The British National Party is not to everyone’s taste. They also have a knack of having leaders and spokespeople who are clearly not the sharpest knives in the drawer. Playing fast and loose with history is one thing, but mucking about with the Bible is another thing entirely.
Clearly, nothing is sacred to our rather thick right-wingers: re-writing history (the Holocaust is just for starters) takes a certain hard-faced determination, but for Nick Griffin even to attempt to tell the nativity story is bizarre. He obviously heard it when he was a little boy and hasn’t looked at it since he grew up.
Here it is in all its YouTube glory – draw your own conclusion. But, while you are doing so, ask just how stupid you have to be to confuse so many elements, invent others and have the nerve to pretend that the Jesus who grew up would have anything good to say about the worldview of the BNP.
So, Christmas has now begun. At least, that is the sort of statement that will keep liturgical pedants happy whilst simultaneously confusing everyone else.
The Christmas season begins on Christmas Day (or late Christmas Eve, if you really want to push it) and lasts for twelve days until Epiphany (6 January) – which is when the Magi first come on the scene. And that, for many people, is another surprise: the so-called Wise Men weren’t present with the shepherds following the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, but came when he was probably a toddler around the age of two. Furthermore, and just to confuse matters, the Eastern Churches celebrate Christmas at Epiphany.
So what? Well, this bit of pedantry is really just a way into the weary observation that now Christmas Day and Boxing Day have passed by, it is time for the newspapers to identify ‘loony Christmas’ stories from the last few days. And it is the Mail on Sunday that strikes my own eye first – mainly because I am partly quoted in it.
Isn’t it bizarre that this great champion of ‘political-correctness-gone-mad’ and ‘Britain-ceasing-be-Christian’ and ‘immigrants-are-taking-over-the-country’ and ‘what is happening to marriage and morality’ wildness should also be the organ that hysterically has the moral giant Piers Morgan going through a Las Vegas ‘wedding’ to Paris Hilton? Doesn’t the editor see the contradictions that run criss-cross through his paper?
Anyway, the story today is about the British Transport Police replacing the word ‘Christmas’ with ‘Holiday’ in their punned posters aimed at reassuring the London public that police will be working in force over the next couple of weeks. The text of the poster is fine, but clearly someone decided to change ‘Christmas’ to ‘Holiday’ in the main blurb: ‘Holiday presence’. Now it just doesn’t work: ‘Christmas presence’ (punning ‘presents’) works, but the BTP’s change of wording doesn’t.
Apparently, it was the police’s marketing department that decided on the word change. The reason is simply (as I put it in the quotation I gave them) bonkers. A spokesperson is quoted in the Mail explaining the change as follows:
It is just to make the message non-denominational so that it applies to everyone and so that people who don’t buy into Christmas don’t feel excluded.
Where do you start with that nonsense? Whoever said that clearly doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘denomination’ or the difference between Christian ‘denominations’ (Methodists, Baptists, etc.) and different ‘faiths’ or ‘religions’.
I hate to side with the Mail, but this story does reinforce the point that it is not ‘faith communities’ that have problems and tensions, but the silly secular humanists who ignorantly seem to think they can patronisingly help the rest of us out by reducing ‘offence’ and being ‘inclusive’. All they succeed in doing is making themselves look stupid and the rest of us cross at their ignorance.
Let’s make this clear: I knw of no Muslim or Hindu or Jew who wants to drop ‘Christmas’ in favour of some bland alternative. They are not offended. What they do find offensive is the patronising stupidity of people who think it is reasonable or helpful to empty a Christian festival of its Christianity on the grounds that people who believe differently will be offended. Would they suggest that Muslims should drop ‘Eid’ from their celebrations in case Christians get cross?
There are exceptions to this nonsense. But it would be enormously helpful if local authorities, the police and other public bodies would insist that all their employees did some training in order to become religiously literate. They then wouldn’t do silly things like the British Transport Police has just done. It would also stop giving organs like the Mail an excuse to sound off on ‘PC gone mad’ stories.
When I was a vicar I had a competition with myself to get a Bruce Cockburn lyric into every Christmas sermon. I never failed.
I wish I was well-read enough to quote clever literary giants and ancient saints – which some seem to manage effortlessly. But, I will stick with Saint Bruce for this year again, wishing all readers of this blog a very happy celebration of the Incarnation and a new year that will bring much joy amid the usual stuff of life:
Like a stone on the surface of a still river, driving the ripples on for ever, redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe.
