No recriminations or anything, just an interesting thing that happened this morning on the Twitter. I was listening to Radio Five when the sad news that David Cameron’s son had died broke. This sort of “news” is normally queue to turn off radio and TV, as there’s nothing to be said, but they’ll insist on saying it over and over again. But before I got to the switch, Nicky Campbell read out the statement from the Conservatives that (paraphrased) said: “the Camerons hope that people will respect thier privacy” and without pausing for breath “we want your views on 0845 etc”. That’s everything that’s shitty about modern media, so I tweeted:
Which obviously resonated with podnosh, who retweeted (taking out the bit about Morrissey — reasons of space, or reasons of musical taste, I dunno):
But by the time it had made Twitter search:
There was a subtle difference there, this tweeter had a problem with Nicky Campbell that I hadn’t articulated in my original, but it’s attributed to me there. There’s a subtle difference between “what cock” and “what a cock” — enough to cause libel-ish issues if I was famous enough for people to leap on to criticise. Had I thought “better” of my original statement and deleted it, only the retweets would have been on the web — how would I prove my innocence in “what-a-cock-gate”?
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