Headline quiz
The BBC and the Daily Mail have both written stories about the same thing today, so I thought it might be fun to see if you could work out which of them said what about it.
Headline 1:
Headline 2:
Hmm it's a tricky one all right. How about the story content?
Article 1:
Analysis of more than 10,000 people by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) found no relationship between years of use and risk.
There is no known biological mechanism by which mobiles could cause cancer, but there has been public concern.
It is hoped this study will allay some anxieties, as research continues.
Article 2:
Prolonged use of mobile phones over many years could increase the risk of cancer, scientists have found.
However, a landmark study by the World Health Organisation into the safety of mobiles is expected to stop short of concluding that they definitely cause cancer - because the evidence is not conclusive enough.
I keep looking at the two stories, thinking I've made a mistake. Surely they're not talking about the same research, I keep thinking. But they are. And if you were in any doubt as to who was doing the scaremongering and who was being that little bit calmer, have a look here and here.
Which report do you believe?
Either/or choices
The either/or* argument is something we'll have to get used to over the next few weeks, as the election rumbles into town - your town, my town, every single crummy town around. You can only have one thing or another. There is no other choice, so this is what you're stuck with.
People use the argument when talking about a finite pot of money from which things must be paid. Why don't we just scrap Trident and use the money to pay for better schools and hospitals? Or, alternatively, why don't we just sack loads of public sector workers and then we can afford lovely tax cuts for the poor hard-working private sector people who are so hard done by in comparison? The trouble is, I think, when you open the door to one of those either/or arguments, you validate the other; and then it's simply a question of whose MPs get over the finishing line first, rather than what's actually best.
I might not like replenishing Trident, for example, but I imagine a lot of the billions of pounds quoted for its installation will come in the form of wages to keep people in gainful employment, often in deprived areas. To argue against it in mere cost terms is a detriment to the genuine counter-arguments in terms of whether it's really needed, whether it's an effective deterrent to the modern threats, and so on. And you might not like public sector workers, but you have to bear in mind that a third of that money quoted for their wages goes straight back in tax and national insurance as well, so arguing against them in pure cost terms isn't the whole story either.
Sometimes it's not so simple to just say you can make a saving by doing something; you have to attack it with a series of arguments beyond cost. A lot of things cost money, and they're good or even reasonable value for money. Just saying you could save X, Y and Z is enough, and it could be harmful to your cause.
The either/or choice is also an argument that people are using when trying to save BBC 6Music and, to a lesser extent, the BBC Asian Network radio station and the BBC website. It's the idea that if you, for example, simply threw Chris Moyles under a bus, or blew up BBC3, you'd have the funds available to keep everything ticking over. You'll have heard a lot of these arguments over the past few days after the news that the radio stations could be scrapped.
This kind of negotiation is a bad idea, I think. Firstly, it is telling the BBC that you don't mind them making cuts - you are simply disagreeing with the cuts they are making. That automatically assumes that there's a need for cuts to be made. If you think there is, then fine, but you need to give business reasons. It's not true, for example, to say that all of the BBC's competitors have suffered throughout the recession - Sky has taken on many more subscribers. So is it really the time when Auntie must cut back operations in order to help her beleaguered commercial rivals? Or is it just that simplistic "It's a recession, the public sector must suffer" attitude that I keep hearing?
Don't get me wrong. The BBC is, I'm pretty sure, an organisation that could do with a bit of trimming here and there, as most big corporations are. A lot of us, in the private and public sector, work in offices where a man walking in with a shotgun and massacring a quarter of the workforce - so long as it was the quarter of the workforce who happened to be the ones who don't do a lot of work - wouldn't make a material difference to output whatsoever. But it's not that kind of either/or, either. It's easy to imagine you could just come in and sack a few people, and that would improve things; but that would assume that (a) management consultants know what they're doing and (b) that the sackings would justify the utterly enormous fees those consultants would command. It's not always the case.