It’s almost Christmas and I had thought to desist from blogging for the duration of the celebrations. Then I caught a link on the Guardian website to a video of an interview with the great Sir Terry Pratchett. So, here we go again…
I will not hear a word against Terry Pratchett. His books (especially the Discworld series) have been holiday reading for me for years and he is one of the very few authors to make me laugh and think in equal measure. I still think Small Gods is wonderful and should be read by anyone who claims to be a theist. But, I am mystified at how such a bright man can make such elementary mistakes when it comes to writing off theism. That said, however, at least he does it with the charm and self-effacing humour that advocates such as Richard Dawkins singularly lack.
I don’t know who the audience is (in the Guardian video), but they are clearly on his side and haven’t engaged their critical faculties. Well, why should they? After all, this is entertainment and not the place for having your assumptions challenged, isn’t it? Well, let’s start with a few quotations:
We [human beings] are shaped by the universe to be its consciousness. We tell the universe what it is.
I’d love to see that unpacked. He hints at an unpacking a little later:
I’d much rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.
This statement follows a romp through evolution and the assertion that we are monkeys who have achieved rather a lot. But here is where the problems start. Pratchett is working with what used to be called ‘the conflict metaphor’ which assumes that science and faith are in a battle for either/or supremacy: we can either have religious faith or we can trust science. This false positioning is given away when he says (earlier):
In my religion the building of a telescope is the building of a cathedral.
He dismisses the Judeo-Christian tradition on the basis that he read the Old Testament through in one sitting, thought that God comes over as a maniac who sanctions genocide and rejected Genesis as anti-scientific nonsense. Oh dear…
First, humanity is neither ‘rising ape’ nor ‘fallen angel’, but (according to Judeo-Christian thought) what Bruce Cockburn called ‘the angel-beast’ – made in the image of God, yet as frail as strong, always needing to learn and grow and develop. Science is integral to this ‘project’, not antithetical to it. This is the bit that leaves me a bit boggled: why does someone as intelligent as Pratchett not allow himself to get beyond false alternatives such as ‘faith versus science’ – when (to put it crudely) science is addressing questions faith does not, and faith asks questions for which science has no remit?
Have you seen the latest Hubble photos? They are amazing – awe-inspiring. I don’t understand a lot of the science around this sort of work, but I do marvel at what it shows us of the universe(s). The cathedral and the telescope are not inimical to one another – they open us up to awe and understanding and faith and worship, but in different ways. Why does Pratchett think they must be alternatives or opposites?
Understanding the workings of the universe is no threat to Christian faith – rather, it is integral to it. We are made to explore the world and why it is the way it is and how it came to be the way it is. But, as the ethicists always insist, you can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ – so we need a different way of asking about meaning, values and significance in that universe. The creation-evolution divide is a false divide and most Christians got over it a long time ago.
Second, Sir Terry would be horrified (presumably) if we read his books as if they were scientific text books. The genre of the literature matters and shapes how we read what we read. So, couldn’t he show a little more literary respect to the material he dismisses and read it for what it is and not for what it isn’t? His assumptions underline for me the charge I continue to make: that many of the loud new atheists such as Richard Dawkins are not stupid, but they are illiterate. They want us to read every text as if there were only one genre of writing. (Fundamentalist creationists fall into the exact same trap…)
Third, the great man goes on to say:
God help me if I ever become a Christian. You lot would suffer, I’ll tell you…
It seems to me that there is nothing here that should stop him from becoming a Christian (even if he was just having a laugh). Evolution would become more interesting, reading ancient texts (with a different set of questions) would become enriching and challenging, and the world would become more colourful. And I’d love to see him using his amazing creative imagination and humour to expose the false contradictions and dichotomies he once espoused.
I am off for a few weeks of uninterrupted reading in January. You can bet your life there will be the odd Pratchett book in the bag. And I’ll be wondering if people like Sir Terry – justifiably popular and sadly now experiencing Alzheimer’s – ever get challenged, or if their fame and popularity simply make every statement they utter acceptable without question.
This is a bit of shameless publicity for someone else’s book.
Andrew Rumsey is a wordsmith. A published poet and musician, he is also Vicar of Christ Church Gipsy Hill, contributor to Third Way magazine and columnist for the inimitably funny ship-of-fools. He is a superb preacher and has the rare talent of never being anything less than interesting.
