Tom Daley Watch: Noooooooo!!!

The Olympic diver has posted a naked snap of himself in a rainforest on Instagram this morning.

While the pic was a throwback from the 2010 Youth Olympics in Singapore, fans believe it has all but confirmed the star will appear on the new series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! kicks off next Sunday.

“Is this a hint that it's true you are going on I'm a celebrity,” one fan wrote under the snap.

Reports have suggested Tom, 20, is part of the new jungle line-up, and bookies already have him pinned as favourite to win.

Ladbrokes are offering odds of 7/2 he will be crowned champ, with a spokesperson saying: "Tom's already been backed by punters and he's clearly the one to beat this year...

Daily Star - regular reviewers may recall the Star has a history of making up stories about our Tom, which turn out to be hilariously wrong.

Meh, any excuse to run this photo.

Maybe this is where Stephen Fry is heading off to?

PS Want to hear about an ex-Star journalist who quit after being asked to make up one too many stories, see Richard Peppiatt's new documentary, One Rogue Reporter .

OMG!!! Attention stalkers! Win a double date with Tom and Dustin Lance Black!!!



It's free to enter, but you're asked to make a donation.

Tom, admirably, wants half the money raised to go to the Brain Tumour Charity, in memory of his dad.

Lance wants half to go to the Human Rights Campaign - this leading American gay rights group really need the money; their declared income last year was a measly $38,500,000.

And the money that doesn't go on mega salaries, goes on imperial nonsense like this.

PS This is being plugged in the US gay media - hope our American friends read the small print about having to provide your own air travel and accommodation. 

Daniel Radcliffe: Don't Say I Didn't Warn You!

"There is no truth to it at all. It's one of those very, very funny things: it came out of a story in the Daily Star and then you see newspapers like The Guardian using The Star as their source, and it grows and grows [until] it's 'Dan Radcliffe is playing Freddie Mercury!', which I was never going to do."

"Everyone on the internet who I presume is saying I'm totally wrong for that part is correct," he laughed. "I AM completely wrong for that part!"
 
"If I'd seen a rumour about me playing Iggy Pop, I'd think, 'Hey, I'd have a go at that - that'd be fun!', but Freddie Mercury? No. I don't even know who the director is. They seem to be saying it's Stephen Frears and Tom Hooper on the internet."

"This is the kind of thing that happens to me and it happens to Emma (Watson) with multiple 50 Shades Of Grey things. When somebody has column inches to fill, they just sub in one of our names." 

Daniel Radcliffe talking to Empire in a podcast - about the story that he was going to play Freddie Mercury in the new biopic.
A fiction ran as fact in media around the world.
Except for one lone voice crying "This sounds like bollocks!" in the wilderness - the mighty Fagburn!
Journalists would make their lives so much easier - and far less embarrassing - if they just listened to me in the first place.
Hey-ho...

The Guardian online - though there's an embedded link they don't make it explicit how they published this crapola without bothering to check it.
Journalism fuck yeah!

Another way stories appear in the Daily Star (and they are not alone) are when they are simply made up, or based on such scant, dubious evidence as to essentially be untrue. I list in my resignation letter (attached) a number of stories that I wrote via this method, in the full knowledge, and on occasion request, of superiors. Most, but not all, of the fabricated stories featured the Daily Star’s most referenced celebrities – Katie Price, Peter Andre, Kerry Katona etc. These people’s careers are symbiotically linked to tabloid column inches, and therefore they were very unlikely to sue over false stories...

Former Daily Star journalist, Richard Peppiatt, statement to the Leveson Inquiry [Thanks to fillo].

PS UND! here's a video of Ed Miliband auditioning for the part of Queen Freddie at Labour party conference yesterday. ONE VISION!

Update: I'm far too nice to gloat - and moreover there are far too many to list - but there are some hilarious reverse ferrets on this today, in both the gay and straight media, often forgetting to mention how they'd run the Star story as if it was deffo deffo true. Hahaha!

