And so to bed for The Sun’s Brown-baiting, as it turns out that it’s quite easy to make a spelling mistake – even when you’re using a keyboard and have a newsroom full of eyes. Any suggestion that, by mis-spelling Ms Janes’ name, The Sun has displayed shocking insensitivity to a grieving mother and a brutal disregard for her dead son would, of course, be mistaken.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009. Grab via @tom_watson.
Darryl Chamberlain of the 853 blog reports that his editorial complaint over BBC Newsbeat’s presentation of the BNP has been partially upheld. BBC head of editorial Fraser Steel agrees that the report on the website was at fault, both for repeating unchallenged the assertion that Stepney-born Ashley Cole was “not British”, and for only linking to the BNP’s website.
However, Steel maintains that – despite these defects – Debbie Randle’s interview was appropriately challenging. This is where Chamberlain feels the BBC’s editorial policy shows serious strain, and I agree:
On a journalistic level, the BNP is a news story on stilts, because it represents danger to most people – a political refuge for the ignored and misled which also threatens the safety of our fellow British citizens. In crude news terms, the frisson of violence associated with the party makes it interesting in a way, say, the Liberal Democrats aren’t. Even this summer, its leader on Epping Forest council said the party could not have been behind an alleged firebomb attack on a man’s home because: “Firebombing is not a British method. A brick through the window is a British method, but firebombing is not a way of showing displeasure.” As a journalist, why wouldn’t you quiz a BNP member about why they’ve joined a party which has officials spouting that stuff?
This is not a normal political party. To treat it as such is not only cowardice, but a basic journalistic failing. The BBC acknowledged this when it invited Nick Griffin onto Question Time – and the vast majority of the programme was dedicated to his being there, with host David Dimbleby turning master interrogator as well as benign chairman.
Will the BBC decide that “political balance” is no longer an acceptable substitute for rigorous journalism as a result of all this? I hope so, because while I agree that the BBC must avoid adhering to any political party, there is no justification for the neutral presentation of those who endorse hate, harassment and violence.
Related:
The Media Show on reporting the BNP
BBC fails on BNP: AVERT PANDICIDAL CRARROW CRISIS NOW!
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
The Janes family weren’t the only ones to be exposed by The Sun’s attacks on the PM. Gordon Brown was the unwilling subject of an especially unpleasant kind of scrutiny – including having his phone call recorded and republished by The Sun. At the Currybet blog, Martin Belam thinks this is a likely contravention of clause 10 of the PCC code, which forbids the interception of private communications:
I’ve no doubt that the contents of the call were of interest to the public, but it seems to me that one side of the phone call is someone attempting to make an apology for their visual disability causing them to have poor handwriting, in a phone call they had every expectation at the time of being private. It would have been possible for The Sun to report on the conversation without publishing a transcript, and it would certainly have been possible to report on the story without publishing a recording of the call in full on the paper’s website.
Belam has taken his concerns to the PCC, and predictably been told that, as he isn’t the prime minister, there’s nothing the PCC can do. I suspect that in any case, as the phone call to Mrs Janes was made in the course of Brown’s public duties as head of government, The Sun could argue that the expectation of privacy doesn’t apply – in the same way it was argued that Alan Duncan’s “on rations” comments were fair game for Heydon Prowse to record and distribute.
But intercepting a phone call to entrap one (sincerely apologetic) party in the conversation is in pretty bad taste – and besides, isn’t it a practice that News International has put behind it? After Nick Davies’ reports for The Guardian earlier this year on the pervasive use of the black arts on the NOTW and Sun, the PCC produced a report this week which assured the public that:
Despite the manner in which the Guardian’s allegations were treated in some quarters – as if they related to current or recent activity – there is no evidence that the practice of phone message tapping is ongoing. The Commission is satisfied that – so far as it is possible to tell – its work aimed at improving the integrity of undercover journalism has played its part in raising standards in this area.
Improving its integrity. Raising its standards. By running a personal apology from one bereaved parent to another on the front page. Well done, The Sun.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
The PCC code warns that “In cases involving personal grief or shock, enquiries and approaches must be made with sympathy and discretion and publication handled sensitively.” But in some cases, the distressed and bereaved will have reasons for actively welcoming publicity – and Jacqui Janes appears to be one such case. The mother of a guardsman killed on duty in Afghanistan, she is grieving and angry over her son’s death, and those feelings have been compounded by what she feels to be the offensively illiterate way in which Gordon Brown wrote to express his condolences.
