The weirdness began back when Jade was given the news that she had terminal cancer live on TV, and continued through a Max Clifford-augmented media storm that picked out every last detail of her waning existence. It was as complete a portrait of human demise as I can ever remember – strange, ogled details included “Jade’s dress is fitted with pain drugs” from the Evening Standard, or “Shuddering Jade’s lips turn blue” in the Sun. Every day, an everyday death on the front pages – no wonder people are pointing to it changing our attitudes about death. 

Sadly, she’s also become a medium for reflected glory, with Michael Jackson and Jordan shamelessly squeezing PR mileage out of her imminent death. And Clifford’s promise back in February that “we are very close to the end in terms of what we’re going to do media-wise”, the media still steamrollered in and over the end – the Sun recording her last hours (“Jade Goody was propped up in bed yesterday — to catch one last glimpse of the sun-kissed fields before she dies”), OK! promising exclusive access to her “last words”.

Equally nauseating were the opinion columns – Carole Malone saying we should quit the horrific voyeurism in horrifically voyeristic language (“she doesn’t look pretty any more. She looks sick. But most of all she looks hunted—like an animal”), and Harry Mount attacking her for her lack of intelligence. Today we’ve got Jan Moir’s confused thinkpiece, swinging between pettiness (“Jade and Jack wrote their wedding vows themselves, the kind of handcrafted homilies you might expect to see stamped on a mug or tattooed on a sailor’s bicep”) and judgemental conjecture (“she ignored the two follow-up letters from her cervical screening. If she had not, there is a very good chance that she would have lived”).

It’s tempting to attack Clifford, but the high profile was what Jade wanted, however much that fact was promoted by Clifford to absolve himself. And in his spinning of the story as creating awareness about cervical cancer, he’s created a blessedly positive message that neuters the bad taste that would be left by the scrutiny otherwise – without it, the story would have run anyway, nakedly voyeuristic and far more uncomfortable for everyone. 

And so we say goodbye to a woman who resembled less a person and more a media touchstone, a locus for all the mythologising and dreams the media get their biggest paydays from. We’re encouraged to see her as the mirror in which we see ourselves and our mortality – that sells papers – but we musn’t forget that we really don’t know her at all. Not like her husband, not like her children.

But now that that constant source of revenue has disappeared, where are the media going to turn their gaze next? Fred Goodwin! As a journo interviewed by the Guardian says: “Since he went to ground, pretty much every one of Goodwin’s addresses in the whole country and even in Spain is being staked out. If he breaks cover he’s going to have snappers and TV cameras following him as if he’s Michael Jackson”, while the picture ed of the Evening Standard said: ”He’s currently worth more than Britney, maybe hovering around the Brad and Angelina with kids price.” I think we’ve finally got ourselves our Greenspan!

Stanford was last seen trying to hire a private jet, but he was declined as he had to use a wire transfer rather than his proffered credit card. Using a rented plane rather than one from your own fleet to try and avoid the feds – not only has he been getting ‘tache tips from Magnum PI, now he’s stealing their storylines! Though maybe he should have taken his plane, the one with the documents linking him to Mexican drug-running lying on the seats, could have killed two birds with one stone. Now the FBI have found that extra bit of incrimination, it really doesn’t look good for Stanny when they finally catch up with him. I’m betting he’s got a base hollowed out in Antigua’s highest mountain, the newly christened “Mount Obama”.

So while Stanford lies low, Antigua has gone mental at the prospect of its biggest private employer going out of business. Despite giving assurances that the banks had enough reserves, people can’t have been heartened by Antiguan prime minister Baldwin Spencer’s words that the case would have a “catastrophic” effect on the country, and so there have been queues around the block to withdraw cash.

Cue one of those awful “I’m stood here” pieces from Stephen Brenkley in the Independent: “They were dressed in summer clothes. The sun was beating down but the palm trees dimmed its heat. Nothing, however, could disguise the frightened mood of the people. Outside the Bank of Antigua yesterday, the overwhelming fear was that hell had come to paradise.” Ooh, it’s just like reading a novel!

While print media continues to print this journo-jism, Felix Salmon in Portfolio suggests that the blogosphere is the reason why Stanford got taken down – the highlighting by blogs of the original Venezuelan magazine article that questioned his investment portfolio brought it to global attention, while print media was too scared of litigation to write anything with the word “fraud” in it. He concludes: “Markopolos really would have been much better off blogging his suspicions about Bernie Madoff than going to the WSJ”. 

