The Evening Standard on Alex Crawford

Just a quick note to draw your attention to this article on Sky superstar Alex Crawford, which was featured in a two page spread in last night's Evening Standard.

I found it infuriating. (Okay, that's probably a bit of an overstatement. I was highly annoyed.) Two pages on the woman who entered Tripoli with the rebels and probably 80% of it is about...her kids. And the fact that she's a woman.

Viv Groskop writes:

At the Edinburgh Television Festival last month Crawford complained that it was "insulting and very, very sexist" to be asked how she raised her children. Today she is less bullish. The woman thing irritates her but she understands it too. She recognises that people see it as unusual that she has chosen to live her life this way, even though that's an incredibly sexist assumption.

As if this article - focusing on Crawford's children, what it's like to be away from them, how her husband has to stay at home - is any different. Crawford's had incredible experiences as a foreign corrsepondent and, as the article touches on, had a really hard time getting to where she is.

How can it possibly be that out of her whole life, the most interesting thing to feature on two pages of a daily newspaper is how she deals with being away from her kids? Groskop's article reduces Crawford basically to just a mother who happens to have a job which is a bit time consuming and often takes her away from home. For all it really matters to the piece, she could be a business executive, an athlete, a cabinet minister, and nothing about the article would really fundamentally change.

It would be infinitely better to read two pages about the experience Crawford had in Libya, and to look more in depth at how she became a foreign correspondent at the age of 43, then to mention those facts in passing. What should be an incidental fact - that she has four children - becomes the central fact of her existence. Groskop calls Crawford's views on being a working parent 'refreshing', but there is nothing refreshing or new about this inane focus on how successful women deal with their families. Frankly, I don't care.

Johann Hari: The Indy basically says 'meh'

The Johann Hari saga at the Independent has come to a sort of sputtering, unsatisfying end. Hari's issued an apology in which he repeats his earlier admission that it was wrong of him to take quotes from other sources and pass them off as words said to him in interviews. This time, the admission comes without the attempt at justification which coloured his original apology, and instead with the concession that it was 'arrogant and stupid' of him not to have asked older, more experienced colleagues for their opinion on his unorthodox method. Hari's apology also includes an admission that he did in fact edit Wikipedia articles under the name of David Rose, making his more favourable and adding false, insulting 'facts' to the pages of people with whom he'd argued.

The actions taken to rectify the situation: Hari's returned his Orwell prize, which he admits isn't that big of a deal since rumour has it they were going to strip him of it anyway; he's taken an unpaid leave of absence from the Indy; and he's going to study journalism, to learn all of the things I guess people thought he picked up somewhere but never did. When he returns to writing, his articles will all be footnoted and accompanied by audio recordings of his interviews so people can check his work.

I think Hari's done pretty much everything he can aside from actually resigning from the Indy, which is what I had expected. He's admitted to the things he's been accused of doing wrong, he's acknowledged the way he would be treating someone he didn't like who had done the same things, he's returned his prize, he's gone off to get proper professional training, and he's agreed to a level of disclosure upon his return that is presumably unprecedented for a mainstream journalist. As someone who greatly admired Hari before this all happened, I don't think I'll ever read his stuff again and think of it highly, but I think he's handled this fairly well. Except that I really think he should have just admitted to it all off the bat and resigned, gone to journalism school, and seen if anyone would hire his new, improved self. But I mean, barring that, I guess this is the next best thing.

Unfortunately, the Independent comes out of this affair looking ridiculous, with its credibility in tatters. The Indy currently has no plans to release the report of its investigation in to Hari, saying it's 'private'. This means that any criticisms or revelations about the Indy's editorial practices, ie how this could possibly have been allowed to happen and what will be done in the future to sort that out, who is responsible, etc, are not going to be made public. The Indy's request that the Orwell Prize committee hold off on their announcement (to reportedly strip Hari of the prize) until they were done their investigation just allowed Hari to beat them to it, making the loss of the prize look like his gracious concession instead of a disgrace. The two-month long investigation into facts that were proven by bloggers in the space of a day or two and which one would think were admitted to by Hari pretty early on, just looks sluggish, reactive and desperate to buy time to figure out how to protect Hari and themselves.