Up until this, I didn’t know that Brown was handwriting letters to the families of fallen soldiers. And personally –despite many misgivings I have about the way the government has managed the war in Afghanistan – this makes me think better of Brown. He appears to experience his responsibility to bereaved families deeply. But I understand why Ms Janes would feel differently on receiving what she considers a deeply inadequate letter.
What I don’t understand is how Dominic Mohan can justify making a spectacle of one family’s grief. Loss of a child is a dreadful, crushing thing – and however cathartic it might be to attack the government responsible for that death, grieving in public can be a cruel process. In the worst cases, people can become fixed as professional mourners, and the process of recovery is made horribly protracted. That’s why the PCC’s guidelines on intrusion into shock and grief are there, and every publicity approach from a bereaved family ought to be handled with huge tact and discretion. It doesn’t work like that, but it should.
It seems unpleasantly likely that The Sun has consciously recruited the Janes to the paper’s anti-Brown cause at a time when the family is deeply distressed. Publicising the reaction to the letter is one thing; encouraging Ms Janes to act the reporter and challenge Brown when he rang to apologise is something else. I hope that the Janes family do not feel exploited. But watching The Sun rack up the politicised covers, making a shattered family the front for its partisan campaign, it looks like something awfully close to exploitation.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
At the beginning of October, Iain Dale suddenly noticed that The Mail was not very nice about gay people and put in a complaint to the PCC. Or at least, he noticed that The Mail was not very nice about him, and the focus of their abuse was his sexuality. Anyway, the PCC have issued their judgement on the case – and the original column is ok with them:
In coming to a conclusion on the matter, the Commission had to have regard to the context in which the remarks were made. They appeared in a diary column which is well known for its mischievous – and sometimes self-consciously fusty – remarks that poke fun at the antics of public figures. The piece followed the complainant’s own comments to Pink News – a news website aimed at gay people – about his attempt to secure the nomination in Bracknell. It may have been an uncharitable account of the complainant’s position – and any intended humour may have been lost on some readers – but the item appeared to be relevant to the news, and to fit into the column’s style, rather than constitute an arbitrary attack on him on the basis of his sexuality.
This might strike some as a fine distinction to make, but where it is debatable – as in this case – about whether remarks can be regarded solely as pejorative and gratuitous, the Commission should be slow to restrict the right to express an opinion, however snippy it might be. While people may occasionally be insulted or upset by what is said about them in newspapers, the right to freedom of expression that journalists enjoy also includes the right – within the law – to give offence. The Commission regretted that the item had upset the complainant, but the complaint was not upheld.
Within the broader politics of the Daily Mail, which consistently figures homosexuality as some sort of threat to the nation (see this report, where the US electorate’s rejection of same-sex marriage is called “a victory for traditional marriage”), the Ephraim Hardcastle column was mild stuff. And given that the PCC has previously asserted that Mail columnists are entitled to claim plain untruths about homosexuality as “facts”, it would be hard for them to penalise the Mail now for using a snide tone to report something that actually happened.
In fact, snarking that “gays all stick together, don’t they?” is barely worth more than a quiver of outrage when there are those who object to extending basic human rights to gay people – the right to marry someone they love and fancy, the right to have a family. The Conservative Party’s group in the European Parliament, for example, includes Valdemar Tomasevski MEP, who describes homosexuality as an “evil” from which children must be “protected”. It’s easier for the Tory party to ally with outright homophobes than it is for them to confront their own Eurosceptics. If Dale really is distressed by hate and prejudice, he might want to modify his support for Cameron’s European policy.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
Big books don’t scare me. I’ve read Infinite Jest. I’ve read Middlemarch. I might even hit House Of Leaves one day, which is extra tough because the words don’t all go in the right direction. So it’s not the massy text that puts me off Ayn Rand, and even seeing my friends struggle with Atlas Shrugged wasn’t the ultimate deterrent – I spent long enough studying Middle English to let go of the idea that books should give me pleasure.
But the dreary working-out of Rand’s Objectivist philosophy (pathologised here by Johann Hari) in novel form – that’s what makes her books seem not worth picking up. Once you’ve grasped the essentials of the belief system, there’s nowhere for the narrative to go. Altruism is a corruption, capitalism is freedom, weakness is an imposition on the strong, etc etc. Fix the characters in within the cracked schema, and you’ve anticipated the moral conclusion towards which the plot is creaking.
