What's in a name?

If you read the news long enough and often enough, you may start to wonder whether we ever read anything that is actually true, completely objective and without any sort of agenda. That should worry people, but it seems many are totally unaware of the manipulation, persuasion and falsification news reporters and subs routinely engage in when writing reports.

Entire fields of study exist to cover media manipulation, but if we ask the right questions every time we read something in the news, then we can start to see how it all works. Let’s start with a very simple example. What has the marital and progenitive status of anyone to do with their alleged crime? The Daily Post this week reports

POLICE chiefs have blasted a grandmother who falsely claimed a cop broke her foot.

If we examine that comment, there is so much in so few words which is utterly irrelevant, unprovable and probably untrue, but which folk read and believe.  But ask the questions: what does ‘blasted’ mean in that context? How does the reporter know that anyone ‘blasted’ anyone? What has the fact that the woman was a grandmother to do with anything? And who were the ‘Police Chiefs’?

If you read stories about people aged 16 - 19, they’re described in a number of ways;  children, young people, youths, yobs, tearaways - even young men and young women when it suits the news outlet. But each of those terms evokes a different image. According to the Children Act, they’re children only until 16, which is when the age of consent kicks in.  But with that definition, any male who has sex with a girl aged 15 and 11 months is liable to conviction as a paedophile.

The news media routinely push their own agendas, even if the only agenda they’re pushing is to stay in business by selling more papers.  The tabloid press is extremely skilled at this sort of manipulation, with the egregious and reactionary Daily Mail at the forefront.  Ignoring its slavish devotion to all things Tory and its continuing slanting of the news against the Labour party, even its non-poitical stories reek.  Today it ran an article on Cern headed, in its typically understated way

Black hole scientist at 'Big Bang' Hadron Collider lab held as suspected Al Qaeda terrorist

Ah. So we can glean from that Islamic terrorists are working on bombs that will deliver black holes (which everyone knows are really nasty things) to anyone nice and Western, can we?  Gosh. But as the article later reveals, he wasn’t even a Cern employee. The Independent reveals

French sources suggested to Le Figaro that he was not planning to threaten the collider itself. Officials at Cern added that the arrested scientist had no access to materials that could be used for terrorism.

which, given what Cern does, is hardly a surprise. We also learn he didn’t even get as far as the hadron collider itself, not having the required security level. But how many folk will pick up the wrong notions, purely from the headlines? The answer, unfortunately, is too many, and these people are the ones that drive knee-jerk reaction legislation.  What’s the answer? Simple;  always ask more questions and - in particular - ask what the article isn’t telling you. 

Our society excels at double standards;  the sorts of standards that see hard working individuals barred from meetings of political parties because of previous (and perfectly legal) political allegiances, when the same party happily encourages those with serious criminal convictions to join. The sorts of standards that sees people being urged to go ‘greener’ while the government of the day routinely leaves lights burning in empty offices all night long. The sorts of standards that encourage MPs to lie about their earnings, to lie about their expenses and to brazenly defend a system which has been long discredited.  The sort of standards which allows the party with the fewest votes to form a government.  Perhaps it’s time for a change.