"a blond man who spoke Norwegian"

Journalism This weekend, in which I've been simultaneously too nausiated and too busy to blog, I momentarily regretted that neither of Charlie Brooker's shows were on the air to comment on the bloody awful rolling news coverage of the attrocity in Oslo. I'd somehow forgotten about his Guardian column in which he's obliged:

"When it became apparent that a shooting was under way on Utoya island, the security experts upgraded their appraisal. This was no longer a Bali-style al-Qaida bombing, but a Mumbai-style al-Qaida massacre. On and on went the conjecture, on television, and in online newspapers, including this one. Meanwhile, on Twitter, word was quickly spreading that, according to eyewitnesses, the shooter on the island was a blond man who spoke Norwegian. At this point I decided my initial gut reservations about al-Qaida had probably been well founded. But who was I to contradict the security experts? A blond Norwegian gunman doesn't fit the traditional profile, they said, so maybe we'll need to reassess . . . but let's not forget that al-Qaida have been making efforts to actively recruit "native" extremists: white folk who don't arouse suspicion. So it's probably still the Muslims."

The tv coverage of Amy Winehouse was equally upsetting, with music pundits and ex-#notw showbiz correspondents goulishly lining up to remind us of her apparent failure as a human being within hours of her being discovered and making assumptions about the cause of death even before an autopsy has been carried out.