It is almost as if it is describing the world of newspapers and politics in 2012 as they come under the spotlight at the Leveson inquiry rather than almost 30 years ago.

I tracked down this video below and the other striking thing is how young Bragg looks.

While the story itself no doubt has its merits the cover feels like an exercise in exploitation and salaciousness that crosses ethical boundaries with its use of a child.

The cover feature is on the subject of what is dubbed “attachment parenting”, which Grumet applies both to her natural son (who is pictured) as well as her adopted five-year-old son Samuel.

The cover image has spread around the globe as pundits express their opinion on the controversial topic of breast feeding children who are walking, talking and in some cases attending school.

Grumet, from Los Angeles, tells how she was breastfed by her own mother until the age of six.

In defending the story Rick Stengel, Time’s managing editor, said: “To me, the whole point of a magazine cover is to get your attention. From the moment that we started talking about this story as a cover possibility, it was like I couldn’t get out of the meetings. There was so much opinion and passion about it and discussion. What that told me is, boy, this is a story that people care a lot about.”

The cover is only being used on the front of the US edition of Time. While the Euorpean cover features new socialist French president François Hollande and the Asian cover features Indian cricket star Sachin Tendulkar.

Grumet also writes a blog  I am not the Babysitter.

The paper pokes fun at Hodgson’s speech impediment and seems to be a particularly shoddy way for the paper, and the company at large, to reflect on its past misfortunes and will endear it to few.

Among those criticising the Sun are former editor David Yelland and senior sports journalists including BBC Five Live’s Jacqui Oatley.

A tweet by Oatley criticizing the Sun’s has been retweeted more than a thousand times.

Charming front page of the Sun. Hodgson has won 11 major titles/trophies, speaks 5 languages but let’s mock his speech twitpic.com/9g5ru5

— Jacqui Oatley (@JacquiOatley) May 2, 2012

While journalist turned PR man Yelland called the Sun’s front page “pointlessly cruel, pointlessly hurtful”.

So little compassion for Roy Hodgson today, bullying language, pointlessly cruel, pointlessly hurtful.

— David Yelland (@davidyelland) May 2, 2012

Jon Slattery has a good collection of others condemning the Sun on his blog here.

The show has two British star. Damian Lewis’ Brody and David Harewood who stars as David Estes who is Carrie’s boss at the Counterterrorism Center of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Harewood grew up in Birmingham and he returns to appear in Labour’s new party political election broadcasts – with his Midlands tinged accent and all.

There are no spoilers and so nothing to ruin what looks like it will be a climatic finish to a great show.

“‘Homeland’ actor David Harewood, returns to his home town of Birmingham and talks about the difficulties many families are facing with prices rising, the Tory led Government’s decision to give a tax cut to millionaires at the same time as they are hitting hard working families,” from the Labour Party.

Below is the extended two minitue promo for the final episode. You might want to watch and you might not…

Shorten’s conduct during the interview is something straight out of the ‘The Thick of it’.

Shorten speaks as he is reading from a script that says ” say nothing, just agree with the Prime Minister”.

Is that not the most kind of bizarre political advertising/self harm?

It begs just one question really, why oh why?

The answer Jolly tells the Sun is simple.  The London Mayor is “such a good bloke”.

“People think I’m mad but it’s something different. I’m patriotic and I thought rather than have something everyone else has got — like a bulldog or the St George’s Cross flag — I’d get Boris. I love that he wants to celebrate what’s great about London.”

It is perhaps no surprise he also tells, the paper: “I’ve not got a girlfriend”.

He paid £180 for the privilege. Is this a love affair to go the distance or will he one day soon wake up and realise that if he doesn’t remove it he will never get a girlfriend and possibly start to ask himself why he has the face of a blond buffoon on his leg?

It takes you on a journey to underline the idea that “print has always been our faithful companion”.

With a daily readership of four and a half million the Mail reaches four times as many people as the Guardian and although outsold by the Sun is taken more seriously. Its closest analogue in the American media is perhaps Fox News:

“In January, its Web arm, Mail Online, surpassed that of the New York Times as the most visited newspaper site in the world, drawing fifty-two million unique visitors a month. The Mail’s closest analogue in the American media is perhaps Fox News. In Britain, unlike in the United States, television tends to be a dignified affair, while print is berserk and shouty. The Mail is like Fox in the sense that it speaks to, and for, the married, car-driving, homeowning, conservative-voting suburbanite, but it is unlike Fox in that it is not slavishly approving of any political party. One editor told me, “The paper’s defining ideology is that Britain has gone to the dogs.”

It says the Mail presents itself as the “defender of traditional British values”, which is what so much rankles its critics:

“To its detractors, it is the Hate Mail, goading the worst curtain-twitching instincts of an island nation, or the Daily Fail, fuelling paranoia about everything from immigration to skin conditions. (“WITHIN A DAY OF HIS ECZEMA BEING INFECTED, MARC WAS DEAD,” a recent headline warned.) A Briton’s view of the Mail is a totemic indicator of his sociopolitical orientation, the dinner-party signal for where he stands on a host of other matters. In 2010, a bearded, guitar-strumming band called Dan & Dan had a YouTube hit with “The Daily Mail Song,” which, so far, has been viewed more than 1.3 million times,” the New Yorker.

Interestingly, the piece is published a week after the Mail Online secured its place as the world’s biggest online newspaper as it overtook the New York Times’ in terms of daily visitor traffic for the first time.