He has pulled together a series of Reflections on God, Life and Bric-a-Brac and got them published by Continuum under the title Strangely Warmed. The book is an excellent companion for Lent (Christmas is nearly over…) and has chapter titles that make you want to read into the book: ‘The mild man of Borneo’, ‘The pigeon of peace’, ‘Unoriginal sin’, and so on. Commendations come from Ian Hislop and Tom Wright and it is brilliant. (The cover pictured, left, is an early draft…)
The blurb says:
Strangely Warmed – short pieces for each day in Lent, designed to be read in the bathroom or on the train, as one would a magazine column. Each piece takes a wry look at the world and reflects on the questions of faith that arise from the everyday — the advertising slogan, the bus journey, the church jumble sale… Drawing on the ingredients of scripture, theology and philosophy, is a collection of Strangely Warmed serious doctrinal points with a lightness of touch, offering bitesized morsels to be enjoyably chewed over, in the hope that this will lead to a deeper reflection on, and appreciation of, Christian faith.
It’s a bit odd not ‘doing’ Christmas for the first time in years. Being on sabbatical (study leave), I will not be in prison on Christmas Day and am not preaching or presiding at any Christmas services. So, I will be having the unusual experience (for a bishop) of enjoying Christmas in a ‘non-professional’ sort of way – if you know what I mean.
This freedom is also making my mind run a bit more freely. Among the many books I am reading is Simon Schama‘s The American Future: A History. I missed the televised series and then started the book about a year ago, not getting very far into it because of other distractions and pressures on time. But, this week I returned to it and I am glad I did.
Schama is superb at describing the role of religious (Christian) faith in the shaping of America. Not only in relation to the protections of the Constitution and the reaction against the association of European Christianity with political power enshrined in the First Amendment, it was profound Christian determination and courage that fired up those who struggled and fought for the emancipation of the slaves and the integration of the black people as citizens of America. Schama is no Christian, but he brings a dispassionate (and, to me, surprising) eye to the power of Christian faith in bringing about change rather than just thinking and talking about it. He doubts that the Enlightenment ‘rationalist’ tradition would have done any more than discuss slavery – whereas the courage, vision and deep-rooted theology of humanity’s ‘createdness in the image of God’ owned by slaves and some whites gave birth to a song that could not be silenced. He describes at length (in Part Two) the singing, the music, the irrepressible creative passion that refused to be silenced by torture, oppression, ridicule or rejection.
This has made me reflect back on the Christmas story that is being told and re-told in so many ways this week. But, as any good carol service will demonstrate, wherever we pitch into the story, it is never the ‘beginning’. Even John 1 and the Genesis narrative takes us back beyond the ‘Beginning’ into the nature of the eternal God himself. But I go back to a summary point that is pivotal in our understanding of what Christmas is about: the song Mary sings when told she is to give birth, the Magnificat.
I don’t know what sort of song a young single woman should sing when told she is to bear a child (not from her fiance) who will turn the world upside down. Mirroring the song of Hannah, the mother of Samuel in the Old Testament, – she knew her ‘story’ and her tradition – she sings not of the joy of starting a family or the privilege of bearing a child full of potential and promise. No, she sings of the cost of vocation, the nature of the world (dominated by power, strength, hierarchies and privileges) and the challenge that God brings (in the child who will bring down the mighty and establish the meek).
Mary captures (or is captured by) the fact that God’s people are to be characterised – and even recognised – by their reflection of the character of God himself: one who gives power away, who lays aside rights and glory, who opens himself to vulnerability, who opts into the world’s suffering and joy and does not exempt himself from the struggle. This is a God who by his very nature offends the caprices and ambitions of a greedy world. The warning in this deeply politically subversive song is that Mary’s child will grow into a man who will say once and for all: “it doesn’t have to be this way; dare to see the world differently; dare to have your values turned upside down and see how the world can be changed by those who, ‘in Christ’, live a different way.”
Mary’s baby will embody all this. He will fulfil the calling that was always Israel’s vocation: to lay down their life in order that the world might see who and how God is. And his people will now dare to live out what was to be fulfilled in this Jesus – but what has always been the calling of God to the people who claim to bear his name.
If the songs of the black slaves and former slaves in America could not be surpressed and if the voices of those inflamed with the inescapable passion of a liberating God could not be silenced by violence or ridicule or apathy or condescension, then Mary’s song cannot be muted either.
I’m off to a Carol Service now. My heart and mind are gripped by Mary’s song and its subversive challenge to a world that is happy to keep Jesus as a cuddly baby in a manger but worried about letting him grow up into the man whose very being became so offensive to ‘contemporary values’ that we had to get rid of him. After all, he was spoiling the party, wasn’t he?
