So, last week, for those of you who weren’t paying attention, I was cross with the BBC. Yes, cross, I tell you, as they filled the news with World Cup non-stories, and issued vacuous non-statements about North Korea. But this week, it’s time to level things up. Because they also did a good thing last week, which was to broadcast an episode of Family Guy, Partial Terms of Endearment, on BBC3. This episode wasn’t screened at all in the US, because it is about Lois having an abortion. She becomes a surrogate mother for a friend, but the friend then dies in a car crash. So Lois heads to the Family Planning Centre with her husband, Peter, where she makes a reasoned and thoughtful decision to have an abortion. Peter’s all in favour of an abortion, too, until he is shown a pro-life video by protestors outside the centre.
This is all — in case I have made it sound rather joyless — incredibly funny. The video that Peter watches is a heroic pastiche: “Science,” proclaims the spokesman, “has proven that within hours of conception, a human foetus has started a college fund and has already made your first mother’s day card out of macaroni and glitter”. At this point, it cuts to a picture of a foetus holding a handmade card which reads, “Mom, don’t kill me! I wuv you.” Sorry to declare myself sole arbiter of good and bad jokes, but that’s a corker. Peter is converted to the pro-life cause. “If God wanted us to kill babies,” he tells Lois, “he would have made them all Chinese girls”.
It’s no surprise this episode hasn’t aired in the States, although it is expected to be included in the DVD release of the series. But it hammers home the fact that abortions used to happen in popular culture, just as it happens in life. No longer: films like Knocked Up, Waitress, and Juno all deal with unwanted pregnancy, and all tie themselves into knots trying to explain why smart women wouldn’t even consider an abortion (either in Knocked Up, where Katherine Heigl is a career woman who despises the guy with whom she has an ill-advised one-night stand, or in Waitress, where Keri Russell is married to a wife-beating lout whom she loathes). It’s a huge narrative flaw that Ellen Page’s sassy, fearless, pro-choice teen, Juno, would be so overwhelmed by the mention of baby fingernails that she would cancel her abortion immediately, and have a child she didn’t want.
It seems that we can’t be expected to like fictional women if they do what factual women do all the time: terminate an unwanted pregnancy. But things weren’t always this way; Dirty Dancing has an abortion storyline, and it’s regarded as a classic chick-flick. Pop culture has simply become more judgemental — and less realistic — as pro-lifers have become more vociferous.
So three cheers to Family Guy, for having the courage of many of our convictions. And an extra cheer for the BBC, for letting us watch it.
So, not to pretend to be one of those girls who likes football, I hate it. Stupid, boring, annoying football where the scoreline can be exactly the same at the end as it was at the start and people can then describe that as “a good game”. And stupid world-cup football is my least favourite kind, walking its weird patriotism/xenophobia tightrope. I know it’s my hang-up, but when I was a child, England flags were scary. Even Union flags were scary — they mean fascism, skinheads, and aggression. And although I am glad that the flags have been rehabilitated and now sit perkily on windows and dog-collars (actual dog collars. Not the ones vicars wear), they still give me the slight heebs.
But mainly, I resent the disruption to my routine. I like a routine above all things. And in the list of things I dislike above all things, change (of almost any kind) is right up there. So when the BBC abandon the 1 o’clock news to show a football match, I feel a bit like Director General Mark Thompson has come round to my house, punched me in the face, moved my things around and then fucked off. And I don’t like it. Sure, I can watch it on News 24 (which I persist in calling News 24, even though the BBC treacherously changed its name some time ago), but it isn’t the same. Louisa Preston doesn’t come on and do the local news. Peter Cockroft doesn’t appear with my local weather. I hate that.
And I thought my irritation with the BBC’s crush on the World Cup had reached its pinnacle last week, with the vuvuzela story. They ran a piece for five minutes on the 6 o’clock news about the racket these horns make. A racket which apparently makes it impossible for our brave fans to sing their chants. This news story could be distilled into precisely one sentence: People making annoying noise prevent other people from making different annoying noise.
