. Last week the mother and sister of Private Gordon Gentle, a 19 year British soldier who was sadly killed in Iraq on the day that the Iraqi interim government took control, walked out of a meeting with John Prescott. Here is an excerpt from Minette Marrin’s Sunday Times column* yesterday on the BBC Today programme’s coverage of their trip to London:
Mother and daughter went to Downing Street where they were received not by the prime minister, who is busy on his lamentable holiday jaunts, but by our deputy prime minister — he of the white-water rescue that wasn’t — to express their anger at Gordon’s death and their demand that Blair should resign. They made various other angry accusations and in the end walked out on Prescott in contempt.
That seems to me entirely reasonable in itself. The Gentles are and ought to be free to make their feelings known like any other citizen. But when they were interviewed on the BBC’s Today programme on Friday in the prime political slot at 8.10am, demanding that our troops should be pulled out of Iraq, I found that I was angry.
This was a classic example of the contemporary infantilisation of public debate — a deliberate emphasis on personal feelings rather than on rational, dispassionate adult argument, on the assumption that, like infants, we the public are not mature enough to respond beyond personal feeling and can’t be expected to. This is convenient commercially since the infantile corresponds so closely to the sensational, and there are megabucks to be made out of all that sensational emoting.
There is probably little that one can or should do to stop the independent media capitalising on this or splashing such personal, emotional responses, and it would be a bad day for Britain if protests like the Gentles’ were not aired widely.
But for a public service broadcaster and an influential, reputable political programme such as Today to splash such personal emotion across the airwaves as if it amounted to serious debate is another matter. The BBC should not be taking part in this infantilisation of the listener, least of all when exploiting the bereaved at the same time. It should be a bulwark against the trivialisation of public discourse.
The terrible grief of the Gentles and their understandable anger have no bearing on the rights and the wrongs of the invasion of Iraq or the deployment of troops.
Their dreadful personal loss does not give them any special insight into what is going on in Iraq and certainly no insight that they did not have before Gordon died or that families of surviving soldiers in his regiment do not have. They are entitled to their views but you can be absolutely sure that if Gordon had not died, his mother and sister would have been of no public interest whatsoever. As it is, they teach us nothing.
The death of even one soldier is, of course, terrible. Everyone thinks so. But it can make no difference to my view or yours about the current complexities in Iraq or about the invasion.
The BBC should have had nothing to do with the Gentles, especially as it seems that they may have links with anti-war lobbyists, who may perhaps be exploiting them as well.
The last bit refers, I think, to Tommy Sheridan, apparently a family friend, and a notable Militant (of the traditional non-terrorist variety) from the days of the Anti Poll Tax Union (a Militant front organisation), who has progressed from being a latterday folk-hero/rabble-rouser to the respectability of election as an MSP for the Scottish Socialist Party.
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The Stop the War Coalition were actually present with them when they arrived at Downing Street. I think Prescott is a dunce but he did not have to see them and the fact that he did at short notice and apparently off his own bat only to be insulted etc by the women who then complained to the Press etc was rather unfair actually.
Tommy Sheridan has shut up for some strange reason – perhaps he has realised that they are going to be dodgy to handle.
“it is an awkward paradox, in the US and the UK, that dead volunteer soldiers are being taken up as heroes by an anti-war movement which detests the military in principle” is a good quote from the Guardian the other day!
A good commentary there.
I thought the same thing about the Daily Express giving *front page* attention to a fourteen year old who spouted about how Blair doesn’t care about the public, and doesn’t care about our troops.
For crying out loud, she’s 14. What does she know about running the country? But more than this, why is the Express giving it front page attention?
The BBC is following the path laid out by the rest of the media. Just before the Iraq invasion ITV held a “discussion programme” in which Tony Blair was to explain the reasons for going to a war to an audience composed of those bereaved by the Bali bombing. Having patiently explained these reasons to a largely hostile audience he was then slow handclapped by them in what must have been a pre-arranged stunt. This is a despicable style of journalism – it throws rational discussion out of the window and replaces it with sensationalism. Just because you lost a relative in a Bali night club or a Basra roadside explosion it does not give you some special insight into how to combat world terrorism.
You’re right David. Over here the surviving relatives of 9/11 seem to now be considered experts on intelligence gathering or so the mainscream media would have one believe.