Media Guardian’s diary column has highlighted the chameleon-esque nature of the UK/Irish tabloids coverage of the new Ken Loach movie.
Congratulations to the Sun and the Daily Mail for raising the phrase “two-faced” to whole new level of meaning. Both papers savaged Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or-winning film The Wind that Shakes the Barley for its naked anti-Britishness and overly sympathetic, not to say simplistic, view of the IRA. All very predictable, of course. But then they remembered that they had readers in Ireland who weren’t going to be seeing eye-to-eye with that kind of talk. Quick volte face. In the Irish editions of both papers, Loach’s indictment of Black and Tan actions in pre-Republican Ireland suddenly became a wonderful “ting”, with the “Irish” Mail carrying a front-page picture of star Orla Fitzgerald with a headline lauding her as ‘the golden girl who conquered Cannes’. The “Irish” Sun, not to be outdone, lavished praise on the film under the headline ‘Cillian’s men give Brits a tanning in Cannes’
I almost wrote a joke about them producing two editions in the north to cover all possibilities.. and then I remembered that The Star already does.
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