A better argument, I think, and one that is happily being made in this instance, I should add, would be to look at the positive output of Asian Network and 6Music and the BBC website - the things they do that aren't done anywhere else and wouldn't be picked up by commercial rivals. That makes them unique products which should be supported by the licence fee. Sure, you could behead Chris Evans and pay for several journalists, but that's not the point; the point is that you need to be making a case for Chris Evans and the journalists remaining intact. You need to make the case why 6Music and the Asian Network and the quarter of the BBC website under threat are doing things that are brilliant and shiny, and commercially irreplaceable. That's the battleground, not saying that someone somewhere else should get the chop.
Which isn't to say that I listen to 6Music or Asian Network, because I don't, and I do happen to think that Chris Moyles is an abomination who makes me cry through the sheer misery of it all whenever I stray across his radio programme in the morning. But that's not the point. I still think they should exist, and they have a right to exist, and each one is vital. I can't stand BBC3, either, and some of the programmes on it seem to me like they were made as a joke, but then I only have 30 days left before my 35th birthday, and I'm not allowed to watch it after that, anyway. I may think BBC3 is shit, but that doesn't mean I don't think it should exist, if it's doing stuff that other people like. It's not an either/or choice, and it's not about what I like or dislike.
Having said all of which, and I'm going to be really hypocritical now, if the BBC really is going to take a machete to its website, can I make a personal plea. While I think it's been a delightful experiment to allow some of the most noxious arseholes in Britain to have a blank canvas on which to vomit up last night's pease pudding, if you're going to start anywhere, could you please start with BBC Have Your Say? It doesn't serve any purpose other than to make prejudice, kneejerk unpleasantness, xenophobia and the BNP seem more popular than they really are, and I'm fairly sure that wasn't what people had in mind when it was set up. All it's done is made people learn how to be slightly more careful when expressing their racism.
In that instance, I would like there to be an either/or choice, and I would like the choice to be for HYS to be chucked in the bin. Keep all the moderators on in jobs, mind - they have done such sterling service in sieving out the hatefulness that they should be given medals really - but that's the only place where I would really love my licence fee not to be spent on something. Just my own personal prejudice, you understand, and I know that in reality all the great stuff on the BBC website will go, and HYS will remain like a stumpy boil, but I am asking all the same. Go on, BBC, I love you really.
* It's funny, but when I write 'either/or' I use a slash, which, come to think of it, means 'and-or', so in effect I'm saying 'either and or or', which isn't especially beautiful. I think that's when little symbols like slashes can come to your rescue a bit.
Is this you????
Just days after the David Wright story, Harriet Harman has slipped up when using Twitter.
I don't think Harman is using the 'Liddle defence' on this occasion, and it seems quite straightforward to work out what has taken place - to me, perhaps, and to most of you who use Twitter quite a lot.Harman appears to have clicked on one of those 'Is this you????' direct message, and her account then sent out 'Is this you????' direct messages. Not really a hacking as such, but yes, the account has been compromised. Nothing especially unusual about that, really: we've all been there. Well, I say 'we've all been there' but apparently not.
A lot of us have had steep learning curves with the internet. We've been spammed, had all kinds of delightful offers that have turned out to be rubbish, come across people impersonating other people, had our money taken away from us, been lied to and deceived on a fairly regular basis. It's not an especially dangerous place out there, but there are pitfalls. It's worth learning so that you don't go on making the same mistakes. It makes you a more cynical person, which might not be such a bad thing. You certainly start learning that if someone says something, it may well not mean it.
But as ever, the creaky old steam-powered mainstream media can't quite get to grips with this electronic business, even when they're writing for the web. I wonder if they're still using Telexes and Prestel over at the Beeb, given this kind of clunky effort:
Harriet Harman has revealed that fake Twitter messages have been sent in her name, including one to a senior Conservative politician.
No, that's not really it at all. They're quite genuine messages; they just got sent from her account without her knowledge because she did the 'Is this you????' thing. Alan Duncan's quote would seem to substantiate this theory, because he seems to be suggesting that someone asked if it was him. And yet, as with the David Wright situation, no-one seems to have twigged. The over-use of inverted commas, like a 1960s reporter saying 'the so-called "Beatles"', is pretty indicative:
Earlier this month, Labour MP David Wright said his Twitter account had been "hacked into" and offensive words added to a message he had posted about the Conservatives.