The Daily Star: Telling Lies For A Living

"It is an interesting quirk of the English legal system that you can't libel the dead. Very handy if you're a tabloid news editor, at say, the Sun, and you publish an article about 23-year-old Julian Brooker from Brighton becoming a 'human fireball' after touching a railway line while crawling around pretending to be Gollum from Lord of the Rings. The shop assistant was drunk, the red top behemoth informed its readers in 2005, because it was 23 October and Julian was obsessed with the number 23. A great tabloid exclusive. Were an iota of it true, that is.
"In the last 24 hours the Sun's subsequent apology to the late Julian ('His parents have asked us to make clear he was not turned into a fireball, was not obsessed with the number 23 and didn't go drinking on that date every month. We apologise for the distress this has caused Julian's family and friends') has resurfaced across the Twittersphere to howls of derision. Some unacquainted with the idiosyncrasies of Britain's newspaper industry have questioned whether the whole thing is in fact a hoax. Sadly, it's not. Far from being an exception, such cases stray dangerously close to being a rule.
"I make that claim with authority because during the two years I worked at the Daily Star I wrote similar, arguably worse, yarns. When Boyzone star Stephen Gately died in October 2009, I was dispatched to Mallorca to investigate. Beneath my byline in the days that followed were lurid revelations of heavy drinking, drugs he may have taken, and gay orgies he may have been part of.
"We tabloid reporters knew little, but under pressure to deliver much, the hotel bar soon swirled with speculation. Thoughts morphed into theories, theories shifted into fact. After all, you can't libel the dead.
"The same month Kevin McGee, former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, committed suicide. At the Daily Star I picked up the phone to a reader who claimed he knew the couple and the story behind the tragedy. "How much is that worth?" He asked. I told him we needed to meet first. He replied that he was out of town.
"'Sod it, you can't libel the dead," someone proffered. That afternoon I wrote the story: "LUCAS EX BLEW £2 MILLION ON DRUGS AND BOOZE." The tabloid news cycle, unrelenting, waits for no man..."

Riichard Peppiatt, who resigned from The Daily Star earlier this month - writing a devastating J'accuse letter about its scummy editorial (non) standards - offers some more insight into the workings of the British tabloid press, from The Guardian's Comment Is Free.
Lucas won undisclosed damages and a public apology over the above and other stories the Star published after McGee's death.
Here's an example of Peppiatt's "sex and drugs" stories about Gately - which is still online.
Interesting to note that both the examples he cites involved recently bereaved gay men.
Charming.
Peppiatt calls himself a "whistleblower", but he was happy enough to collude in all this crap for several years, so he's hardly Bradley Manning.

The Daily Star: Tabloid Exposé

Richard Peppiatt, a journalist on The Daily Star, announced his resignation this evening - saying he can no longer write for the paper because of its gutter-low journalistic standards, its Islamophobia and tacit endorsement of the English Defence League.
This is something Charlie Brooker attacked brilliantly and savagely in The Guardian last month.
You can read Peppiatt's J'Accuse resignation letter to owner Richard Desmond here.
Peppiatt tells us of such lows as being told to go out wearing a burkha in public for a story, and having to write a story about how the Daily Star had stopped some "tax-payer funded Muslim-only loos" - which had never existed outside of another Star journalist's imagination.
"Not that my involvement in stirring up a bit of light-hearted Islamophobia stopped there. Many a morning I've hit my speed dial button to Muslim rent-a-rant Anjem Choudary to see if he fancied pulling together a few lines about whipping drunks or stoning homosexuals."
This is how the Daily Star works; invent stories, incite homophobia, whip up Islamophobia, and fuck the consequences.
Peppiatt tells Desmond; "You may have heard the phrase, 'The flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil sets off a tornado in Texas.' Well, try this: The lies of a newspaper in London can get a bloke's head caved in down an alley in Bradford."