PS

Update: thanks to Tim Montgomerie for a nice collage of this morning's measured, not-at-all sensational headlines

On Ken Clarke

This is the second time in the last four days I've felt the need to write about the way rape is treated in the media, but now my responses to two different issues seem so polarised that I'm not sure I'll be able to discuss both without tripping over myself somewhere. And so I'll discuss today's Ken Clarke fiasco and leave my thoughts on the SlutWalk phenomenon for another time.

I don't even know where to begin with today's distortion of Justice Secretary Ken Clarke's interview on BBC 5 live. The audio is here and the transcript here; I beg you to listen/read (preferably listen, so you can hear tone as well) before you read the rest of this or form an opinion on the subject. Immediately after the interview aired, the reports began to come in: that Clarke doesn't think date rape is rape, that Clarke thinks some rape is trivial, that some rapes are not rape at all, that Clarke doesn't believe 'rape is rape'...and then began the flood on Twitter, with people who had clearly not heard the interview or even read a proper news report about it informing their followers that Clarke thinks rape isn't rape if you know the attacker, if you're wearing a short skirt, etc etc etc.

First of all: yes, absolutely, Clarke made some horrible choices in terms of the language he used, and didn't take any opportunity to correct himself. He repeatedly referred to 'serious' rapes, which is what has led a slew of people to accuse him of believing that some rapes are 'trivial' (ie the opposite of serious), or that rape in general is not a serious crime.

But in listening to the interview, it is crystal clear that Clarke is trying to distinguish between what he later calls a 'classic' rape scenario - one person violently pinning down another person and having sex with them against their will (the 5 live discussion is framed exclusively in terms of women victims, though of course men can be and are also victims of rape) - and other crimes that can be classified as rape but aren't in that same way. Actually, Clarke is specifically trying to distinguish between that 'classic' rape and statutory rape, or his example of consensual sex between an 18 year old and a 15 year old. It turns out that, actually, that crime would be a sexual offence with a minor and not classified as rape and so not included in the average sentence Clarke is trying to refute, but that doesn't change the fact that, at the time, Clarke's 'serious' was not a demarcation of some rapes as worthy of our attention and concern and others not, but an attempt to distinguish between the sentences given to violent, repeat offenders and those given in cases of statutory rape. I think Clarke made clear on the show, and then again in later interviews, that he views all cases of rape - sex against someone's will, regardless of the circumstances - as serious crimes.

He alluded to some 'confusion' around date rape when he was a practising lawyer, but unfortunately was never asked to clarify, and nor did he volunteer to. He did say that all date rape cases are different and that some cases of date rape are that 'serious' classic scenario - which is to say, violent, forceful. I would guess that the confusion he speaks of lies in cases where perhaps two people have been out together, are both drunk, and have sex, and where in sober retrospect neither party is sure if consent was given at the time, or whether a person can be capable of giving consent after a certain point of inebriation. I am emphatically not saying that a woman who has been drinking is in any way at all to blame for rape, or was 'asking for it'; a person has a right to say no to sex at any point up to and during the act, and the other person has an obligation to stop. But I think it's disingenious to pretend that society thinks that a man in the 'confusing' date rape scenario above is the same and needs to be treated the same as a predatory rapist (whether a stranger in a park or a colleague in the office) who intentionally commits a pre-meditated and violent rape.

And actually, I don't really want to get into that whole debate, though this blog fairly sums up my thoughts on it (and much more concisely, I might add). My main outrage today was not with people who were unwilling to see that rape is an incredibly complex and nuanced issue and not nearly as black and white as being able to say all rape is exactly the same. My main outrage was with the media and politicians, led by Labour leader Ed Miliband, who were determined to score political points and create a controversy by purposely ignoring the context and meaning of Clarke's words and reducing the interview to a couple of patently false soundbites, which were then repeated and further distorted through other media and Twitter.

Miliband demanded in PMQs that Clarke be sacked by the end of the day for his views on rape. This might have been justifiable if, say, Clarke had actually denied that rape was a serious crime, or actually said that date rape isn't rape, or actually said that some rape isn't really all that serious. But he didn't, and Miliband knew that. I hate to have to agree with David Cameron on anything, but when he accused Miliband of jumping on a bandwagon, he was absolutely correct.

