Yesterday a commenter on my 'What do we call these scum' piece said there were 'non-white' people at the protests. I looked at the Mail's coverage, then, expecting a happy rainbow nation of faces united against the tyranny of Islamism - sadly, the photographers have clearly been complete bastards by deliberately leaving out all the hundreds of ethnic minority protesters who happily marched along with the English Defence League and deliberately taking pictures of growling nuts in England tops! Outrageous!
The sadness for me comes that after a rather good piece of news reporting from the Mail, there's a predictable response in the comments. You'll see that the worst-rated comment is this
while this also gets bombarded with red arrows
but this
and this
are considered worthy of praise by readers, and this
is voted up, despite being entirely factually wrong. What does that tell you?
It's sad that the Mail can execute accurate and interesting stories about touchy subjects without feeling the need to skew things over to a predetermined point of view. I say sad because it makes it seem all the more deliberate an act when they do, rather than being just the result of laziness. Clearly the ability exists to report things without blowing one side or the other out of all proportion; perhaps there isn't always the willingness.
There. And I managed to do a whole blog post on that story without resorting to the cheap, easy and juvenile tactic of comparing this
The dispute came as a Cabinet minister raised fears of a return to 1930s fascism, comparing modern Right-wing groups to Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts.
with this
If the Blackshirts movement had any need of justification, the Red Hooligans who savagely and systematically tried to wreck Sir Oswald Mosley's huge and magnificently successful meeting at Olympia last night would have supplied it.
from the Daily Mail of 1934. Oh bugger, I just did.
6 comments:
There is no need to bias you stories if your reader base is already highly opinionated. Conformation bias takes care of that.
To top it off, 800 green thumbs up for those posts? Not even the BBC get that many on a really popular topics, and you can't even thumbs down on their site.
They must get an obscene amount of traffic.... Or of course someone is taking a leaf out of Israel's propaganda book and using something like Megaphone.
The internet is a bad place to get public opinion on sensitive topics.
In contrast though take a look at the story about Asda's Asian clothing range and the comments on there. They are mostly sensible, thoughtfull with plenty of green arrows. There are a few dick head comments but they have loads of red.
How can someone claiming to be a left wing blogger say that first comment by Emma Redwall is good? Blaming everything on people on benefits is only replacing one set of prejudices with another.
If everyone on the dole is a mindless thug, students are all open minded and tolerant I'd like to see some evidence for it. Otherwise thats no less bigoted then the other commenters.
I don't recall saying it was a good point (although I'd agree with the first sentence of it); I was illustrating the opinions that were disapproved of. What I should have said was it's interesting that, on the whole, commenters on the Mail website aren't shy of complaining about people on the dole themselves, which implies it can't be that reason why it was voted down.
*sigh* Not surprising really...
Regarding your thing about the person referring to "non-white" people marching with the EDL though (I missed that comment; I'll have to go back and read later...), it does say on the BBC article you linked to in that particular post:
"In Birmingham last week, the BBC filmed black and white men alongside each other on EDL's lines."
Which does kinda suggest that perhaps race isn't their motivation, so much as religion. But that's another discussion altogether.
Back on-topic, I stand by my theory that the BNP (or, from a non-libelous slant, general right wing fascists connected by online discussion groups, who may or may not support the BNP) have a team of 10-20 web crusaders who spend a few hours each day voting on Mail stories, then changing their IP addresses via a proxy and voting again, and again, and again... If each one makes 50-100 votes, you start to see big numbers (remember, there must be a few people voting against them, so 800+ thumbs up is enormous).
As far as I'm concerned, this is the only way to account for such a huge number of angry bigots, who both own computers with internet connections and can read.
Kirsty,
Emma Redwall isn't saying everyone on the dole is a wanker. She is saying she thinks wankers like the EDL thugs are usually on the dole.
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