Popular Elsewhere
17:38 UK time, Tuesday, 24 May 2011
A look at the stories ranking highly on various news sites.
The - is explored by a big hitting Independent article. It refers to the TV programmes in the middle ground between fact and fiction like The Only Way is Essex, Made in Chelsea and Geordie Shore. The article says the (unwritten) rule for structured reality is that while the locations and scenarios are often instigated by producers, the interaction between the characters is real. It goes on to point out that Daran Little, the "story producer" on Towie and Made In Chelsea, is also a regular writer for EastEnders and Coronation Street. In an effort to explain where the line between fiction and reality lies, he says "We'll steer the characters to certain places. Before the cameras roll we'll say 'remember to ask what happened last night'... In the edit, I'll cut words out of sentences to make it more 'writerly' and give it that soap opera quality. But we don't make anything happen that they don't want to happen. The emotional narrative is real."
A popular Guardian story gives looks at the problematic tasking of . Jon Ronson follows the story of a man who says he faked mental illness to get into Broadmoor and now can't convince anyone he was lying. The problem is faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you'd expect of a psychopath. To add to that being seen as sincere when expressing remorse is also problematic "They say psychopaths can't feel remorse," said Tony, the man Ronson had been speaking to. "I feel lots of remorse. But when I tell them I feel remorse, they say psychopaths pretend to be remorseful when they're not. Trying to prove you're not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you're not mentally ill."
CNN's most popular story says a for 21 October By Harold Camping. This follows his previous highly publicised dommsday prophecy for 21 May not coming true. The story says Mr Camping first inaccurately predicted the world would end in 1994. He is funded by a non-profit Christian radio network which, CNN reports, received $80 million in contributions between 2005 and 2009.
A according to a popular Daily Mail article. A tribunal heard that the teacher stopped a student "scrunching up" other boys' GCSE art coursework but the boy claimed the teacher had grabbed his right forearm so hard it left nail marks. The teacher claims the story was embellished.
In the Telegraph's most popular article James Delingpole is . Delingpole accuses Mr Obama of being disingenuous - tracing his routes back to wherever he happens to be visiting. He argues that the ability to adapt makes him into a charlatan and says Tony Blair used to do this trick too, "his accent mutating from broad Glaswegian to genteel Edinburgh to Mummerset to Estuary to Richard E Grant to Sarf London Grime - often in the course of one Downing Street reception - the better to persuade his target audience that he was their kind of guy."
