Tim Jonze wanted to be harsher on Morrissey!

[Augustus]

Agreed, but if you sit down with a scorpion for an hour you can hardly be surprised when you get stung.

The problem Morrissey has now, and it's this that will be the NMEs weakest point, is that the rest of the press have taken the NMEs report and spun it just as much as the NME did themselves. It was noticeable on Question Time how the comments became not what Morrissey actually said but what it was reported he said with no mention of any possible spin that may have been attached to his words by the NME. If there are provable damages there then he'll be OK, if not he's learnt yet another valuable lesson. If anyone doubts getting into bed with the press is a poor idea just look at the McCanns and how their attempts to cosy up backfired. Yes, I accept the press is an integral part of the music business but there are better ways and there is scarcely a mainstream paper that would not jump at the chance of a Morriseey interview where he would likely receive a more adult hearing and the younger demographic can be reached with the myriad of rotten teen music shows. The NME is superfluous. The Times, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Later..., Radio 1, E4, Jonathan Ross. Why bother with the NME?

The other thing that is naive in my opinion is that (and I do this myself) we sometimes yearn for the England of the Ealing comedies or Steed and Emma Peel when, as with drive-ins, Happy Days and the Wild West in the USA it wasn't quite what we think it was with the benefit of our rose tinted spectacles. People have always said "things were better then". I wonder sometimes if it's a human self destruct mechanism so we don't have the elderly sobbing in the streets afraid to die and blocking the tills at the supermarket. It's far easier to say "it was better then and I'll be glad to be out of it", when often it wasn't. I'm guessing things are better now for Morrissey than they were in 1980. They certainly are for me and I would guess for you as well.

 

[Forza Mozza]

If the quotes are accurate, I don't see why Morrissey is (once again) having his lawyers issue all kinds of threats. I guess Morrissey wants to use this to get in the papers, though.

That said, I fully understand how frustrating it is when you speak your mind and if your feelings take one step off the PC left-wing dogma you are called all sorts of names. Magazines like the NME try and insist that all artists in popular culture who do not conform 100% to leftist, socialist ideology must be made to apologize or else they should be demonized. This is very suffocating. Artists should not worry about things like whether an ultra-PC writer at a music rag approves of his/her thoughts. Art will be seriously harmed if we insist that artists are required to hold a certain political ideology before they can comment on the world through their work.

The crime is not that Morrissey said provocative or controversial things. He says all kinds of provocative, controversial things. This is okay so long as magazines like the NME can see that they come from a left-wing socialist's heart. A pop artist could hold court all day with the music press about how much he loves Fidel Castro, how America had it coming on 9/11, etc etc. That would be a-okay. So long as the NME can say to themselves, "Well, he said something crazy there, but it comes from a leftist's heart so he means well," they will not criticize a thing you say, no matter how extreme, ignorant, or offensive. But if you make even a mild comment on a complex issue where maybe even a majority of people in England agree with you but the comment reveals you've stepped off the leftist/socialist plantation, you will be told you need to apologize, that your career should be in jeopardy, that no one should pay attention to your artwork, and that you need to be sent somewhere for re-education classes before you're allowed to leave your house again.

Please don't try and twist this story for your own political view. The reason why Morrissey and his team is suing for defamation, is according to Merck that the editorial on the interview is not accurate.

I do agree that an artist political / religious / social view does not detract from his work, but that isn't the case here. Your bashing of "liberal left wing dictatorial" view of the world, is reminiscent of people who use this as a guise to say idiotic prejudices, in the same way the Conservative party in the UK, have in the past, used the term PC to bash left wing ideology and philosophies.

 

[left out]

From his clarification Jonze is suggesting that he has not seen the finished article as it was published.

1) He was paid to do the interview, but the NME didn't send him a copy, even knowing that there would be a big fuss and Jonze would be asked to comment on it?
2) Jonze has been unable to track down a copy of the published article on the internet?
3) The NME's reply to Morrissey's legal people suggests that they do not have a copy of the recording of the interview. Or have I mistaken this? Does this mean the NME did not use the original recording/transcript of the interview to write the piece, or that they allowed Jonze to leave the country with the only copy of it they had?
4) Jonze stands by the quotations in the article, which he has not read?

Perhaps we are getting sidetracked into what/if/huh! but there does not appear to be much in the way of honest journalism here....

 

[Augustus]

The problem is surely that the words Morrissey uses are not, in themselves, racist to most people except those on the very outer edges of the left yet the NME have decided they have that connotation and they will play that aspect up for the purposes of increasing the ailing rag's circulation. There is nothing quite like a race controversy to get airtime and column inches and sell copies. That is actually their job. Spinning it out of its context to do so is not and that will be the crux of the whole matter. I still contend Moz and his advisors should have known better.

My fervent hope is that Morrissey and his Merry Men shove this down the throat of IPC with great force, my fear is it'll end up a draw, in effect a defeat, for the Greatest Living Englishman and some of the mud thrown by IPC & the NME will stick. I have a feeling the latter may be most likely.

Morrissey outgrew the NME by the time of The Queen Is Dead and I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't their irritation with that that was at the heart of the Finsbury stitch up. Even after the split he would have been able to carve out a successful solo career without the NME. Why the hell he thought he needed it now I really don't know. Sell out tours, number one albums, top ten UK singles without any airplay. Why bother with them? It really doesn't make any sense to me. To hell with 'em. Merck should have nixed the whole thing from the get go. In the age of Blogger, Myspace, iTunes et al they are an utter irrelevance and should have been treated as such.