Which is depressing on its own. But worse is the knowledge that Rand offers her make-believes as triumphant evidence of her own world-view. This isn’t the sympathetic curiosity that animated Eliot’s realist “experiments in life”, just a bludgeoning insistence on telling the reader How It Is:
In The Fountainhead I showed that Roark moves the world—that the Keatings feed upon him and hate him for it, while the Tooheys are consciously out to destroy him.
Ayn Rand, Journals of Ayn Rand, ed. David Harriman (Penguin Dutton, 1997), p. 392
Roark is the genius of capitalism, Keating is the ambitious mediocrity, and Toohey is the collectivist anti-Roark. So Rand started out with a belief in the heroic entrepreneur. Then she wrote a novel in which the entrepreneur is the hero. Then she claimed she’d “shown” the truth of the position she started out with. It’s the basic Littlejohn manoeuvre: making something up, then screaming “you couldn’t make it up!” for the remaining word count.It’s a sort of genius I suppose – just not one that you’d want to try governing by unless you were a splinter-brained ideologue.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
Outrage and hazard are often disproportionate, and governments can be as lousy at calculating risk as any stats-challenged individual. Government advisor Professor Nutt recommended a policy of honestly evaluating the harm caused by intoxicants – a policy which would logically extend to decriminalising or reclassifying many illegal substances (including cannabis, ecstasy and LSD) which are less dangerous than socially-acceptable substances like alcohol and tobacco. And he got fired for it.
In his letter dismissing Nutt, home secretary Alan Johnson explained that:
I cannot have confusion between scientific evidence and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as Chair of the ACMD.
Government, in other words, refuses to bend its expression of outrage through the legal system to conform to the objective hazard. This misdirection is unjust and dangerous: resources are aimed at punishing people for selling and possessing substances which are basically inoffensive, while the black market in illegal drugs fosters violent crime.
But maybe it’s a mistake to imagine that a government would be primarily concerned with a hazard to the people it represents. For the ruling party, the biggest hazard is outrage itself – and drugs policy really gets the outrage gushing.
With comment from The Sun (“NUTTY Professor David Nutt, the government’s chief drug advisor, must have been on the wacky baccy again!”), The Indy (with Richard Ingrams taking in a Moir-ish view of Steven Gately) and The Mail (“Our drug-corrupted political and media elite view Professor Nutt as a hero because he helps them excuse their own wrongdoing”) all lining up to say that Professor Nutt was a Danger to our Youth, it looks like Johnson made a pretty solid political decision.
Evidence based policy would be nice, but why would any minister want to sit in line for that sort of outrage? Johnson might not be interested in formulating a drugs policy based on risk – but he’s demonstrated great acumen in recognising a danger to himself. The press wanted Nutt, and if they hadn’t got Nutt, they’d have moved on to Johnson. That’s an objective risk, and firing Nutt was the consequence of rational self-interest.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009. Illustration © Beau Bo d’Or, 2009.
This is a guest post by Joel Snape.
I got in an argument with some creationists the other day. The usual story: I was on a food run, they were handing out leaflets, I absentmindedly took one, they said “‘Oh, do you think about Jesus much,” and I went “Wait, this is about Jesus? Have your leaflet back.” I would have walked away, but before I had the chance one of them told me he believed that everything in the Bible was literally true, and before I knew it I was late back with the butternut squash. My girlfriend was furious.
Anyway, of the fish-in-a-barrel fun I had over those thirty minutes*, this was my favourite exchange:
Christian: You know, I’ve studied evolution.
Me: Which books have you read?
Christian: Well, I actually did political science at university, but…
Me: So did I, that’s fine, I’m just asking which books on evolution you’ve read. I’ve read loads.
Christian: Well, I went to the same university as Richard Dawkins.
Me: I went to the same university as Victoria Wood, but I couldn’t [thinks desperately]… write a sitcom about dinner ladies to save my life.
Christian: …
Me: [in my head, so as not to ruin the moment] ZING!
You know what? I wasn’t just being a dick: I have read loads of books on evolution. But these creationists were pretty well-informed – in the sense of knowing an awful lot of ‘facts’ that were actually convincing-sounding lies – and somewhere during the conversation, I realised that I’ve never read a book that contains simple, comprehensive proof of why evolution is definitely real, alongside easily-memorable ripostes to the ill-thought out arguments most creationists parrot.