I remember an academic friend of mine once telling me that correlations do not make for explanations. He was right and I have been cautious about statistical correlations (in particular) ever since. The phrase came to mind when I read just now an interesting article by Martin Beckford on the Telegraph website about new academic research due to be published in January by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen).
Based on the results of 4,486 interviews conducted in the respected 2008 British Social Attitudes survey, it notes:
50 per cent of respondents now call themselves Christian, down from 66 per cent in 1983.
the proportion of Britons who say they have “no religion” has increased from 31 per cent to 43 per cent. Non-Christians, including Muslims and Jews, now represent 7 per cent of the population, up from 2 per cent, 25 years ago.
The steepest fall was among those who say they worship in the established religion, the Church of England, down from 40 per cent of those who call themselves Christians to 23 per cent. (“Official Church attendance figures show that average Sunday attendance was 978,000 in 2007, compared with 1.2m in 1983.”)
It then draws several conclusions:
More and more people are ceasing to identify with a religion at all. “Indeed, the key distinction in Britain now is between religious involvement and indifference. We are thus concerned about differences in religiosity – the degree of religious commitment – at least as much as diversity of religious identity.”
“The declining Christian share is largely attributable to a drift away from the Church of England.”
The decline in faith is largely attributable to children no longer being brought up in a particular religion. (“The results suggest that institutional religion in Britain now has a half-life of one generation, to borrow the terminology of radioactive decay… Two non-religious parents successfully transmit their lack of religion. Two religious parents have roughly a 50/50 chance of passing on the faith. One religious parent does only half as well as two together.”
Obviously, I haven’t read the report on which the article is based, but it appears to hold only one surprise… which I will come to later.
The statistical problem is simply that different surveys cover different periods of time, ask different questions and use different criteria. So it is difficult to draw conclusions that might show any degree of consistency from the various studies done. The Christian Research data of a couple of years ago was a case study in seriously questionable conclusions being drawn from selective data and based on assumptions that were questionable (for example the use of flat-line projections that assume nothing will change in the next thirty years).
But why should anyone be surprised that people who no longer belong to a church also no longer feel they should use a church’s label to describe their (lack of) allegiance? It is no surprise that the biggest loss should be recorded for the Church of England as it is the only church that does not simply count as its ‘members’ those who consciously commit to attending the church on a committed basis. Clarity in terms of specific commitment is bound to reduce the numbers, but we need to ask what story the particular statistical dynamic is telling – which might not be the obvious one.
However, as Lynda Barley says (at the end of the article):
Statistical comparisons over a long period have the drawback of ignoring recent trends.The Church of England has been carefully monitoring Christian affiliation and churchgoing following the 2001 government census result that 7 in 10 people regard themselves as Christian. Independent surveys continue to show that 7 in 10 people are Christian and approaching half are Anglican in contrast to the British Social Attitudes Survey findings which focus on religious membership.
Local church counts of worshippers throughout October for the last nine years record 1.7 million individual Church of England worshippers each month in each year. At the same time, it has been ordaining some 500 new clergy each year.
The Church of England doesn’t really ‘do’ membership. Signing up to the Electoral Roll can say various things about the commitment or ‘belonging’ of someone. Even paying regularly by Gift Aid doesn’t really tell us a great deal about belief or commitment. It is notoriously difficult to say who is and who isn’t a ‘member’ of the Church of England’; all we can say is that the Church is there for everyone who wants it – a unique vocation of service to the whole community.
The surprise is simply that Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society, is still being consulted for a view on such research. He said:
Last week at a gathering of faith leaders at Downing Street, the Prime Minister said that Christian values were ‘at the heart of national life’. This research shows that this is simply not true. This report shows more clearly than ever that Britain is a post-religious society and policy should reflect that.
Two responses: (a) Mr Sanderson would say this regardless of the ‘evidence’ put to him. If you said the sky was blue he would claim this as evidence of the death of Christianity in Britain. (b) ‘Christian values’ are not the same category as ‘membership’ or ‘commitment’ – which makes his statement a good example of a non sequitur. Even if the conclusion were to be right, you couldn’t draw it from this evidence or the Prime Minister’s statement about ‘Christian values’. Is his ideological prejudice so powerful that it blinds him to anything good about Christian (or other religious) contributions to society?
