29 August 2002
posted by theclipe 1104
The Herald devoted its front page lead yesterday - along with an entire inside page and an editorial - to Jack McConnell's announcement of a drive to end Scotland's poor diet record. Unbelievably, in all this reporting and editorialising the Executive's decision to scupper Tommy Sheridan's Free School Meals Bill was not mentioned once. Not once! The question was never even raised with McConnell! What kind of journalism is this? It was left to correspondents in today's Herald to make the connection clear for the overpaid hacks.
One of the quotes that often appears at the top of this page comes to mind:
You cannot hope to bribe or twist
thank God! the British journalist
but seeing what the man will do
unbribed, there's no occasion to
23 August 2002
posted by theclipe 1054
As a service to humanity, I've decided to repost Iain MacWhirter's column from yesterday's Herald. I couldn't agree with him more. I've also been sickened by the way the murder of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman has been dealt with by the media. Sycophancy and hypocrisy have been rife.
Dangers of being sentinels of the public's well-being
From Herald - 21/08/2002
Iain Macwhirter
I'm sorry, but much of the reporting of the Lakenheath murders is pornography, pure and simple. I don't care if it is all "human interest" - the material filling the popular press this week has been an affront to human decency. In devouring the salacious details of this tragic, though statistically rare, event, I fear we are little better than the paedophiles who drool over images of vulnerable children.
Normally, I avoid reading about murders on principle. I find the hypocrisy of the press at such times nauseating: the way the papers proclaim their sympathy and concern for the victims and parents when all they're really interested in is selling newspapers. And TV journalists are almost as bad, though at least they have the decency to be shifty about it.
And it's only going to get worse. The police haven't even identified the bodies yet, so we can be sure there will be at least another week of this media frenzy. By the weekend the press will no doubt be filled with ghoulish accounts of the post-mortem and sordid details of how Holly and Jessica died.
If there were ever an argument for controlling the press, this is it. The public may have a right to know, but the press don't have an absolute right to distort and sensationalise. Nor is press freedom a justification for invading the private grief of the victims merely for the titillation of a lascivious readership. There must be a better way.
Emotive reporting of child sex abuse perverts public debate and creates a
climate of fear. It is wrong for parents to be brainwashed into keeping their children behind locked doors over a risk that is as remote as a lottery win. Media coverage of child murders corrupts the police, who bask in the warm glow of press attention. Detectives seem more interested in courting publicity than conducting systematic inquiries. The climate of fear and moral panic feeds prejudice and hate and encourages demagogues to call for populist measures such as the death penalty which have failed before and would fail again.
But these aren't the only reasons I had, until yesterday, avoided reading the accounts of the sad circumstances in which Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman met their end. As a father of young children myself, I find it impossible not to empathise with the victims' parents. Who wouldn't? But sympathy rapidly degenerates into morbid curiosity and then pure voyeurism. I'm as much of a sucker for this kind of stuff as the rest of the newspaper-reading public. The mere thought of paedophiles pursuing children turns my stomach, but fascination about how they do it gets the better of me. Of course the press is giving us what we want. But I need to be saved from myself.
Not that there is any evidence, by the way, that paedophilia was involved in the Lakenheath murders. It was only yesterday that the police actually charged Ian Huntley with two counts of murder. Not that you would believe it from the acres of space devoted to Huntley and his girlfriend, who have already been given a place alongside Myra Hindley in the media hall of infamy.
The victimisation of the prime suspects has already reached bizarre proportions. Yesterday, papers such as the Sun led with a story about how Ian
Huntley's first wife had run off with his younger brother just two weeks after their wedding. "Holly and Jessica: suspect's love tangle", the Mirror agreed, was the major news event of the day. At the time, Ian Huntley hadn't even been charged and yet he had become a media villain whose private life had become fair game. Maybe they are monstrous murderers. But we are supposed to regard people as innocent until proven guilty. How can this couple can expect a fair trial after this lurid exposure?
The tabloid press has already conducted its own trial and found that society is to blame - or at any rate those elements in society which refuse to countenance the return of the death penalty or consider measures such as the castration of sex offenders. According to the Daily Mail: "These two children were murdered, in part, by a liberal society . . . This government has done nothing to reverse the trend towards lethal permissiveness. It has relaxed laws about censorship and legalised acts of gross indecency with young men and women. It has relaxed the drugs laws. It has made a virtue of 'alternative lifestyles'."
Really? Do they mean Tony Blair? Is David Blunkett lethally permissive? Most people regard this Labour government as the most morally conservative since the 1920s, led by the first Labour prime minister to be a dedicated church-goer. Actually, the real debate about "alternative lifestyles" and the acceptance of homosexuality is taking place within the Conservative Party right now. Perhaps the Daily Mail's real target is the former Tory minister, Michael Portillo, and the Start Again Party.