But if you’ve actually got investments in Stanford International Bank, the target of the SEC investigation, you’re not going to be getting that back for a while. Those affected include some of the West Indies cricket team, who were encouraged to put back some of the $1m they won from the Twenty20 Superstars match Stanford organised back into his investment bank. The names of those who took him up on the offer haven’t been released, but apparently at least two of them are playing England right now (and getting beat). Perma-boy Michael Owen has been hit by the scandal too – according to the Daily Mail, he’s a global brand ambassador for the bank, and is “thought to have” money invested in it. Whether that’s the Mail just putting two and two together or he actually does have investments, it isn’t clear, but he probably should have stuck to promoting breakfast cereal all the same. 

We’ve been waiting for old-school cricketing firebrand and lothario Geoffrey Boycott to wade into the scandal with all the disregard for easy soundbites that makes Boycott On Cricket one of the funniest sports books ever written, and so it has come to pass. “Everyone can surely agree that the tacky, vulgar circus that unfolded in Antigua last November was an embarrassment for the game”, spake Boycott in – where else? – The Telegraph. “We cannot keep on treating sport as a business along the lines of Marks and Spencer, or Tesco.” Or any other shop! We love you Geoff.

Peston was blamed for the queues outside Northern Rock after he revealed the bank’s woes to the nation, as well as for the rise in HBOS’s share price after Peston revealed they were going to be taken over by Lloyds. More specifically, he was accused of being a pawn in some insider trading scam, with a mole feeding him information that would affect the markets. It was an accusation that George Osbourne ratified and then Peston, with typical aplomb, deflected with the Deripaska-Rothschild-Osbourne yacht scoop, while the FT defended Pesto to the hilt.

Still, the criticisms haven’t gone away. “Newspapers have the same sort of obligation as they do during a war”, said Simon Jenkins on the media’s role in the crisis, i.e. shut up and not “scare” people. Jenkins of course chose instead, on the day of the worst stock market fall in years, to romp up Cader Idris and uncork his babbling, Biblical prose. How responsible of him!

So Peston faced the committee yesterday, and he rebuffed the criticisms in a hyper-Pestonian manner. This was Pesto off the leash, allowed to roam free over vowels and clauses, a style described politely as “loquacious” by the Guardian and perhaps more accurately as having “sentences like giant sausages” by Quentin Letts in the Mail. “I know lots and lots and lots of people, including you, and, y’know, I talk to lots and lots and lots of people”, was his version of refusing to outline his sources. Slick.

The main thing is that Northern Rock was screwed even if Peston did create a run on it, something that the other journos at the hearing all concurred with. Jenkins’s wider notion of not reporting financial stories to maintain market stability is flawed too, as transparency moves to the front of the agenda. Jenkins, for his part, kept pretty quiet at the meetings, only piping up to tell the assembled committee kettles that they were black: ”By an extraordinary coincidence you have all five journalists here who predicted the credit crunch. What have you been doing all the time?” Well, at least they haven’t been telling people to “invest in sanity” and buy “shares in kindness, with a side bet on courtesy and brotherly love”. If only we’d just given Fred The Shred a nice big hug, then none of this horridness would have happened!

Peston, meanwhile, nailed the whole conundrum when he says that impact upon share price is “peripheral” to the provision of information to the masses. That’s what journalism is – can you remember that far back, Jenkins?

NBC rolls out the English stereotypes –  ”Giving such a weather-obsessed country a day to natter about nothing else has let them drop the stiff upper lip and pick up a snowball instead” – while it also manages to get in a Dickens reference, something that the Times also does in a very silly editorial:

“The first thing to say about the snow is that it is extraordinarily beautiful. There is a joy to trampling through unspoilt snow that some children enjoyed yesterday morning for the first time in their lives. Some children built their first snowman and rolled their first gigantic snowball. The scene out of every domestic window was a Christmas card from the fables of Dickens, five weeks too late. Dull would he be of soul who would not look out of his own window and note a scene touching in its majesty.” Terrible would he be of writing who could not avoid Victorian idiom in the 21st century.

More saucer-eyed nonsense in the Indy from John Walsh, where, alongside his attempts at pop culture (Paris Hilton and Verne Troyer references, really good try) he makes playschool similies (“The leafless trees, holding globules of white in their long black fingers against a white sky”) and then personifies clothes pegs and catkins in an adorable, itsy-bitsy way:

“The clothes pegs on the washing-line, their reds and blues and yellows and greens enhanced to perfection by the surrounding whiteout, are freighted with tiny caterpillars of snow; so are the catkins, the buds and the smallest twigs. They all seem a little stunned by the turn of events – the heaviest snowfall in London in 20 years – and resigned to silent, indignant contemplation of the magic white stuff that arrived overnight to settle so insistently on their tiny backs.”

Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian sketches a (by his own admission) ridiculous portrait of a very Guardian-y London where chav and cyclist remember their “forgotten innocence” amidst a charmingly ramshackle yet painterly landscape. The Telegraph continues the theme – “Those who walked a long way to get to work yesterday found strangers talking to them. Travellers swapped stories. There was a helping hand for the elderly” – before getting back to usual editorial business by shoehorning in an attack on big government – “Six million who normally catch buses in the morning were disappointed. That illustrates the centralised precautionary policy that has overtaken us.”

