OPINION
There’s a reason my First Law of the Media is Never Believe a Headline. Headlines have always been designed to be catchy, to engage the reader’s interest and get them to pick up the paper and read it. What was true in the print era is still true: good newswriting delivers the Who, What, Why, Where, When and How as early and concisely as possible. In the internet age, though, actually reading the article is a secondary consideration at best. All that matters is getting them to click in the first place. It’s all about the clicks – and about generating as much outrage as possible.
Whether or not the content matches the headline. In fact, headlines that misrepresent the content of an article, or worse, what a person actually said, is classic fake news.
Like this:
Lily Allen says that having children “ruined” her career.
As it happens, this is a double-whammy of misleading. It not only misrepresents what Allen actually said, but even the news article it was drawn from.
But, boy, did it work in generating clicks and fake outrage.
Like too many other people who spotted that headline (and dozens more like it) on Twitter, my first response was, “Wow, Mother-of-the-Year material”. Unlike too many other people on Twitter, though, I actually bothered going to the article and reading it.
Turns out that Lily Allen obviously isn’t too bad of a mum, after all. Because here’s what she actually said:
After years spent as one of London’s most notorious party girls, she moved to the country and had children in 2011.
But now Lily Allen has admitted her two daughters have ‘totally ruined’ her pop career because she chose to prioritise them instead of work – insisting, ‘You can’t have it all’.
So, what she was saying – and the Daily Mail headline that sparked the furore indeed accurately represented this – was a rejection of the feminist dogma that women can ‘have it all’: career and motherhood. In fact, as Camille Paglia has said for years, they just can’t, and trying to only makes women miserable and their kids even worse.
The singer-turned-actress, 38, said she believes women have to decide whether to put their children or their career first, saying she chose the former.
‘My children ruined my career. I love them and they complete me, but in terms of pop-stardom, they totally ruined it,’ she told the Radio Times Podcast.
‘I get really annoyed when people say you can have it all because, quite frankly, you can’t.‘‘I get really annoyed when people say you can have it all because, quite frankly, you can’t.’
Clearly, then, she is being tongue-in-cheek, or at least disarmingly dismissive, of the “ruined my career” bit. Because, as she makes clear, she wouldn’t have had it any other way.
‘Some people choose their career over their children and that’s their prerogative, but my parents were quite absent when I was a kid.
‘I feel like it left some nasty scars that I’m not willing to repeat on mine.’
Lily’s father is actor Keith Allen, 70, who walked out on her film producer mother Alison Owen, 63, when Lily was four years old.
Lily has now said that she ‘chose to step back and concentrate on my children’ and she’s glad that she has as ‘they’re pretty well-rounded.’
She has also, although she clearly has to choose her words to placate the woke celebrity milieu, adopted something else very traditional.
‘A big part of sobriety is surrendering and letting God – in whatever way you want to believe in that – have a plan for you.’
And as many women have, she’s finding that, having been present for the critical years of early childhood, she can at least dabble a bit in a career. Which is paying off in a muted way, after she wisely vanished from the celebrity spotlight for nearly a decade.
Lily now lives in New York with her children and new husband, Stranger Things star David Harbour, 48, whom she married in 2020 and has turned her hand to acting […]
‘I got a call from a casting director who was putting on a play [2:22 A Ghost Story] in the West End. I said: “No, I’m not an actress”.‘But then I was talking to David – I’d been feeling a bit directionless and didn’t really know what I was doing with my life, except for being a mum and setting up a new home in Brooklyn.
‘He said, “Maybe you should call them back” and five weeks later I was in rehearsal.’
For her performance in 2:22 A Ghost Story Lily received a Best Actress Olivier Award nomination in 2022.She has since starred in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman last year, for which she received mixed reviews.
Well, good luck to her, I suppose. I was never much of a fan of Lily Allen the musician, but if this interview is any indication, she seems to have made some wise personal choices.
No matter what outrage-mongering clickbait headlines might say.