RSS

In an effort to share more, and using the new xfruits site (HT: JD Lasica) I’ve rolled up my RSS subs (all 236 238 and count­ing) into one big feed you can just sub­scribe to. It’s on the left. There’s a couple of quirky subs in there (my fold­ing bike, for example) but oth­er­wise I think it’s a pretty use­ful resource, and hope you will too…

Reporting Tony Blair: inaccuracy or partiality?

How do you get this:

Tony Blair says his belief in God played a part in decid­ing to go to war in Iraq. The Prime Min­is­ter tells ITV1 he prayed over the dif­fi­cult decision. Tonight the start­ling insight into how Mr Blair’s faith influ­enced Britain’s part in oust­ing Sad­dam. So was it holy war?”

ITV News Sat­urday, 4 March 2006

From this:

Tony Blair: The only way you can take a decision like that is to try to do the right thing, accord­ing to your con­science. And for the rest of it, you leave it, as I say, to the judge­ment that …
Michael Par­kin­son: So…
TB: ….his­tory will make.
MP: So you, so you would… you would… you would… pray…to… to God whenever you make a decision like that?
TB: Well I… you know… I don’t want to go into…
MP: No, but I mean, hey, you said that…
TB: …this side of this but it’s… [NB These two lines spoken sim­ul­tan­eously]
MP: …you said that…you’d…
TB: Yeah I … you, you… [NB These lines also spoken sim­ul­tan­eously]
MP: …been informed…
TB: but you… of course…. It’s…. you, you struggle with your own con­science about it because people’s lives are affected…

Michael Par­kin­son show, Sat­urday 4 March 2006

Accord­ing to industry reg­u­lator Ofcom, the inter­pret­a­tion placed by ITV News on Tony Blair’s appear­ance on the Michael Par­kin­son show broke the reg­u­la­tion on due accur­acy.

You can watch the full clip of the inter­view here. See­ing it is more com­pel­ling than read­ing it, and in my view, whilst ITV News repor­ted Mr Blair accur­ately, they didn’t report him impar­tially.

Here’s the ITV intro again:

Tony Blair says his belief in God played a part in decid­ing to go to war in Iraq. The Prime Min­is­ter tells ITV1 he prayed over the dif­fi­cult decision.

And, here’s the BBC News intro (which gives Parky a big­ger plug):

The Prime Min­is­ter has said in an inter­view that he prayed to God when decid­ing whether or not to send UK troops to Iraq. Tony Blair told ITV1’s Par­kin­son chat show that he had struggled with his conscience…

The Beeb launch into a Richard Lister pack­age, but then ITV con­tin­ues with this:

Tonight the start­ling insight into how Mr Blair’s faith influ­enced Britain’s part in oust­ing Sad­dam. So was it holy war?

ITV took a view on Blair’s exchange with Par­kin­son and — without exactly mis-representing it — they ‘over-represented’ it, fail­ing to pro­duce any­one in their report­ing to defend a pos­i­tion they had cre­ated by amplification.

If you’re a Chris­tian, isn’t it right that you pray for guid­ance over dif­fi­cult decisions? After all, we’re not talk­ing about con­sult­ing a Ouija board. As a firm athe­ist I know that prayer won’t be deliv­er­ing any­thing back, but if we take prayer as a socially accept­able euphem­ism for reflec­tion, then is there really any­thing offens­ive, shock­ing or sur­pris­ing about this admis­sion? One doesn’t have to agree with Tony Blair on any­thing, not least his com­mit­ment of troops to Iraq, to tol­er­ate his right to reli­gious freedom.

Still, accur­acy is the offence as far as Ofcom is con­cerned. I guess it’s a less ‘polit­ic­ally sens­it­ive’ crime than impar­ti­al­ity which might make you vul­ner­able — unfairly — to accus­a­tions of stooge-dom. I’d like to see the reg­u­lator have a little back­bone, and tough it out one of these days…

Incid­ent­ally Richard Lister’s report on the BBC didn’t have any­one defend­ing Tony Blair either, but then the BBC piece didn’t shout as loud.

Britain’s free online news battle…

The biggest freesheet battle in the Brit­ish media is being con­duc­ted online. Accord­ing to the latest stats, the online ver­sions of the Guard­ian and the Times have both moved up the web­site rat­ings. Guard­ian Unlim­ited got 16m unique users last month. Over the same period Timesonline.co.uk claimed 11m unique users. Both of these are part of Paul Dacre’s ‘sub­sid­ariat.’ Both would, how­ever, like to make money.

Freesheet rivals the BBC News web­site gets one bil­lion pageviews per month. I don’t know what that trans­lates to in unique users, but just to put that met­ric in some per­spect­ive, Timesonline.co.uk got 74m pageviews and Guard­ian Unlim­ited 153m.

Thank good­ness they don’t print news­pa­pers at the Beeb’s Wood Lane HQ.