Julie Birchill on why the press has been fairly quiet on Eric Joyce

[TheYellowOfTheEgg]

She pulls no punches in this article on the Eric Joyce and why the media hasn't gone for him. She's right that we hadn't heard much about how bad the stuff he was looking at was.

www.spiked-online.com/2020/08/12/the-silence-of-the-hacks/

Dido .....er, yes, in my opinion :)

I initially winced a bit at the attacks on IK - clearly she & JB loathe each other, & JB was absolutely relishing every spiteful little dig. Still think it undermines the main thrust of the piece tbh.

However. How come IK is even allowed to continue to cohabit with him with her vulnerable daughter? Why aren't SS involved?

I had an ex-colleague (teaching) who was discovered to be exchanging inappropriate messages with very young (11-12yo) students. He was prosecuted & also got a suspended sentence. His gf was initially very much in denial about it all (she was another colleague), but part of the conditions even before the suspended sentence was that he was no longer allowed to live with her & her young daughters. SS made it abundantly clear that if he was to be discovered having any contact with the gf's children, they would seek to protect them, if necessary by removing them from their mother's care.

Is IK just too much of a big wig to have to worry about this sort of thing?! Even if the daughter is 16 now, as PP said she was 14 when this came to light & is vulnerable.

If that is true that the daughter has DiGeorge syndrome-a quick google search shows that 90% of people with DiGeorge have learning difficulties. I sincerely hope that Eric Joyce is never left on his own with her.

It may be a condition of his sentence that he has no contact with vulnerable people....I assume he's on the sex offenders register, and his living arrangements will be known. Yes, it would be normal to have either no contact or only supervised contact with children or step children but it's not likely that the details of this would be in the press. It would be important to protect any vulnerable people's identities.

I agree - on the face of it, still living with IK and her daughter sounds really, really wrong.

FWIW I was also confused at the beginning of the article about what the relations of all the people in it were. It could have been a little more clear in laying that out, and I think it might have made the whole premise/argument around people being protected by their connections better too.

I agree it assumes you already know the context and who lives with who. It reads to me as if Burchill was aiming it at other journos as much as anyone else, calling them out on their cowardice and double standards. Whether that's justified or not is another matter - it's possible that some have tried and can't find a publisher, although that doesn't explain the silence on Twitter, Julie Bindel excepted.

Two more points then I must do some work:
Julie Bindel has a funny 'I am not Julie Burchill' Twitter thread going at the moment - sorry daren't link (meant to be working blah blah).
Secondly why did no-one tell me Julie Burchill was back on Twitter? Marvellous.

@Clymene perfectly articulated - it’s a disgrace

The hypocrisy of the Times is staggering. They slammed Zara Hyde Peters, who was due to become head of UK Athletics, because she had let her husband work with teens after he had been banned from teaching, even though he hadn't been convicted of any offence link. HP deserved to be criticised and rightly had to resign her position, but GOK how the Times had the nerve to slam her when they would have known what was coming down the line with IK.

You know I love the Feminism topic but it's a shame this couldn't be in Chat or somewhere that more people would read it.

I like this comment by India Knight:

We still don’t talk enough about the menopause, which is stupid because it happens to all women eventually.

Yep, women are a sex not a gender identity.

I was shocked at the time to hear that Joyce had such a lenient sentence. I don't know how widely the case was covered across all media, but surely India Knight is not such a powerful figure that she was able to ensure the media's relative silence? Any absence of coverage might be more down to the fact that Joyce is hardly a household name - and also perhaps, very depressingly, to a perception that his was not a major crime.

Princess, Julie Birchill's point wasn't so much that IK has a whole load of power - not in the Rupert Murdoch sense - but she has pals and contacts who have refrained from their usual commentary either in the press or on social media.

Yes, I see that, tiktok. Knight presumably knows a lot of media people, but surely not everyone who might have commented? And come to think of it, has Burchill written about Joyce in her Sunday Telegraph column?

I've just noticed that Julie Birchill is on Twitter too.

Underneath IK’s initial tweet lots of journos replied in support - Hadley Freeman, Janice Turner, Suzanne Moore, Jane Merrick amongst many others. I appreciate they may be friends of India’s and perhaps not aware of his crime at that time, but that coupled with the media silence does feel quite

I like The Times as they’re pretty good on trans stuff and have the amazing Janice Turner writing for them but I can’t stand Knight and don’t like the way they were pretty quiet on the Joyce matter, clearly to protect her. They also don’t allow comments on her articles of drivel which again is to protect her.

I don’t know that there has been media silence as such. It was in the Guardian, the Independent and on the BBC.

It's been buried. Typically, MPs behaving badly is a favourite sport of the press. And yet I'd literally never heard of Joyce's assaults until now.

Compare against the coverage of Elphicke's prosecution. Before and through the trial and massive feature on his wife (now the MP) in the Times.

Joyce? Crickets.

I think the coverage of Joyce's numerous transgressions has been visible, although not prominent. But the sentencing completely passed me by; it was definitely under reported.

India Knight is not such a powerful figure that she was able to ensure the media's relative silence?

It's not India the media are scared of, it's her step-father, who is the Chairman of the Times group link

It's an awful article. I read it first thing this morning and couldn't make it out at all, the key point, that India Knight is married to Eric Joyce was not spelt out at all, so I was left wondering why an article about a sex offender was ranting on about a journalist.

@TeiTetua

Sorry to to be a wet blanket among the general jollity, but I thought the article was a bit embarrassing. It's a hatchet job pure and simple, a one-sided attack on another person--in fact one woman savaging another. India Knight may well be something of a twit (or a complete twit, if you prefer) but I just thought Burchill went on too intently, too long. After this I came away with less respect for her.

Agree. All points lost in the spite.

Clymene, but Elphicke was an MP up till the last election, just 8 months ago. He was suspended from his party in 2017 when the sex offence allegations were made against him, but the suspension was lifted a year later so that he could vote in the no-confidence-in-the-government motion then. So I think it's not surprising that this added extra interest in him with regard to media coverage of his trial.

Joyce, on the other hand, stopped being an MP in 2015, and for the last 3 years of his time in the Commons he sat as an independent because he was first suspended by and then resigned from his party. I remember reading about the assault that got him suspended. So Joyce's political career was a bit further back in time than Elphicke's and he had already been disowned by his former party long before his recent prosecution.

As I said before, I was shocked that Joyce only got a suspended sentence. I really hope any lack of media coverage - although a PP has said she saw plenty of coverage, and I agree (but maybe I noticed it because I remembered Joyce's record of violence) - wasn't because his crime was regarded as 'no big deal'. I don't see his case as having been 'buried' for nefarious reasons of 'I won't call out my pal's partner' or 'I won't call out the partner of someone whose stepdad is a big media cheese'. I see it more as 'I don't think this will interest my readers much' (including Burchill's readers in the Sunday Telegraph). But of course I accept I could be totally wrong here.

You can request a review of his sentence here:

How to get a sentence reviewed
Make sure you submit your request as early as possible and within 28 days of the sentencing.
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• name of the person who got the sentence
• date the sentence was given
• court where the case was held
• crime committed
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