The deputy leader of UKIP has hit out at a regional daily for posting “negative, biased comments” about him on its website during his appearance on a TV panel show.
Paul Nuttall, a Member of the European Parliament, took to Twitter to criticise the Liverpool Echo for the live blog it ran during Thursday night’s Question Time programme on BBC1.
The Echo had decided to launch the liveblog during the show as it featured Liverpool native Mr Nuttall, as well as Conservative Wirral West MP Esther McVey.
Political reporter Liam Murphy posted a number of readers’ tweets on the blog during the programme’s airing, including one which hit out at the pair’s ‘Scouse’ credentials – with one describing Mr Nuttall as a “bad Bootle UKIP meff (a local dialect word meaning ‘homeless person’)”.
Mr Nuttall later took to the social networking site to share his disgust, posting: “Liverpool echo chose to highlight some really negative, biased comments tonight including one calling me a ‘bad bootle ukip meff’ Appalling.”
The Echo has since run a follow-up article highlighting Mr Nuttall’s complaint.
Editor Alastair Machray told HTFP: “We printed the comment in the spirit of freedom of expression and in that same spirit have published Mr Nuttall’s irritated response in a follow-up article.
“We are convinced Mr Nuttall respects the principle.”
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So have I got this right?
Some people are saying some thing about some thing on TV and someone on Twitter says some thing about someone on TV, and that someone says some thing back on Twitter about the someone on Twitter?
And so the newspaper runs a story about the TV someone saying something about the Twitter someone, who said something about the someone saying something on TV?
And who said newspapers were irrelevant and that journalism is dead?
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I can’t stand UKIP but does free speech extend to unjustified personal attacks. The media world is becoming nastier by the minute.
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Confused – you’ve pretty much summed it up.
It’s like All the President’s Men.
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Newspaper in reporting readers’ views shocker.
Nuttall is a loon. He has previously said that under a UKIP government, comedians who did negative jokes about the party would be banned from public funded theatres.
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It’s not even a readers view worth reporting, it’s a comment about how scouse or not he is from a hair and beauty student that’s been turned into a page lead. Astounding stuff.
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TheLNH, that’ll be in response to Stewart Lee’s exquisitely hyperbolic tirade about Nuttall’s pronouncements on immigration on his BBC4 series some time back. The accompanying video portrays a bowler-hatted Nuttall character travelling back in time to attack a primitive fish as it emerges from the sea, in an attempt to prevent evolution from contaminating primeval Britain with its nasty foreign ways, before himself being bitten in half by a dinosaur.
It’s funny because it’s true.
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