The Mail’s Harry Phibbs really outdoes himself in a truly barking thinkpiece, musing first that “snow should be proclaimed by the United Nations as part of the basic human rights of a child”, before managing to equate the hours-long failure of the London transport system to the fall of the British empire:

“When the snow falls, the nation of Drake, Wellington, Raleigh and Nelson goes into a state of paralysis…British Rail told outraged commuters that the quantity may not have been too severe but that: ‘It was the wrong sort of snow.’ That phrase has lived on in infamy as symbolising the defeatist mentality of those who gave up and offered excuses at the first sign of difficulty. The mentality that lost the empire.”

And with business slowing, the FT has had to run with Onion-flavoured headlines such as “Restaurants find dining out is not essential”, while sentences like “Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race” are chucked onto the front page in a desperate bid to fill space. Meanwhile bankers sounded like they were having their own epiphanic moments as the reality of their avaricious lifestyle was brought into sharp relief by the innocence of childhood – “I got to leave work early and go for a walk in Victoria Park. It was much more fun watching children play in the snow that being in work”.

Meanwhile, the rest of the country noted that it’s snowing, just like every other year.

Twitter is one place that we may witness the public effort for a resurgence of the Republican grassroots movements, as they engage with the next generation of voters. Signing up in the week before Obama’s inauguration, Karl Rove has made a highly symbolic move as he wonders how anyone can steer the Republican Party out the wilderness. The irony is not lost that Rove has moved toward an open, inclusive and fairly liberal network at a time when Obama declares “I will open the doors of Government and ask you to be involved in your own Democracy again.” Rove must be desperate. Directing the Right’s bow towards blogs and social media has stumbled in the past, though Twitter continues to be an indispensable asset for political communication.

Rove’s final tip in his Op-ed “A Way Out of the Wilderness” declares “The GOP must master new media.” With all of Rove’s Twitter-talk about ninjas, he must feel the need to become a sensei of New Media, declaring “Democrats have successfully developed tools to exploit online advocacy, and Republicans must spend more time and energy doing the same.” The strategy is not lost on this Twitter commenter: “He’s obviously trying to build a new career in now a Democrat dominant political env. He’s vsmart…like a weasel.”

With Twitter displacing the mainsteam-media as the first place to break news stories, the BBC have been caught out using it to source information about Mumbai, inaccurately. Similarly, as journalists met in a five-star hotel in Athens for the Global Forum for Media Development, outside the rioting was happening, and being broadcast on Twitter and Facebook. A journalist who was present at the forum declared: “It is a dangerous world, indeed, when citizen reporters are completely trusted, both by the media institutions that incorporate them and by the audience who consume that information.”

After journalistically fellating Nat Rothschild the other week, the Evening Standard’s Chris Blackhurst once again whacks the fawning up to full power for the “truly incredible” Staveley.

“Obviously, although she doesn’t say so, her looks help. But there is more to it. She has no side to her, she isn’t grand but straightforward and very direct. They clearly like that. She also claims to do exactly as she promises, never stitching anyone up, never letting anyone down.”

Debatable, Blackhurst, considering she played Mephistopheles in the bargain that allowed Barclays to get out of the strictures of government bailout cash, set to cost shareholders £3.2bn. The deal also means that Barclays bosses get to keep paying themselves mega-bonuses. So there may be some who would argue with your painting of a snow white Staveley.

The Mail has her as a Yorkshire lass/maverick – “She never tried to conceal the echoes of her Yorkshire accent and [Prince Andrew's] friends got used to her calling them ‘Luv’…she was not cut out to be a passive princess carrying out official duties and keeping her opinions to herself”. With predictable sexism, they continue to focus on the Prince Andrew connection rather than her business achievements, and this after their outraged news piece about the deal. In the Mail’s world, only men are fit for business profiles – this little woman is for drooling picture-led puff pieces about her love life. Which is great for Staveley – she doesn’t have to worry about genuine probing or questions of accountability.

The Times continues the theme of the bluff Northerner, a woman “who does exactly what she promises, has no airs or graces and calls interviewers ‘love’ and ’sweetheart”’.

These profiles seem to reveal only one thing about Staveley – that she is intelligent enough to know that she can manipulate press hacks to have her presented, after a few “sweetheart’s”, as a harmless, charming anachronism: a funny Northerner doing her gooey Northern things. Better that than as ruthless and money-drunk.

Kudos to the Guardian though for even-handedness, and picking up on her reality-defying statement: ”It is not about money – it wouldn’t matter if I was making £8m or £200m.”

Melanie Sykes would never say that!

Update: thanks to ‘Lord Dacre’ for the kind tip…