The Greatest Show On Earth is exactly that book.
It’s also a bit of a return to form. The God Delusion is comprehensively structured and intimidatingly well-argued, but – perhaps because he’s used to delivering the same material to denialist buffoons – the tone can get a bit hectoring. By contrast, this is Dawkins at his most avuncular – the twinkle-eyed, tweed-jacketed professor you’d like to give a non-ironic apple. He’s talking about a subject that he genuinely loves, and you’d have to have visited an awful lot of Noah’s Ark-themed petting zoos not to be swept along by his enthusiasm.
Describing bacteriologist Richard Lenski’s experiments in evolution, for instance – a twenty-year exercise in tedium, repetition and very carefully moving things between jars – Dawkins is clearly in awe of what Ben Goldacre would probably call Proper Science, and it’s impossible not to feel the same. In other moments, Dawkins describes the elegance of evolution with a sense of wonder that doesn’t seem to have dimmed through the years, getting excited about obscure plants or interesting fossils in a way that makes you wish he’d taught you biology at school.
Meanwhile, he marshals his arguments like Tony Hart making the New York skyline out of scrap metal – a nudge here, a prod there, and suddenly you have a genuine understanding of radioactive clocks or the reasons for the Cambrian gap, along with easily memorised rejoinders to most of the typical creationist tropes. It’s not going to convince everyone – Dawkins can’t resist including a transcript of his chat with a particularly blinkered Concerned Woman Of America – but if nothing else, it should make sure I never have to bring up the fact that I shared a university with Chris Tarrant. I’m pretty sure I could do whatever his job is.
* Bonus round 1: if you need a couple of single-sentence creationist-upsetters, try “What did the carnivores eat on the ark?” or “If god’s omnipotent, how can you say Jesus was his only son?”
Bonus round 2: here’s something I should have said to the creationists but didn’t, which I’m going to call the Last Biscuit argument:
Imagine I’ve got a packet of biscuits on my desk, but there’s only one left. One of my colleagues is hungry, so I give him the biscuit. That’s a pretty big sacrifice, especially if my colleague decides that instead of taking advantage of the biscuit properly he’s going to just crush it underfoot and then chuck the crumbs in my face. Now imagine that I know in advance what my colleague’s going to do to the biscuit and that I could make a new packet of biscuits appear out of thin air. Surely that’s stretching the meaning of sacrifice a bit?
Text © Joel Snape, 2009
story: I was on a food run, they were handing out leaflets, I
absentmindedly took one, they said ‘Oh, do you think about Jesus
much,’ and I went ‘Wait, this is about Jesus? Have your leaflet back.’
I would have walked away, but before I had the chance one of them told
me he believed that everything in the Bible was literally true, and
before I knew it I was late back with the butternut squash. My
girlfriend was *furious.*Anyway, of the fish-in-a-barrel fun I had over those thirty minutes*,
this was my favourite exchange:Christian: You know, I’ve studied evolution.
Me: Which books have you read?
Christian: Well, I actually did political science at university, but…
Me: So did I, that’s fine, I’m just asking which books on evolution
you’ve read. I’ve read loads.
Christian: Well, I went to the same university as Richard Dawkins.
Me: I went to the same university as Victoria Wood, but I couldn’t
[thinks desperately]…write a sitcom about dinner ladies to save my
life.
Christian: ….
Me: [in my head, so as not to ruin the moment] ZING!
You know what? I wasn’t just being a dick: I *have* read loads of
books on evolution. But these creationists were pretty well-informed -
in the sense of knowing an awful lot of ‘facts’ that were actually
convincing-sounding lies – and somewhere during the conversation, I
realised that I’ve never read a book that contains simple,
comprehensive proof of why evolution is definitely real, alongside
easily-memorable ripostes to the ill-thought out arguments most
creationists parrot.
The Greatest Show On Earth is exactly that book.
