They say, do they not, that citizen journalism is almost always sloppy. Bully bloggers, full of received opinion do the cause no good, it’s true. But when Monica Grenfell opened her mouth, in Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Mail, she proved beyond a shadow of doubt, that traditional print journalists are a dying breed.

The very fact she has a job with a major publication is a miracle to me. Showing absolutely no sign of understanding the real issue, which has made Miss Marshall the cause célèbre to people who are sick and tired of being branded lazy or just flat out weird for having a normal body.

Monica Grenfell lives in a place where the definition of the word normal, bears absolutely no relationship to the one given to it by people in the real world. In the real world, stick thin supermodels mean as much to people as soap scum on the bathroom tiles. It’s annoying that it always comes back after scrubbing it off, but life goes on. Grenfell, however, takes soap scum’s existence to mean that it is somehow important. That its tenacious presence is proof positive that it must therefore have some worth.

The hypocrisy of it is blood boiling stuff, right up there with religious bigotry and racism. They’ll plaster heavily photoshopped pictures of a nobody on the front page, claiming that this image of an ugly on the inside slag represents beauty. Then on the next page they show a completely un-photoshopped, badly lit exposure of someone like Chloe Marshall and brand her a freak because she likes regular meals.

Chloe Marshall is beautiful precisely because she is normal, which is exactly what “they” don’t like about her. Normal doesn’t sell newspapers. Normal isn’t sexy. Normal is for normal people and who would want to appeal to those grotty little Northerners?

For it to sell it has to be on the extremes. You can’t be a movie star that enjoys a spliff now and then, you have to be greedily addicted to coke. You can’t be a full figured women, you have to be either morbidly obese, so they can point and laugh at you, or so terrified of becoming unhealthily overweight, that you vanish when viewed side-on.

The sad fact is, Monica Grenfell has a job because people spend millions every year on the sorts of publications her and her kind bring to being. The supermarket check-out shelves are full of Helvetica headlines; bold magenta promises for the inside scoop on people who don’t really exist. Wedding snaps of that busty moron who lost “Big Brother”. Some guy who posted a video of himself in bed with that blonde who cried about being made to eat worms on “Celebrity Love Island House Renovations on Ice”

Nothing I say or do is going to stop the relentless onslaught from the Rupert Murdoch’s of this world, who assign their own standards to everyone else and market it to the masses as a real choice. Choice is an illusion. The only way to genuinely choose anything, is to compare both sides of an argument and take away from it what makes sense to you; what feels right to you personally. I think, on that note, a cursory look around the blog-o-sphere shows exactly what ordinary people are saying about the twisted world of Monica Grenfell, RIP.