And several leading politicians, including Foreign Secretary David Miliband, have had "fake" Twitter accounts created under their name.
Well, we still know that words can't be added to tweets you've already submitted - you can delete previous ones and then replace them with new ones, but that's not really adding words. And yet Wright's defence is still chirped out by the mainstream, who don't seem to understand it's not plausible that events transpired in the way he says they did. You don't need the 'fake' around the 'fake' accounts, either, because they are fake.
With the election coming up, there will doubtless be a lot more stories about it. I just hope that these things can be better explained and researched in the future. I'm not holding my breath, though. Maybe one day, when Twitter is deeply unpopular and people are abandoning it in droves, the BBC and other media outlets will finally start to understand how it works.
*update* Perhaps MPs should be given a little induction course into how Twitter works, though you would have thought that someone would have told them how to avoid most of the pitfalls. Ben Bradshaw appears not to have done a bit of a whoopsy here and sent a text message to someone else to his Twitter account.
Please Ben, don't say you were 'hacked'. Just say "I texted Twitter rather than someone else whose name began with T, silly old me, what a plonker eh?" - go on, do that.
Genius or dreadful?
When I saw this on the BBC's website, I didn't know which way to go. I still don't. Part of me thinks it's genius; part of me thinks it's dreadful. I'm torn.
I like the breezy silliness of the KitKat/banana comparison; I like the KitKat-wafer-thin excuse for a news story; I'm not so po-faced as to think there isn't a place for this kind of thing on a publicly-funded news website. I mean look at this bit!
Superb! And what's that, you say? You'd like to see a picture of a slightly camp-looking Lionel Blair, holding a curvy banana? All right then:
I know, I know. There's a sense in which news is being trivialised by a lot of celebrity flim-flam; and yes, there's a sense in which it's a bit dispiriting to see that the only way people can engage with a politician like Gordon Brown is through his choice between KitKat or banana; and yes, there's a lot of crap that overwhelms news websites at times, pushing out real news at the expense of celebrity ballast.
But, but, but... when it's done this well, and with the tongue so firmly planted in the cheek, I don't mind my tax pounds paying for the BBC website at all. I know there are many who do turn purple and start grabbing the flaming torch when they see this kind of thing in the absence of actual news, but given that this is alongside pages and pages of good news coverage, why not? I'm going for genius.
The politics of pinkness
This article about men wearing the colour pink certainly isn't the worst thing on the BBC website ever. That's in no small part because this, about some bloody television programme that isn't even on the BBC, is.*
The politics of pinkness have been batted about this week by the media, like a lazy cat patting a ping-pong ball under the settee, and what we've got is stuff like this:
In many areas of British life, like the City, pink shirts are seen as normal workwear. Pink ties are normal. Even pink socks make an appearance.
Even pink socks. Look, I don't mean to have a bash at the BBC because I do love them so much, and they're so much more interesting and diligent than certain other media outlets we could name, but I can't stand much more of this.
"We have come a long way even compared with 20 years ago," says Johnston. "Pink was the last taboo colour-wise."
I fear that's not quite the case, and I have a photo to prove it:
Look at that pure windblown, open-necked, medallioned, cravatted sex. Look at it! Look at it right there!
No further questions.
* Can't we have a return to the bad old days, when you had to buy a separate TV Times and Radio Times; and each channel pretended the other didn't exist; and Morecambe & Wise, Brucie and all those other channel-hoppers made clunky jokes about 'the other side'? Why must the BBC drool all over the wiltingly awful music-is-sport karaoke shitsack that is the X Factor, as if it's anything culturally important, let alone any good? Oh, Auntie. I thought I knew you. I was wrong!**
** Look, I don't want to blame the reporter who put that together. It's not as if it's a badly written article or anything. It's just that it exists at all that makes me want to burn myself on something to make the pain go away.***
*** Not as much as those TV trailers for Noel's Christmas Presents, obviously.
‘Being lonely gives you cancer eek innit’
If you haven't read this wonderful article by Paul Bradshaw, you must do so. It's a stellar piece describing exactly how those myths peddled by the mainstream media about teh evilz of the deadly internetwork are not only misleading, but specifically misleading in that the mainstream is more fact-free, more unrepresentative of the population and less trustworthy than the internet world.