But party politics aside, the real assault on standards is coming not from the liberal establishment (whatever that is), but from the very tabloid newspapers which indulge in such prurient orgies of indignation. It is rich, indeed, for the tabloid press to give lectures on undermining marriage and morality when their pages are filled week after week with lurid scandal and sexual titillation. Their only morality is what sells.
There is a horrible inevitablity about the way the coverage of sensational child murder and abduction cases are choreographed by the media. First there is the shock and grief of the victims' parents, then the hunt for the murderers, then the discovery that society has "lost its innocence". After that, the press winds itself into a lather and demands the return of the death penalty.
Apparently, DNA testing is so fail-safe today that there need be no worry about hanging innocent people. Well, I've got news for the hangers. DNA testing is far from foolproof and there have been numerous instances of such procedures incriminating the wrong people. But what of the deterrent effect? According to the Daily Mail: "Lenient sentences are an unforgivable betrayal, for they fail to reflect society's abhorrence of paedophilia and to satisfy the natural desire to see real justice." This is dangerously close to saying that the execution of innocent people - for such miscarriages of justice are inevitable - could be justified on the grounds that it satisfies our lust for retribution. America has been sending more and more murderers to death row, but it hasn't stopped homicide becoming the prime cause of death among black males under 35. State-sanctioned murder has done nothing to engender respect for the law. All it has done is legitimise retribution and revenge, and give another turn to the cycle of violence.
There is another reason why paedophiles or child murderers would not be deterred by capital punishment. Most sexual assaults on children are committed not by predatory paedophiles in playparks, but by parents and relatives in the family home. This is the uncomfortable reality that the prurient press chooses wilfully to ignore because it doesn't fit with its demonic rhetoric.
In reality, it's not "stranger danger'' we should be alerting children to, but
"family danger". The home is a dangerous place. But somehow I don't expect Sun leader-writers to start saying: string 'em up, it's the only language these parents understand. Nor, one suspects, will they start calling for a register of close friends and relatives, on the grounds that they are the ones most likely to cause harm to children.
If these self-appointed guardians of public morality are so concerned about truth and justice, perhaps they should start considering the real causes of violent sexual crime and child abuse. How many extra copies would that sell? Not many.
16 August 2002
posted by theclipe 1410
"Donald Dewar is irreplacable."
Jack McConnell - 19 October 2000 following Dewar's death
"The first couple of years [of the Scottish Executive and Parliament] were a disappointment."
Jack McConnell - 16 August 2002.
Not so 'irreplacable' after all then!
15 August 2002
posted by theclipe 1049
Loved the final dig that Sir Muir Russell managed to get into the press release announcing his departure as head of the Civil Service in Scotland. So it's been a privilege to "head the Scottish Executive"? Anything that deflates Jack McConnell's ego is alright by me.
14 August 2002
posted by theclipe 1111
Sorry to pick on The Herald this week, but Jackie Kemp's column on the abduction of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman is a toe-curling space-filler: "What is to be done and whom shall we blame?"; "For many, the first reaction is: how can we have wasted so much time?"; "Is it reasonable any longer to expect the police force in a small and relatively quiet part of the country such as Cambridgeshire to co-ordinate an operation of this kind? What experience can they have?"; "Are we relying too much on hi-tech digitalised services? Have we disempowered the human operatives too much?"
Answers on a postcard please to 200 Renfield Street, Glasgow, SCOTLAND, G2 3PR.
13 August 2002
posted by theclipe 0922
Looking for work? These are probably just part-time shifts, but they could keep the wolf from the door as you complete your ground-breaking investigation or start the next Great Scottish Novel...
Job title: News sub-editors
Date posted: 5/8/2002
Publication/web site title: Scottish Daily Mail
Full details: We need confident, experienced news sub-editors to work
regular shifts on Scotland's biggest selling quality newspaper. Daily
newspaper experience essential.
Please apply in writing with CV and covering letter.
Apply to: Mr Andy Harries, Deputy Editor, Scottish Daily Mail, 200
Renfield Street, Glasgow, G2 3PZ
12 August 2002
posted by theclipe 0932
"The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fall at the feet of mammon... Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." -- John Swinton
A great quote from a former Chief of Staff of the New York Times. Click here for more info.
"A church wedding, to me, has Romanist overtones..."
John MacLeod's column in The Herald shows, once again, how much he desperately needs to ditch the newly-found sobriety and take a drink. Click here for more twittering from Tarbert.
posted by theclipe 1309
On Saturday morning I woke up and - still drunk from the night before - saw Pop Idol Darius winning some stupid celebrity game for a teenage girl on the BBC's kids show. This came into my head unbidden: "The day Darius Danesh lifted the young girl and ran across the stage with her in his muscular arms, was the day I realised I was gay." I'm not gay and have no idea if I should be worried about this or not. Still, I thought it might make a good opening for a novel or short story.
posted by theclipe 1538
At the moment I'm reading The Season Ticket by Jonathan Tulloch. It's about two working class lads from Gateshead coming up with various scams to get enough money together to see their beloved Newcastle United. Amazon are doing a deal on it at the moment, if you're interested.