11 Mar 10 | Uncategorized
One of the problems of long-haul flights is that your critical faculties are so compromised by being confined in a metal cylinder for several hours with no leg-room and too much free gin that you’ll watch rubbish movies and read almost anything that gets put in front of you, even stuff you’d never normally touch.
So it was that yesterday morning found me incandescent with rage at a feature about the evils of Facebook in the Daily Mail, with the superbly seedy headline “I posed as a 14-year-old girl on Facebook. What followed will sicken you”.
Written by former police detective Mark Williams-Thomas, the article described how he had created a profile of a 14 year old girl on Facebook, logged on and “within 90 seconds, a middle-aged man wanted to perform a sex act in front of me”, going on to detail the many evils of social network sites and calling for more control and supervision online.
This is all standard fare for the tabloid press seeking sensationalist stories about the evils of the internet, social networking and anything from the modern age, but it seemed odd that Facebook should be the venue for this sort of stuff: it isn’t really a chat-based service, a new user takes a long time to get many “friends”, and the site has restrictions in place that stop users over the age of 18 chatting to the under-18s.
And so it turned out to be. It has emerged that Williams-Thomas’s research was not done on Facebook but another, as yet unspecified, service and that the Mail got it wrong even though he spotted the error in their sub-editing and asked them to change it.
Facebook is furious and is threatening to sue, on the not unreasonable grounds that the story will have been read by large numbers of parents of potential users — who will neither see nor note any correction — and that the Mail has damaged their reputation.
It’s similar to the situation with the Independent on Sunday, which printed an article by sex-blogger Zoe Margolis with the headline “I was a hooker who became an agony aunt”, apparently confusing her with Belle de Jour. Margolis is also threatening to sue.
Anyone who tries to argue for the superiority of mainstream media over the anarchy of the blogosphere and the growth of citizen journalism and user-generated content online will find their cause seriously undermined by this sort of sloppy reporting, which smacks of wish-fulfilment on the part of desperate editors and an unwillingness to check the facts in case they get in the way of a good story.
Being called to account for serious errors is one of the things you sign up for when you become a journalist, and it distinguishes those with aspirations to be taken seriously from the rest: freedom of speech does not mean freedom from responsibility for the consquences of what you say in public.
As a long-time supporter of reform for UK libel laws (sign the petition here: www.libelreform.org) it is painful to see Facebook turn to the law, but this is more of a reflection on the poor state of press regulation in the UK, where the company clearly feels that the UK Press Complaints Commission will be unable to give them satisfaction over such a serious lapse.
And perhaps it will make sub-editors and headline writers a little more careful in future when they write stories that attack the online world.
18 Feb 10 | Uncategorized
I’ve just been on the BBC news channel, commenting on the Press Complaints Commission decision not to uphold complaints about Jan Moir’s controversial Daily Mail article after the death of Boyzone singer Stephen Gately.
Moir, if you need reminding, wrote a column for the Daily Mail asserting that there was nothing “natural” about Gately’s death in his holiday apartment in Mallorca. The columnist heavily insinuated that Gately’s demise at just 33 years of age was somehow due to his homosexuality and accompanying lifestyle.
It was a sordid piece of work, and the insensitivity was heightened by the fact it was published before Gately’s funeral in Dublin (it’s worth noting that the Irish edition of the paper chose not to publish the article).
The subsequent Twitter storm was impressive, and, by and large, correct. It’s entirely right that people should be able to voice their concerns, and a Twitter hashtag is extremely useful in uniting people in a single cause.
But despite days of #janmoir trending, and 25,000 complaints to the PCC (a record!), the commission decided not to censure Moir or the Daily Mail.
The PCC, let’s be clear here, has made the right decision. Moir’s article was offensive, and the PCC acknowledges this, several times over. But it emphasises a couple of key points:
1.
Matters of taste and offence do not fall under the remit of the commission.
2.
“Freedom of expression is a fundamental part of an open and democratic society…
“…The price of freedom of expression is that often commentators and columnists say things with which other people may not agree, may find offensive or may consider to be inappropriate.
“Indeed, the reaction to the article, and the publicity which had ensued as a result of its publication, was a testament to freedom of expression, and was indicative of a broader process at work demonstrating the widespread opportunity that exists to respond to an article and make voices of complaint heard.”
This is true: Moir has not exactly suffered from a shortage of criticism. And rightly so.
But the reaction to the PCC ruling has been nothing more than an appeal to argumentum ad populum. “There were 25,000 complaints, therefore the PCC should have done what we told them.”
This morning’s outrage is wrong on two levels: just because a lot of people believe something, doesn’t make it right. And just because a lot of people demand something in the name of justice, doesn’t mean it’s fair or just.
More importantly, the PCC, though it refers to the volume of complaints in its adjudication, is not dealing with all these third party complaints: it is dealing with the complaint of Gately’s partner, Andrew Cowles (a curiously unmentioned figure in the Twitter outrage).
Put simply, people of Twitter, this wasn’t about you. God knows the PCC has its problems, but they got it right this time.
18 Feb 10 | Comment, Uncategorized
The Press Complaints Commission has dismissed a complaint by Stephen Gately’s partner about a Daily Mail column on the Boyzone singer’s death. The watchdog argued reprimanding Jan Moir for the beliefs expressed in her article ‘would be a slide towards censorship’ (more…)
02 Dec 09 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
High Court judge, Mr Justice Eady suggested yesterday that Parliament has no power to repeal privacy laws that have developed over the past decade and claimed he has been singled out as a target by the press. Eady, who has presided over almost all of the most high-profile privacy cases in recent years says he was targeted by Daily Mail editor, Paul Dacre, after he awarded an unprecedented £60,000 in damages to Max Mosley, for a breach of privacy by the News of the World. Eady also said he thought “libel tourism” was a “phenomenon” largely invented by the media. Read more here and here