One of the things I like about the internet, and social networking, is that facts can be challenged instantly and mainstream media guff and churnalism called out straight away. You don't need to sit in a dusty newspaper library looking at clippings, then painstakingly research for weeks; what you need is available to you right away. Presumably this is another reason why the mainstream media don't like the internet: their work is open to instant scrutiny by irritating amateurs like me, cheeky haemorrhoids on the arsehole of media output.
The great thing about the web-savvy generation is that we question everything. You have to. Your first experience of the internet often centres around someone lying to you - someone telling you that he wants to put some money in your bank account; someone claiming to be from an airline saying that he's found something of yours; someone claiming to be your bank, telling you to update your security issues and pop over a password via email; someone pretending to be someone they're not when they're chatting to you. As soon as you see anything, you want to challenge it, and you want to make sure. We're no longer happy to be told "That's the way it is" by our masters in the press, because we're not so sure they can be so sure, and we're not so sure they might not be twisting things.
So when you see something like this
you can say to yourself: Hang on, is that really accurate, or is it missing the point a bit? To be fair to the Beeb, at least they have balanced out the story with this quote:
Ed Yong, of Cancer Research UK, said: "This study was done in rats.
"Overall, research in humans does not suggest there is a direct link between stress and breast cancer.
"But it's possible that stressful situations could indirectly affect the risk of cancer by making people more likely to take up unhealthy behaviours that increase their risk, such as overeating, heavy drinking, or smoking."
Worth pointing out the rats bit, given that they don't have quite the same emotional attachments as human beings - at least I don't think so, not having ever been a rat (though there may be some who'll disagree with that). The Mail covered the story in a similar way, also urging caution despite the headline:
but it's still been done in this order: People might get worse cancer if they're lonely, oh but someone else points out this was a small study done on rats, and not people. And both media outlets have used photographs of a human being, rather than a rat in a lab. The Mail even talks of 'a woman with breast cancer' whereas they should be talking about 'a female rat'.
Another marvellous asset the reader of news has available is independent analysis of media coverage, which in this country comes from the NHS and their 'behind the headlines' section:
The research found an association between isolated rearing, increased stress responses and increased tumour burden in rats that were genetically predisposed to tumours.
Although the animal study was well conducted it shows an association rather than a direct causal relationship between corticosterone levels and an increased likelihood of malignant tumours.
Also, while rats and humans are both social animals their social dynamics clearly differ. The stress factors used in this experimental work are not relevant to modelling how human social interactions may affect risk of breast cancer, and it is not clear how relevant changes in corticosterone hormones are to the development of cancer in humans.
I find something comforting in reading such a calm and measured response to these medical stories. On the one hand you have "being alone might make cancer worse" and on the other you have "if you're a rat predisposed to having a certain type of cancer".
Luckily, I'm not a rat. But that's the brilliance of the web, and why the mainstream media are really angry about it: everything you write can be looked up and analysed straight away. It's not just the people who can afford the massive printing presses who control what people can read, because people can seek out information on a huge range of subjects - often the original source material (though not in this case unless you want to subscribe to the journal in question). And that has to be a good thing, worth celebrating and treasuring.
A whiff of something unpleasant
The crimes committed by Brandon Jolie and Kingsley Ogundele are, of course, appalling to anyone with a moral compass. That's a given. But when you read
something about it doesn't sit quite right. Jolie was, after all, not a rapper but a music producer. Does that matter? Not in terms of changing the crimes he's committed, which I reiterate are disgusting. But I can't help wondering if something else is going on.
The other offender, Ogundele, is described like this by the Mail:
Yes, he was no stranger to violence because he was once acquitted of armed robbery. Do you see? When you're convicted of one crime, you're automatically guilty of all other crimes you've ever been accused of, even if a jury of your peers decided you weren't. Again, let me emphasise this because someone is bound to say I'm trying to defend these lowlife, I'm not defending these lowlife. I'm just asking why these stories can't be shocking enough in themselves, with the details factually accurate. Why isn't the truth good enough?