It’s also a bit of a return to form. The God Delusion is
comprehensively structured and intimidatingly well-argued, but -
perhaps because he’s used to delivering the same material to denialist
buffoons – the tone can get a bit hectoring. By contrast, this is
Dawkins at his most avuncular – the twinkle-eyed, tweed-jacketed
professor you’d like to give a non-ironic apple. He’s talking about a
subject that he genuinely loves, and you’d have to have visited an
awful lot of Noah’s Ark-themed petting zoos not to be swept along by
his enthusiasm. Describing bacteriologist Richard Lenski’s experiments
in evolution, for instance – a twenty-year exercise in tedium,
repetition and *very carefully* moving things between jars – Dawkins
is clearly in awe of what Ben Goldacre would probably call Proper
Science, and it’s impossible not to feel the same. In other moments,
Dawkins describes the elegance of evolution with a sense of wonder
that doesn’t seem to have dimmed through the years, getting excited
about obscure plants or interesting fossils in a way that makes you
wish he’d taught you biology at school. Meanwhile, he marshals his
arguments like Tony Hart making the New York skyline out of scrap
metal – a nudge here, a prod there, and suddenly you have a genuine
understanding of radioactive clocks or the reasons for the Cambrian
gap, along with easily memorised rejoinders to most of the typical
creationist tropes. It’s not going to convince everyone – Dawkins
can’t resist including a transcript of his chat with a particularly
blinkered Concerned Woman Of America – but if nothing else, it should
make sure I never have to bring up the fact that I shared a university
with Chris Tarrant. I’m pretty sure I *could* do whatever his job is.
*Bonus round: If you need a couple of single-sentence
creationist-upsetters, try ‘What did the carnivores eat on the ark?’
or ‘If god’s omnipotent, how can you say Jesus was his only son?’
Bonus round: here’s something I should have said to the creationists
but didn’t, which I’m going to call the Last Biscuit argument.
Imagine I’ve got a packet of biscuits on my desk, but there’s only one
left. One of my colleagues is hungry, so I give him the biscuit.
That’s a pretty big sacrifice, especially if my colleague decides that
instead of taking advantage of the biscuit properly he’s going to just
crush it underfoot and then chuck the crumbs in my face. But it’s not
*that* massive, because after all I could just go and buy another
packet of biscuits.
BNP sympathies are a reaction to immigration and a sense of cultural endangerment in the white working class, right? Not exactly, according to this infographic from Information Is Beautiful, which shows many areas of relatively high BNP support (well, over 0.04% of the population) are remote from the largest non-white populations:
It’s possible for voters to live at great distance from ethnic minority communities, and still think there are too many of them over here, apparently – but conversely, it also looks as though support for racist politics largely fades out where non-white faces are most visible. For the very small minority who actively support the BNP, it seems that beliefs about immigration are unlikely to have been formed by direct experience of it.
(Some caveats: the National Institute Of Statistics information is pretty old, and shows ethnic make-up rather than immigrant populations. If anyone has a more recent analysis they think is relevant, stick it in the comments.)
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009. Image © David McCandless, used under Creative Commons. Spotted by @UAF.
A survey (PDF) by YouGov for the Daily Telegraph polled 1,314 adults after Griffin’s Question Time appearance and compared the results with a survey taken during the summer. (The figures in the left-hand column are from 29 May to 4 June; those in the right-hand column from 22-23 October.) The results show such tiny shifts that it seems fair to say that the programme caused no change in voting intentions or political sympathies.
The BNP’s “total positive” score fell by two points, its “total negative” score fell by one, and its “ambivalent” score increased by two – so far, Question Time seems to have been neither a devastating exposure of the BNP viewpoint, or a crossing-over into the mainstream. But over on page two of the PDF, there’s a more depressing figure: 22% of those surveyed reported that they “would or might consider voting BNP”. Considering that only 3% say that they intend to vote BNP, that’s a whole chunk of people who don’t identify with the BNP yet don’t see their politics as off-limits – presumably including people who read and believe headlines like these.
It’s regularly asserted that we need “debate” about immigration. But immigration is constantly being debated, and as Alex Massie points out, the terms of that debate are almost entirely in agreement with the BNP. Immigration is presented as a problem which must be controlled, culture is offered as an internally consistent entity that will be destroyed by change – and we saw on Question Time that none of the three major parties is willing to step away from this strikingly illiberal line. The authoritarian, isolationist tendency is already at home in UK p0litics. It’s never really gone away.
**Edit ** LibCon highlights possible efforts by the BNP to bias YouGov polls in their favour. If that’s true, and this is still the best showing they could manage, they’re not doing it very well.
Text © Sarah Ditum, 2009
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