before the 50s, really, quite often included very charged and biased language. (I personally encountered the racial slurs “darkie” and “chink” in the text, and the latter was from an article in the 30s.) Media ‘professionalism’ didn’t really start to become a thing until mid-century. And in the US, at least, it got tossed out the window in the 80s, thanks to Reagan ditching the Fairness Doctrine.
Freemage, I just finished reading “The Magnificent Catastrophe”, about the election of 1800, and it’s interesting to see how many parallels I spotted with our current situation. Hyperbole? Check. Smearing reputations? Check. Polarization? Check. Emotive language? Check.
I recommend the book; it helps put things a bit more into perspective, though the results of that election were never as dire as what we have now. Still, there are some things that have been with us since the beginning of the US.