And, in the light of other discussions going on on this blog, just to confirm that this appears to me to be a good example of good reporting – summarising and bringing to the attention of a wider audience some research that is worth discussing and doing so in a clear and comprehensible way.
It was announced yesterday that a new independent panel has been appointed to oversee the release of documents related to the 1989 Hillsborough football disaster.
According to the Home Office, the panel’s job will be to make sure the Hillsborough families and wider public receive the maximum possible disclosure of governmental and other agency information on the events that occurred and their aftermath. The panel will also produce a report illustrating how the information released adds to public understanding of the tragedy and advise on options for establishing a designated Hillsborough document archive.
It will also consult with the Hillsborough families, to ensure their views are taken into account.
The Right Reverend James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, has been appointed as chair, and the rest of the panel will be appointed early in the new year.
This is very good news for all concerned. Will disclosure finally lead to a public apology from the Sun for their disgraceful coverage of the events that day?
Still reflecting on engagement with the media, I am also thinking about Berlin.
I’m reading Francis Wheen‘s brilliant new book, Strange Days Indeed – a romp through the 1970s, the decade of my teenage formation. This was the height of the Cold War and the time I was beginning to learn about German politics and the division of Europe. I still regret that, having studied German politics seriously at university and having lived and worked as a technical translator in (West) Germany, I never made it to Berlin while the Wall was up. But, at the beginning of January I will be spending four days there with my youngest son who is studying history and politics at university. (I notice he seems to have nicked from home some of my books on German history/politics and Berlin…)
The reason for this rambling introduction will become clear in a moment when I pull some threads of thought together. But, the thinking really began last week when I read Evelyn Waugh‘s novel about Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine. In this book (which a friend lent me – I had never heard of it before) Helena questions the Imperial Wall that Rome was building to keep out the barbarians. Questioning the defensive assumptions being made by the Roman powers, she asks:
Instead of the barbarians breaking in, might the City one day break out?
This reminded me of a conversation on a farm near Gweru in Central Zimbabwe. The cattle dip was standing unused and we, the English visitors, were interested to know why. The problem seemed to be that even if the cattle were dipped, they then got undipped cattle from neighbouring farms coming in and contaminating all the others. So, they were waiting until they had the money to build a fence that would keep out the potentially diseased cattle and protect their own.
One of our number (a Zimbabwean expat) suggested a solution: ‘Why don’t you invite all the neighbouring cattle owners to bring their cattle through the dip, charge them a small sum – and thereby you keep all the local cattle healthy, you make a bit of an income from dipping the neighbours’ cattle and you avoid the unnecessary expense of the fence?’ Everyone wins. This suggestion met with astonished staring. But, it was the off-the-wall sort of insight that was needed.
Helena was not interested in defence and protection, but in getting the ‘good stuff’ out there in order to make the barbarian world better. If the Gweru cattle farmers could think about positive engagement with the local/wider world, they would get their protection as a by-product. The German Democratic Republic was bound to fail because walls designed to keep people in (protection of sorts) never work. Israelis and Palestinians might also need to recognise that security requires the interests of both parties to be secured – or at least brought into the equation.
Jacques Ellul, a French theologian and jurist wrote a book in 1962 called The Meaning of the City. In it he questions the significance in Genesis 4 of the murderer Cain’s decision (having been expelled from ‘home’) to settle in the Land of Nod, build a city and call it Enoch. His conclusion is that all human beings, caught in the great expanse of human meaninglessness, build walls around themselves and their immediate relationships and worldview, thus giving them a ‘place’ in the universe by which other people and things have a sense of significance or proportion. The question he raises (which I have addressed in a couple of my own books, principally Hungry for Hope?) has to do with what happens when the walls – designed to protect – get breached and we are faced with a choice: (a) re-build the wall, but even thicker this time so that it won’t get breached again and our ‘world’ can remain undisturbed, or (b) poke our heads out and see what the bigger (and potentially scarier) world outside actually looks like? Of course, the ‘scarier’ world might, in fact, hold wonders and glories and opportunities hitherto never imagined…
For me all this comes together in the fact that the Jesus of the Gospels seemed to spend his time angering and frustrating the purists who saw their duty to God consisting in keeping the protective walls strong. Eventually they crucified him. Instead, however, Jesus seemed to think he should contaminate the ‘bad’ or ‘sad’ world with grace and love and generosity and mercy and joy and hope and goodness.