In February it racked up an average of 6,265,000 unique visitors a day, compared with 6,239,000 for the The New York Times.

Martin Clarke, the Mail Online’s editor tells the New Yorker that what made Mail Online a success was its heritage:

“Fleet Street newspapers have always had eclectic taste, which makes us perfect for the Internet. The beauty of this is that Britain’s always exported its creative talent—going back to Charles Dickens—but we’ve never really been able to export our actual journalism itself.”

Clark also quotes Mail editor, Paul Dacre, on American journalism whose heights his own paper’s website has just scaled:

Dacre told me [Clarke says], “At its best, American journalism is unbeatable. But the problem with many of your newspapers is that they became too high-minded, too complacent, and self-regarding. As they became increasingly monopolist, some of them also became—if you’ll forgive the phrase—too up themselves. They forgot that there’s a huge market out there of people who are serious-minded but also want some fun in their reading.”

The sister of one victim, who piloted the jet that crashed into the Pentagon, has called the AMC posters “cruel and tasteless”.

The posters, featuring the familiar silhouetted man falling from the sky, have been around for a while, but it is only in the last week or so when they started appearing on the sides of buildings in New York that the outcry is getting more heated and the complaints more pointed as the memory of 9/11 is invoked.

Deborah Burlingame, whose brother Charles piloted the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, said she found it impossible to believe that an advertiser could put up a billboard in New York that “shows a human being tumbling down in space and not imagine that this will evoke the tragic memory of those poor souls on 9/11”.

When you look at the two images side by side it is easy to see why some are upset, but as the Mad Men falling image is very familiar to fans of the show from the opening credits any the similarity is unfortunate rather than an intentional move by AMC to generate publicity through controversy.

No one would want to denigrate or lessen the pain the families of 9/11 victims, but at the same time this is Mad Men’s fifth year and the image of Don Draper falling has been there in the credits since the start. This is what AMC has told The New York Times after it decided to ask families of victims what they thought of the posters:

“The image of Don Draper tumbling through space has been used since the show began in 2007 to represent a man whose life is in turmoil. The image used in the campaign is intended to serve as a metaphor for what is happening in Don Draper’s fictional life and in no way references actual events.”

There is good piece in Esquire by Tom Juond who wrote the original piece in the magazine in 2003 called “The Falling Man”, which game the famous AP picture its title (until then it had no name, it was just a frightening reminder of that terrible day).

He argues that the controversy is manufactured by bloggers in search of pageviews:

As a result, bloggers have created something of a controversy around the poster, suggesting that unnamed “people” are “upset” with it, when apparently the only people really upset with it are the bloggers looking to create controversy. Still, when a television network is accused of exploiting a sacred 9/11 image for its own purposes, it’s worth looking once again at the image in question to see what those purposes might be. In particular, it’s worth reminding ourselves that the guardians of American culture have been exploiting sacred 9/11 images since at least 9/12, and that Drew’s photograph was initially deemed anything but sacred — was declared “exploitative” — because it told a truth that could not be easily exploited.

At a time when the country was greedy for heroes and martyrs to give purpose to its pain, Drew’s photograph portrayed a victim representative in his fear, his desperation, and in his solitary resolve. At a time when the country was desperate for images that were communal and redemptive, Drew gave it a man left to the mercy not of God but of gravity, and dying utterly alone.

Despite his comments appearing before the Mad Men posters began appearing on buildings his comments stand. They are supported by those of other relatives. While some, as you read above, are outraged others have taken a different attitude that shines an uncomfortble light on the media and bloggers as The New York Times piece details:

“I am so worn out by you guys coming to us in order to create a kerfuffle where none exists,” wrote Rita Lasar, whose brother Abraham J. Zelmanowitz was killed on 9/11. “You may think you are being sensitive to our feelings, but in reality you are just using us so you can write a story that refers only to your own feelings.”

Anyone who knows Mad Men knows the image of Draper and is aware that his fall represents not only that of one man on Madison Avenue, but is symbolic of a larger decline of America, that Draper represents America itself, and its fall, which reached its destructive denouncement when the Islamic fundamentalists launched their murderous terrrorist attack on the United States one day in September 11 years ago.

What’s surprising is that it has taken so long for this “controversy” to ignite as Draper’s image jumped from TV screen credits to poster ad campaign, suggesting very strongly as Juond says in his story that this is one controversy that has manufactured to play on people’s feelings concerning 9/11. Never a nice thing to do.

His line is that advertisers are laughing at us and intruding in our lives while at the same time forbidding the public from touching their copyrighted images. He has a point.

He says the public owes adverisers nothing and encourages people to take back public spaces and re-arrange as they see fit:

“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

“You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

“Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

“You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs. “

- Banksy via The Fox is black blog

Craig Ward who blogs on The Words and Pictures blog has drafted a reply:

“The last time I checked, The Advertisers at least had to pay a lot of money to use the public spaces that their wares occupy – unlike yourself who has decided to remove yourself from that model in the name of art and anti capitalism.

Another criticism often leveled at advertising is that it steals from artists and plagiarises ideas, where as your work is merely ‘inspired’ by one artist; Blek Le Rat. Which I guess is OK. And the fact that you’ve made a comfortable living from it is also fine. I feel like it’s a convenient irony though that the only people who can now afford to own your work are the ad-land Creative Directors and City boys that you so eagerly rail against, while at the same time selling your own brand of rebellious, anti-establishment cool,” read the rest here.