From the BBC report you get this:
On his website he claimed to have had his music featured on films and on BBC One soap EastEnders, and said he had recorded a track for Nike.
And from the Mail's:
Known as Maniac, Jolie was regarded as one of the top grime producers and had been picked as a hot music talent to front a Nike advertising campaign.
Jolie produced a soundtrack for the Bafta-winning British crime movie Adulthood and also collaborated with rapper Tinchy Stryder, who reached the top of the charts this year with his hit Number 1.
With a big picture of Tinchy Stryder, who has nothing whatsoever to do with the case. Who knows who's right? Perhaps the BBC are just being extremely cautious about these things; perhaps the Mail has access to information that the BBC don't. Yet again I'll make the point, although someone still won't notice, that these crimes are shocking and nothing defends the action of the men, and no arguing about details changes the way in which they've acted. However, there's another difference between the Mail and BBC stories: comments. The BBC don't offer them; the Mail do. The comments are obviously all rightly condemning the pair for their horrific actions but... well, there appears to be a whiff of something else going on, but you be the judge.
Some comments condemn rap music:
I don't really know rap music well enough and I suspect a lot of Mail readers don't either. If there are lyrics that do glorify violence against women, and there may well be, then there's a case to answer. But:
The talk of 'extermination' is a bit unsettling. And then there's stuff like this:
Now some may say, and probably will, that there's nothing else going on here. But the question about whether these men 'look like the face of crime'... I'm not too sure you can dismiss there being some other nod and a wink being given there. There's also something a bit unpleasant about calling their families 'scum' when we don't know anything about their families. Then there's this:
I think if comment moderation does anything, it makes people slightly more veiled with their thoughts than they otherwise might be, to see what they can slip under the barbed wire. Why have comments at all? These men have carried out a despicable act against a pregnant teenage girl - who needs someone shouting about it underneath the story to tell them whether it's good or bad? Haven't we already made our minds up?
But of course, let's not let the victim get away with this. There must be a good dose of victim-blaming in every story about a crime committed against a female, and yes, as ever, it's here:
So there are a couple of ways of covering the story. You can play it safe, like the BBC, tell the story, be careful about reporting things you can't verify as being true even when they don't affect the outcome of the report, and so on; or you can just go in all guns blazing, say someone's guilty of another crime because he's convicted of a different one, say people are rappers when they aren't, put in a photo of Tinchy Stryder when he's not involved in the case at all, and then let your readers throw in a few hand grenades as well, including abuse of the victim.
I know which one I'd prefer to read. The BBC's coverage doesn't lessen the horror you feel about the victim's experience, the heroism of the man who saved the victim's life, or the revulsion you have towards the men who did this. And it doesn't add something else, a whiff of something unpleasant. By no means as unpleasant as what these two men did, of course, but they have been judged for their actions.
Don’t let the facts get in the way of the scare story
The news that the sudden death of Natalie Morton was almost certainly nothing to do with the HPV vaccination broke last night. Not late last night. Not so late that stories couldn't be changed in the meantime. It's worth remembering that when you see what they printed today - and what's still up on their websites. It's worth keeping that in mind when you consider whether they actually care about the facts of the situation or whether they're merely interested in perpetuating a scare story.
The BBC, for example, play the story very straight:
A girl who died shortly after being given a cervical cancer vaccine had a "serious underlying medical condition", an NHS Trust has said.
NHS Coventry said the vaccination was "most unlikely to have caused the death" of Natalie Morton, 14.
She was given the Cervarix jab at Coventry's Blue Coat School on Monday and fell ill a few hours later.
The government said its national cervical cancer immunisation programme should continue.
However certain these conclusions seem, there is one ray of light for the scaremongers, and it's this:
"We are awaiting further test results which will take some time," she said. "However indications are that it was most unlikely that the HPV vaccination was the cause of death."