 

[unruly boy]

Reported on the main page.
read here

Last month, whilst on an assignment for the New Musical Express, I asked Morrissey if he'd ever consider moving back to Britain. Little did I know then, as such an innocent question left my lips, that I was about to provoke a Morrissey rant about UK immigration policy, a series of ignorant, racially inflamatory statements (based on no factual evidence), and a media storm that has seen this piece debated on forums, newspapers and even Question Time.

The controversy has been further fuelled by Morrissey's manager Merck Mercuriadis posting online an email sent from me, saying that I'd had my name removed from the piece. This was true, I had requested my byline be removed, but not exactly for the reasons the Morrissey camp are spinning (those being that I didn't want to criticise Morrissey and it was a stich-up by the NME).

So before I continue, there's something that needs to be pointed out. Every single quote attributed to Morrissey is 100% correct, there was no provocation at all, and Morrissey was given a chance to apologise or clarify his views with a second telephone interview. At no point did he back down. Although Morrissey as a person was charming, courteous and (until this point) a joy to interview, I found comments such as "England's been thrown away" and "These days you won't hear a British accent in Knightsbridge" woefully ignorant. I wrote a piece saying that Morrissey - although liberal in many of his views - was using the language of the BNP and Enoch Powell when it came to immigration. In the piece I mentioned that his comments likening the UK to that of "going to Zagreb and hearing nothing but Irish accents" were offensive as they compared British ethnic minorities to tourists. I also said he was being overly nostalgic for a Britain built partly on empire and imperialism and that someone as well travelled as Morrissey had no excuses for such comments.

The piece was very critical and NME decided to tone it down, something I didn't agree with. They showed me several rewritten versions, some of which were very soft on Morrissey, one that was quite critical. None had any of my points or arguments in them and none of them were written in my voice. Furthermore, I hadn't even seen the finished version before it went to print (I still haven't seen it, as I'm currently writing this from the surreal surroundings of a beach internet cafe in Thailand). For these reasons, the byline was removed.

However, it's been something of a PR coup for Morrissey's people that they've managed to divert attention from their artist's ill-informed comments by focussing all the attention on the byline debate. The fact that Morrissey's team have dared suggest that the NME have stitched him up is ludicrous. At the end of the second telephone interview, Morrissey said "I gather this is going to be a scathing piece on me" to which I replied along the lines of "It's not going to be too good, no, it will anger a lot of people".

Morrissey and his management knew that I wasn't writing them a soft PR piece. All I promised was that the transcript would be printed as fairly as possible and that I'd print his more "liberal" comments about finding racism "too silly to discuss". This promise was kept, as far as I'm aware.

Were Morrissey's comments ill-informed and likely to provoke anger inside those of us who are tired of hearing the right wing press and the BNP whip up fear with the same factually distorted statements? Undoubtedly. Is Morrissey, the son of immigrants who's written anti-racist songs, actually a "racist"? It's a murky area that should be being debated now, instead of the issue of why a byline was dropped.

What's clear, though, is this: the "I've been stitched up" card is the last bastion of someone who's said something offensive but is too scared to back this up, yet too stubborn to apologise. How can Morrissey possibly claim a stitch up when the interview is printed in Q&A form, his quotes are recorded on tape and he wasn't even asked about immigration in the first place? It's truly cowardly. If Morrissey holds these opinions he should either be sticking to his guns and standing by them or - more honorably - educating himself on race issues, realising why his comments were both offensive and inflamatory, and apologising for them as quickly as is humanly possible.

Tosser.

 

[Augustus]

The most telling part of Jonzzzzzze's defence is this...

"If Morrissey holds these opinions he should either be sticking to his guns and standing by them or - more honorably - educating himself on race issues, realising why his comments were both offensive and inflamatory, and apologising for them as quickly as is humanly possible."

So just to recap then Tim, Morrissey is wrong to hold that opinion and therefore no defence will be accepted by you and you are the arbiter of what people may or may not think in a free society. Very typical of the nauseating hypocrisy of the liberal media. You could ask if the remarks were in his view likely to cause offence why publish them? Oh, yes, I know. Is that sound of the jackpot being hit?

It's not in the gift of the repulsive Tim to say what is right and wrong on any subject whatsoever. He's a jobbing hack, not God, and doesn't seem a very professional one at that. Sorry to burst your immense ego Timmy baby. What you think on any subject under the sun means nothing at all and carries not an iota more gravitas than anyone else. Who died and left you in charge?

 

[withmyheadonthebar]

withmyheadonthebar worked as a freelance contributor of NME hopefully he/she might tell us that it's norm in there to rewrite articles.

http://forums.morrissey-solo.com/showthread.php?t=80869&page=3#43

I most certainly did not work for the NME, I was a Melody Maker girl!!!
But more importantly - no, I've never in my life heard of articles being rewritten in the way that this was. That's not the ed's job. (Ironically, they're generally meant to be the last bastion of defence against libel claims...)
Speaking of which, I've not done a whole course on libel but it was covered to some extent in my sub-editing course, and if I understand correctly, the onus is on the publication to prove that they haven't twisted the truth in such a way that the person's career could be adversely affected by it. With this in mind (I think it's safe to say that Moz's career would be affected if he was proven to be racist, as the NME heavily implied) I really don't see how the NME can win the case. Confusing all round, really...

 

[2-J]

The way it works is like this;

under UK law it's an offence to defame someone (say / write stuff that would cause right-minded people to think less of them)

but a defence to the charge is that you were telling the truth.

So to prove the offence in court, Moz would have to show that the NME published something that could make right-minded people think less of him (e.g. that they said or heavily implied he was a racist, for example),

if that was actually shown to have taken place, then the NME would have to show that what they said or implied was true.