If you’re on the train listening to music through the speaker on your crappy little phone people aren’t looking at you because they admire your taste in funky beats. They’re wishing that you were dead, from something painful.
(1)Monthly Archive for April, 2007
Equifax collect credit data about you and then sell that data to financial institutions who are considering lending you money. If you want to know what they’re saying about you, you can pay them £17 to see a copy of your own records, which seems a bit cheeky to me. However, thanks to the Data Protection Act, you can also ask them to give you a copy of all the data they hold on you by demanding a Statutory Credit Report from them, and that only costs £2. You can even pay by credit card, an idea I find ironically appealing, for some reason. Equifax.
(0)You know I’m not usually one for posting links to videos on You Tube, so this must be a pretty special video, right?
Lots of people think that BBC News is biased in one way or another. It isn’t. People who don’t work for the BBC simply cannot imagine the trouble and wrangling and arguments that go into making sure that the output of News is as impartial as it’s possible to be. Of course it’s not nice when the BBC is saying something that you don’t like, and it’s much easier to imagine that this happens because of bias, but the hard truth is that if you think the BBC is biased on an issue then your opinions on that issue are probably wrong. (Of course, if you think the BBC is wrong about the details of a story, particularly if it’s an IT story then you’re probably right! But I’m talking here about bias not accuracy.)
One of the processes that ensures impartiality in news reporting is having clear rules for whether or not you report on a story. The theory goes that you report developments and if there aren’t any developments and you think people are interested anyway then you have to find another angle to the story. You may think it’s worth reporting that China is torturing people in prison but they were doing that last week; if there’s nothing to add this week then you can’t report on it. There is always some debate about whether anniversaries constitute a development in a story, usually you need more than just an anniversary as a justification to do a story in which there have been no other developments.*
The way in which BBC News has been reporting Alan Johnston’s captivity frequently has not met any of the usual criteria. There have been memos and e-mails from editors and managers in News telling programme makers to keep the story in the output despite the fact that there have been no developments. As a result the story has been regularly mentioned in news bulletins and programmes, often with no justification at all or at best a flimsy reference to some arbitrary anniversary such as three weeks or the second month since he disappeared. There have also been several dire items including this nine minute package that went out on Newshour last week (Newshour on Alan Johnston). I know that many editors and journalists are unhappy about this pressure but most of them are unprepared to challenge the orders that they have been given.
The BBC has a responsibility as an employer to do everything that it can to get Alan Johnston released. By staging demonstrations and organising vigils and press conferences it can keep the story fresh and in the headlines and that may well add to the pressure on his captors to release him. I can even see the justification for the embarrassing “Free Alan Johnston” posters that have appeared on billboards around London, although they look uncomfortably similar to the BBC’s current promotional material to me. However, it is vital that the BBCs role as a lobbyist is not conflated with its role as a provider of impartial news. Otherwise it confirms the suspicions of those people who are inclined to believe that the organisation is biased – that the news agenda is based not upon a careful, academic judgement of what stories are most important but rather on the personal whims of whoever happens to be in charge at the time.
* This only applies to radio news. In television news the criteria for doing a story are mostly to do with whether there are pictures or not.
According to BBC News the experiments that will seek to identify the elusive Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator at Cern are “each about the size of a mansion”. How the f**k big is a mansion? Is that bigger or smaller than a palace? How about a castle? Is this some sort of joke that I’m not getting?
(1)
The Mark of Cain is a film made by Channel Four about a group of young British soldiers in Iraq. In it “Iraqi detainees are mistreated at the hands of the soldiers; de-sensitised by violence and encouraged by their mates.” According to the Guardian it is based on more than 100 interviews with soldiers, their families, MPs and others. It also draws heavily on the courts martial of soldiers accused of torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners. It is due to go out on Thursday. A lot of people are saying that it shouldn’t be shown because it might encourage negative feelings towards British troops in the Middle East, in particular those marines and sailors who are currently being held in Iran.
I just finished re-reading The Colditz Story, a documentary account by a former prisoner of war, P.R.Reid, of the lives and antics of British POWs held in Germany during the Second World War. In it he frequently mentioned how grateful he and his fellow prisoners were for the protections they enjoyed under the Geneva conventions. It contrasted pretty starkly with the dismissive and flippant attitude towards those conventions that I’ve been hearing from politicians and commentators recently.
One of the reasons why we need commonly agreed ways of treating prisoners of war is that we want to protect our own service men and women when they are captured. If we choose to disregard or cynically bypass the fragile standards that do exist it is they who will end up paying the price. So I think that this week, when everyone is thinking about the British prisoners in Iran, is the perfect time to show a drama about the mistreatment of prisoners during conflict. Where human rights are concerned you really should do unto others as you would have others do unto you. The contrast between the way Iran has treated their British prisoners and the way the British have treated some of their own prisoners-of-war should be obvious to even the most thick-skulled Daily Mail reader.
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