Some postmortem tests do take a long time to be processed, so it will be a while before it's absolutely certain the HPV jab had nothing to do with the girl's tragedy. So that strand of doubt can be used, if you want to whip up a frenzy of panic, and irresponsibly demonise a perfectly safe vaccination. But who would want to do that?
Chaos - really? Despite the initial findings? How on earth can the Mail spin that into being somehow chaos? Well, you get quite a way into the story before the findings are revealed. Chaos and fear go before facts:
The cervical cancer vaccination programme is in chaos today after the death of 14-year-old Natalie Morton.
Ministers insisted the scheme must go ahead and refused officially to suspend it.
But many health trusts are cancelling vaccinations due over the next few weeks while they investigate whether vaccine stocks are linked to the dose given to Natalie, who died on Monday hours after receiving the jab.
Initial post mortem results suggested the schoolgirl had a serious underlying health condition which meant it was 'unlikely' the vaccine had caused her death.
See how the death is linked to vaccination all along, with the vaccine stocks that were given to her, despite what we learn in the fourth paragraph. To the Mail, those findings change nothing - it's still full steam ahead with the panic, regardless of the truth of the situation.
And there's the headline on the Mail front page at 9.30am today, deliberately mistrustful of the evidence they've been given. Look at the layers they put around the story - the health trust (evil State apparatus) claim (this is what they're saying, folks) that Natalie could (that's could, not almost certainly did) have died from something other than the jab. Ah, if only the Mail were so careful with the way they dealt with press releases from MigrationWatch or the Tax Payers Alliance, rather than simply printing them as if they're cast iron facts! But then, when the facts don't suit your agenda, you have to try and distance them from your narrative, don't you?
The URL for the story is quite revealing, by the way. As ever with the Mail, it gives you a steer into the way the story was originally prepared. But this time it reveals something else:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1216942/Cervical-cancer-vaccine-programme-chaos-death-schoolgirl-14-hours-jab.html
The schoolgirl died hours - yes, hours - after having the jab. Now I don't know about you, but if she'd died seconds after having it, then there might be cause for real panic and concern. Minutes would still be alarming and would be the kind of thing that would spark a genuine need to investigate the vaccinations and ensure they're safe. But hours afterwards...? Lots of things happened in the meantime to the poor girl. She probably ate dinner - why not link that with her death? Why must everything go back to the vaccination? What is the Mail trying to do here? No wonder, though, that they changed the URL - how dare they put in something which emphasises how distant her death was from the vaccination! Keep the panic in, don't take it away!
The local health trust in Coventry, which made the announcement, would give no further details to the nature of the problem.
As is right and proper with patient confidentiality, of course. But look how it almost appears the trust is being secretive, given what the Mail says.
It remains unclear whether Natalie's condition alone was to blame or whether it was a particular reaction when combined with the vaccine.
And so the Mail clings on to what little it has left, determined to keep the momentum behind the scare story. HPV is the new MMR for the Mail - a new way of exploiting parents' fears over their children and bashing the evil State for injecting our kids with DEATH because they're PROMISCUOUS and therefore deserve to die. I read somewhere (and I've forgotten where, so apologies to you if it was you) a very good blogger saying the Mail had made a 'mistake'. Which I can't agree with. This is no mistake. There is no error here. This is all calculated and deliberate.
Meanwhile, the graphic on the BBC's report goes like this:
No wonder the Mail doesn't like the BBC, when it refuses to play along with the ramping-up of fear and plays stories like this straight down the line, almost like a real news outlet rather than screeching fear despite knowing its agenda is almost certainly based on suppositions which are crumbling away.
So there you have two ways of dealing with the same story. Press ahead with your agenda of fear and hysteria, or put one terrible and tragic death into context - context not only of what actually happened to this one poor girl and her family, but the wider picture of reactions to the jab. One of those approaches is news. The other isn't.
And look, the Mail must be so proud of itself for having achieved its goal of spreading fear and panic. Look at this reaction to the story:
Job done! I bet they're patting themselves on the back at a tremendous success for their fearmongering there. Well done to you all.
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