I said I assumed Hari would resign - I assumed that he would resign to save both parties from having to say they sacked him, but that they would sack him if he didn't choose to resign. But no. Hari will be welcomed back in 2012 with a watchful eye (well, maybe, who knows since the Indy aren't saying!) and a pat on the head for his journalism degree. Despite admitting to repeatedly breaching two very serious rules (of journalism, of ethics, of basic decency and common sense, take your pick) and destroying the trust readers had in him, Hari will return to a prominent position at the Indy that most young journalists could only dream of; he won't, I imagine, be hired on as a local London news reporter who has to work his way up to the op-ed pages. He'll probably even be able to spin this whole thing and his subsequent foray into j-school (rumoured to be at Columbia) into a good couple of first articles.

In short, a year or so from now, the only people who will really remember will be the people that didn't like Hari in the first place. He'll gain new readers who aren't familiar with his past indiscretions. He'll be without his Orwell prize but will be relieved to have salvaged his job and, let's be honest, his reputation among those in the mainstream media who were never really willing to admit that he did very much wrong in the first place. The Independent has failed miserably in creating real consequences, either for Hari or for itself, and I for one will avoid reading it in the future as a result.

No News is Good News?

Well. I had been doing pretty well with posting fairly regularly up until the last two months. For a few weeks I was too busy with work and some family stuff to form a coherent opinion on anything, and then for a few weeks I was on holiday and had absolutely no clue what was going on in the world.

It's an odd feeling, being out of the news loop. My last few days in the UK before I headed home were consumed with trying to find the latest news on the London riots, but by the time I was home I had no real desire to follow up. When I was in Canada, I didn't feel adequately submerged in either Canadian or UK news. When NDP leader Jack Layton died, everyone was talking about his last news conference and how frail he looked. But I hadn't seen it, and indeed hadn't paid much attention to Layton since the election, so I didn't feel as connected to the story as everyone else seemed to be.

Equally, I had no real idea what was going on in the UK. Being on holiday, I was more scanning the front page of the BBC News website before starting my day than really poring over the news as I usually do. I was pretty much off Twitter, a regular source of comments and links that indicate what the big story of the day might be. And that was when I was in the civilised world, not at my grandparents' in rural Quebec, where the lack of a computer let alone an internet connection and the recent closure of the only deppanneur in walking distance meant I spent my days blissfully ignorant of anything that wasn't a canoe or a quad bike.

When I got back to London, I tried to catch up on what was going on. What were the big stories that happened between August 10 and August 30? Okay, things seemed to have progressed in Libya, check. There were rumblings of this Nadine Dorries abortion debate, so I was a bit behind on that one. Hurricane in the US. What else? Hmm, well...nothing earth-shattering then, I guess?

It was a nice reminder that sometimes in the little bubbles we build for ourselves - you know, following a bunch of people on Twitter who all talk about the same things, constantly refreshing news pages, having 24-hour news channels on every minute of the day - stories tend to get a bit over-hyped. Sometimes the big news of the day really isn't that big - we'll spend much of the day talking about it, tweeting about it, blogging about it, battling opinions on it...and then forget about it a few days later.

The abortion debate, for example. For days it's all anyone could write about, until eventually the coverage reached the kind of hysterical fever pitch point where you have to sit down and go, really, are we still talking about this? How many times and in how many fora can the same points be made over and over and over, with one side having absolutely no hope of budging the other? If there had been any real chance that the amendment would be passed, that would have been one thing. There would have been some real purpose in getting all worked up, in making sure that everyone's opinions were heard, in lobbying MPs, etc etc etc. But it was never going to come even close to passing, and everyone knew that. The final vote was 368 to 118.

I'm not saying it's pointless to debate anything that we know isn't going to come to pass, but I think that with the combination of the 24 hour news cycle and the blogosphere, where everyone is competing to make sure everyone else knows what they think and knows that they knew some scrap of information first, stories can just get massively blown out of proportion if there's not much else to talk about. And they can keep running for days. With the amendment not even close to passing, the whole thing will now fade away. The big story about that bill will always be the changes to the NHS that some people see as privatisation, and the yet-to-be-seen results of those changes. People will remember the debate as a footnote, another mad Dorries moment and not much else.

So I think I might go into a self-imposed news exile more often, especially when things seem to be getting out of hand with a story that doesn't really seem to be that big of a deal. If I can limit wanting to scream at my computer/TV/newspaper in exasperation to just once or twice a day, it can only be beneficial to my sanity.