In relation to the media and the Church’s enagagement with the public discourse, I think this says that we should be unafraid of getting outside the walls and contaminating the world with the goodness and grace and mercy of God – even if we get roughed up along the way by both sides, those who think we’ve sold out from our own ‘camp’ and those who think we are intruding on territory that does not belong to us.
It’s a messy business, but I/we need the imagination, guts and sense of adventure to not retreat into ‘safe’ territory (whihc, of course, never is safe), but run all the risks of getting out there and facing the uncertainties of what might lie in wait for us. And, if we are going to do it, we had better enjoy the experience.
Having a had a fairly rubbish time with the media in the last couple of weeks, I was interested to see someone else possibly getting the treatment today. He’s more accustomed to it than I am. He’s the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Let’s get one thing straight at the beginning: I am not complaining, whinging, scrooging, bleating or ranting. I am (quite properly) raising a question to which I think a lot of people would like an intelligent answer in relation to the media.
This morning I did a long interview with a radio station about the furore about Christmas carols set of by the Sunday Telegraph report on my book Why Wish You a Merry Christmas?. The questioning roamed widely and covered everything from why Christian leaders avoid ‘speaking out’ for fear of being misquoted, misrepresented, ridiculed or rubbished to how media ‘stories’ actually run (news today, comment tomorrow, blogs the day after, hate mail for a week, then finished). We noted how an observation taken out of context then gets reported (in my case) as ‘complaining’ which then gets passed on as ‘disdaining’, ‘pouring scorn on’, ‘rubbishing’, etc – leading to me being accused of trying to ban carol singing! Bizarre. But, despite this experience (not the first time – I got turned over by Mugabe’s propaganda machine in Zimbabwe in 2007 – I urged a proper and serious engagement with the media – recognising the realities and pressures under which journalists work – but also a refusal to accept that ‘the way it is’ is the only way it can or should be.
So, back to Canterbury. The Telegraph has a front-page article based on an interview between the Telegraph’s George Pitcher (whose blog is always worth reading) and Dr Williams. The headline proclaims:
Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘Labour treats us like oddballs’: The Archbishop of Canterbury has accused the Government of treating all religious believers as “oddities” and “eccentric”.
The article (co-written with Martin Beckford) then proceeds to report some salient bits of Rowan’s interview and is reasonably OK. The problem is the interjection of the words ‘accuses’ and ‘Labour’ by the sub-editor in the headline. This makes it appear that the Archbishop launched a broadside against the current government, making hard-hitting accusations about their attitude and policies.
Yet the reality is that Rowan had an intelligent and reasonable conversation with George Pitcher in which he observed that the problem is not purely that of the current government, but rather of the whole political class. The cultural pool we swim in these days is one in which assumptions are made about (a) secularism, (b) religion as a ‘problem to be solved’ rather than a gift to be recognised and valued, (c) the compartmentalisation of life (derived from the spurious post-Enlightenment dichotomy between private and public and between faith and fact) and (d) accessibility to the public discourse on precisely these matters and their implications.
The good thing about the Telegraph’s coverage is that its front-page article points to a longer article by George Pitcher which then includes an audio clip of the interview itself. It is when you hear the interview clip that you realise that Rowan wasn’t chucking around wild accusations, but making some intelligent observations in the course of an intelligent conversation.
I guess some of my criticisms of current journalism are answered when the written word is accompanied by (even an edited bit of) real audio/video in order that the reader can then get a better idea of what the interview actually sounded like. It made me wish I had been there to listen to the whole exchange.
The question I alluded to at the beginning of this is simply whether those of us who expose ourselves to the media have a right to expect justifiable coverage rather than just ‘any’ coverage? Do journalists have a responsibility to respect the truth of a ‘story’ and the integrity of the subject – or are they right to claim that ‘any publicity is good publicity, so shut up and put up with potential misrepresentation’? They will argue that they have done a good job by getting a story on the front page that points the reader through to the more detailed article and the online audio/video – and they have – but is that the end of the matter and all that can be said? Is it enough simply to say: ‘Well, at least it started a lively debate!’?
I don’t necessarily expect answers to this stuff, but I do want to keep the questions alive. The media, whose job it is (among other things) to hold the rest of us to account and to scrutinise ‘power’, cannot hold themselves above accountability or reject the questioning put to them by those of us who engage with them.
I am doing a lecture in Lent on ‘Ethics and the Media’ and this is beginning to occupy my mind already.
I am Nick Baines: bishop, author, broadcaster and Scouser. Welcome to my blog. I write about anything that interests me - the first word, not the last.
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