Surely Anton Vowl deserves to be longlisted?

The longlist for the Orwell Prize 2010 for blogging was announced recently. There are a number of political bloggers on the list, all of whom are very good and deserve their place.

However there was one name that I was hoping to see on there that was missing.

Anton Vowl has done brilliant work on his "Enemies of Reason" blog. He consistently skewers press and particularly tabloid hypocrisy with a wonderfully pointed invective style which is both very funny and deadly serious in the subjects he covers.

A post that he did last October is one of the best (if not the best) blog posts I have ever seen. Entitled "Hmm... remember this" it juxtaposed the outraged protestations of the tabloid press at the fact that Nick Griffin was allowed to appear on BBC's Question Time with several of each newspaper's front pages that specifically played on issues that the BNP use to campaign on themselves. The post left me open mouthed at how brazen the tabloid press is on issues like this and rightly received lots of links and tweets at the time it was published.

For me, this is exactly what blogging should be about. You rarely see this sort of thing in the mainstream media because of the unspoken "dog doesn't bite dog" rule that is generally followed in the press.

The Orwell Prize is self-nominating and I know Anton submitted himself from the list on the Entries page. Although it doesn't say I would be very surprised if this post was not one of the 10 that he nominated.

I am disappointed not to see Anton on the longlist. Hopefully however he will get recognition for his great work in other ways this year.

Anton Vowl skewers press hypocrisy on the BNP

I don't often do blog posts that basically just link to a single other post but Anton Vowl's post on "The Enemies of Reason" today entitled "Hmm... remember this?" is absolutely superb and deserves to be linked to widely. He contrasts the "outrage" expressed on the front pages of today's tabloids regarding Nick Griffin (largely directed at the BBC for letting him on) with many previous front pages of each of them showing headlines that could pretty much have been BNP press releases.

His conclusion is:

It's all very well people blaming Labour, or the BBC, or whoever, for the 'rise' of the BNP. But if there has been a significant increase in BNP support - and it hasn't translated into votes yet, despite a severe recession and growing unemployment - perhaps that might have more to do with the legitimisation and absorption of their extreme views by newspapers creating scare story after scare story concerning race and immigration, often baseless stories created simply to scare? It's one thing going to a BNP meeting but it's quite another to hear exactly the same thing over the breakfast table from a publication which purports to report the facts.

It is one of the best blog posts I have ever seen. If you haven't read it yet, go and do so right now!