The news that Cardiff councillor John Dixon could face disciplinary action after implying in a tweet that the Church of Scientology was “stupid” has caused consternation online. But Scientologists often complain about representations of them in print, broadcast and online (as is their right).
My own experience of this came in winter 2003/2004, when I was working at New Humanist magazine.
We ran an article by young radio journalists Sam Washington and Phil Kemp. Sam and Phil had made an radio documentary about alleged abuse within the Church of Scientology. The programme had won the BBC File on 4 Investigative Journalism Award.
Sam and Phil had been students of New Humanist Associate Editor Sally Feldman, and approached her suggesting they turn their research into a print article. Being a magazine dedicated to critiquing religion, we were happy to accept.
When the Scientologists got wind of the publication, all hell broke loose. The Scientologists repeatedly called the office making demands. They asked for a retraction, and threatened to report us to the Press Complaints Commission; they accused the journalists of skulduggery. They requested we pass on contact details of the two young reporters. When we called File on 4, they told us they had been subjected to a similar barrage after they had recognised Washington and Kemp’s work with the award. At this point, Sam Washington was actually working at File on 4.
Kemp and Washington insisted they had presented their findings to Graeme Wilson, the public affairs director of the Church of Scientology, and offered him an opportunity to make a representation in the article (in which he is quoted).
New Humanist eventually reached an agreement with Wilson, and ran a letter from him in which he variously described Washington and Kemp’s work as “disingenuous”, threw doubt on the reliability of their sources, and talked up the church’s astounding success.
This put New Humanist in an awkward position, as we were publishing a letter casting doubts on our own contributors’ professionalism. We were fortunate that they understood and didn’t leave NH caught between two complaints.
Please join us for an exclusive discussion on broadcasting, free expression and the BBC with Mark Damazer, controller BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 7, on Monday 12 July at 6.30pm. Reflecting on his tenure shortly before leaving the BBC, Damazer will be in conversation with John Kampfner, chief executive of Index on Censorship. The event will also mark the publication of a special Index issue on radio, “Radio Redux: freedom on the airwaves“.
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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.
Irena Maryniak talks to Sadeq Saba, head of BBC Persian service, about the channel’s future, signal jamming and impartiality