When The Daily Mail Summons Its Writers To Make Sad Celebrities Of Their Children It’s Paedogeddon
DAILY Mail writers don’t have children, they have material. Among the coterie of wearisome women columnists that pour out self-parody in prose for the Daily Mail’s malevolent Mekon boss, Paul Dacre, Shona Sibary is the worst offender. While Liz Jones mines her own mental illness for copy, Sibary exploits her four children repeatedly and shamelessly, embarrassing them in print and online even more frequently than Samantha Brick mentions her horny-handed hairy scary of a husband.
Sibary has written endlessly about her family with the kind of detailed designed to make them all as miserable as she patently is but her latest column is a particular treat. In it she recounts how she ‘accidentally” came to be able to spy on her daughter’s text messages and how their content “shocked” her. In fact, she was so shocked that the only option was to transcribe them for a national newspaper and its internationally read website. Oh and she made sure to detail her every conversation with her daughter too.
Annie, the young girl in question, is 13-years-old. How must she feel knowing her mother has filleted her teenage burbling for fun and profit? Having been bullied at school for reasons far less dramatic, I can only imagine how easy it’ll be for tormenters to mock her and her over-sharing, insensitive mother. Particularly as this isn’t the first time that Sibary has held her daughter up as an avatar of teen life gone off the rails.
In August last year, Sibary penned another typically hysterical article that concluded that Annie and her older sister Flo are “sad clones” simply because they want to look like their friends and the celebrities they admire. In a piece which included a lot of pictures of the girls, Sibary concludes:
“It seems as if the shallow celebrity culture we live in is somehow sucking the very soul out of my lovely girls and turning them into something vacuous.”
Imagine having your mother write that about you as you struggle in that typical teenage way to establish your identity. And there is, of course, the crushing irony that Sibary is penning her almost heartless homilies in the Daily Mail, a temple to obsessive analysis of celebrity bodies, clothes and behaviour.
The latest article is even worse than Sibary’s previous exploitations of her daughters and her family life in general because it piles one abuse of privacy on another. One day, as a young woman, Annie will look back and read this features, perhaps coming to realise that her mother saw her more as a canvas onto which she could paint her Daily Mail approved opinions rather than a girl making mistakes and learning about life.
The Mail consistently bangs the drum for an odd pseudo-1950s morality while also pumping out a toxic sludge of tittle tattle and hurtful coverage of human tragedy and tragic celebrity. In the ranks of its rotten columnists, self-sabotaging creatures like Sibary who cannibalise their own family lives for a decent feature rate and some more desperately craved attention occupy the lowest circle of hell.
Posted: 20th, February 2014 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