The catchphrase of this world cup, at least in my house is, “That’s not news!” It’s yelled with some fury at the television, so I guess I do have something in common with football fans after all.
But now the BBC has genuinely raised its annoying-ness game, running a piece on North Korea’s role in the world cup. They excitedly report today that this week’s match against Brazil was broadcast live in North Korea, unlike their first match which was shown after a 12-hour delay. To be honest, if I were Kim Jong-il (a fantasy I like to indulge in briefly each day), I would just tell them we’d won. What’s the point in controlling all the state’s media if you don’t pretend to have won everything from the World Cup to Eurovision? He’s missed a trick there.
But that isn’t why the BBC were being annoying. The BBC were being annoying because they reported that the fact that the match was being broadcast live was a big risk to the North Korean authorities, because people might wave placards and protest against them. The report goes on to remind us of how grouchy people were about the path the Olympic torch took in 2008, and how much protesting went on. It then mentions that no placards or protests happened at the North Korea match.
“It is interesting,” proclaims their website, “to ponder why this might be”. The author then spends precisely no time pondering why this might be. Were protests organised but stopped? Have the South African authorities prevented something? Has FIFA? I mean, look how cross they got with the orange Dutch beer ladies. Do people who care about human rights not care about football? Or did they try and fail? Could they just not get the tickets, or are placards removed at the entrance to the stadium?
I don’t know, and if you read the BBC’s website, nor will you. But don’t worry, they’ve wrapped up the story neatly: “Perhaps those who claim that sporting events of this kind can break down barriers and cultural divides have a point.”
And it’s at this point that I am now having to shout at the internet as well as at the telly. That’s right, BBC. A sure sign of the breaking down of barriers and cultural divides is a lack of protests about North Korea. There were no protests because no one wants to protest about them. Hey, I guess instead of worrying about those imprisoned or killed in this secret state, we’ve just learned to get along. Ebony, ivory, and so on. I think this may be the stupidest sentence I’ve read all year, and am officially cross. I’m off to watch the tennis instead.
It’s been a busy month for China’s central propaganda department (CPD).
In April, the Qinghai earthquake exposed tensions between Tibetans and the Chinese authorities. The disaster, just weeks prior to the Shanghai Expo, seemed likely to steal the limelight away from the celebrated international event. More recently the CPD’s skills have been tested by a spate of school attacks, the department responded with a press freedom clampdown, it banned reporters from interviewing the parents of the dead and injured schoolchildren. Also on the CPD’s growing list of media concerns this month were the state visit of North Korea‘s leader Kim Jong-il and last week’s China-US Human Rights Dialogue.
Faced with a possible outbreak of negative publicity, the CPD have been issuing internal “directives” on a near daily basis, the orders specify what stories news agencies can publish, how to publish them, and how to control and monitor the public discussions. Luckily for us, so widespread are these directives that there is a Chinese blog, the Ministry of Truth, dedicated to leaking these press guidelines for all to see.
Excerpts from some of the directives have been translated into English by China Digital:
17 May – Regarding sentencing of Taixing school attacker; “only use Xinhua sources for pronouncement of first sentence, do not report death sentence, not not promote any other similar news items.”
14 May – Report “China-US Human Rights Dialogue” correctly, do not put related news on the front page, close comment sections.
12 May – [Shaanxi stabbings] …only publish the general draft from Xinhua, do not use information from other sources; do not place it in a prominent position; do not exhibit it for a long time; close the news commentary function.
11 May – News about Internet in Xinjiang must all use draft of media in Xinjiang, do not promote, do not hype.
30 April – [Shanghai Expo] … all media need to use reports from Xinhua or other central committee media; no other media should do its own reporting; no following or stopping leaders for interviews
29 April – [Taixing stabbings] … do not send reporters for interviews… Do not put it on the highlights section or on the front page. Do not give it a large title. Do not attach photos.
In a speech to Amnesty International’s national conference John Kampfner talks self-censorship, Nick Griffin and why free speech means fighting for the rights of people whose views you find obnoxious (more…)