The Telegraph followed with the headline 'Kenneth Clark questions whether date rape is really "rape"'. Er, no, he didn't. A blog on the New Statesman website said that 'a significant amount of people agree with [Clarke]' that there is a 'scale of rape', trotting out as proof a survey showing that 30% of people think that a woman is partially or totally responsible for rape if she is drunk. Except, since Clarke didn't say anything about drunk women asking for it, it was a lie to say that 30% of people agreed with him. Independent columnist Johann Hari, who I normally adore, posted a link to an old article on the prejudices that allow rapists to go free, saying the 'horrible views that Ken Clarke subconsciously revealed about rape are dismayingly common in Britain'. Except none of the views in the article are ones Clarke discussed.

I have no problem with journalists taking a current event and using it as a platform to foster discussion on important topics - and, as I had planned to write about in relation to the SlutWalks, common attitudes toward rape are absolutely something that need to be brought out into the open. But so many journalists and political activists today took the opportunity to purposely ignore Clarke's fundamental point, which was, ironically, that the BBC 5 live presenter Victoria Derbyshire was reducing a political policy covering all crime into a tabloid headline about Clarke reducing rapists' sentences to 15 months. Clarke was trying to clarify facts about the average sentencing (which, granted, he did not do very well at all), and to stop the discussion from becoming hysterical over figures that he believed weren't true.

Any discussions about the pitiful figures for rape reporting and conviction rates, about the way the police and justice systems treat rape victims, about funding for rape crisis centres, about public attitudes toward rape and the idea of victim-blaming and myths about false reporting - all of these and more would have been very valid questions to ask of Clarke and ourselves. There are enough real problems in the way society and the legal system treat rape - there was no need to create a fake hysteria around something that Clarke just clearly does not believe, and I was immensely disappointed in the media today for insisting on perpetuating sensationalist trash.

Election Time!

Quick thing to think about before today's post: tomorrow is the TUC March for the Alternative. By all accounts, it's going to be massive, though the UK papers have already started with stories about how it's going to be hijacked by extremists, violence is expected, etc. Keep an eye on the coverage - watch how different it is from the now-daily coverage of protests in the Middle East, Gulf and North Africa, which I mentioned in an earlier post. I'll try to post on Sunday when I've seen a bit of the coverage and find some examples. Or, who knows, maybe the coverage will be fair to the thousands who are likely to turn out and march peacefully and not focus on a few who might manage some destruction? Nah.

Actually, what are your thoughts on this? Is it irresponsible and/or sensationalist journalism to focus only on the bad bits and not give as much airtime to the grievances of the majority? Or is the destruction/violence legitimately the news, the thing people are going to want to see on TV and read about the next day? Does it give a skewed view of the participants? Is there a bias in coverage that assumes the protesters don't really have a right to be angry? Would love to hear some comments on this, from any country.

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I meant to post yesterday and link to a BBC story about the impending Canadian election, but I forgot and now it's been corrected. Some of you may have seen it, anyway. The reporter somehow managed to mix up Lawrence Martin, the political analyst he interviewed, with Lawrence Cannon, the Foreign Affairs Minister, resulting in a few choice quotes about how Canadians don't like Stephen Harper's 'autocratic' style...attributed to his Foreign Minister. The article also contained a photo of Jack Layton captioned "NDP leader and acting Deputy Mayor of Toronto". Classic example of super lazy journalism - Layton's (since edited) Wikipedia profile did indeed say he was acting Deputy Mayor of Toronto, which is presumably where that came from.

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So it's election time! In addition to the Canadian election, which could be as early as May 2, we have the referendum on Alternative Vote in the UK (which I get to vote in), UK local elections, and devolved parliamentary elections in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, all on May 5. Throw in important Portuguese and Nigerian elections and an Icelandic referendum I need to keep an eye on for work, and all in all I'm pretty much going to be saturated with election coverage for the next month or two (when there aren't revolutions, wars and natural disasters to distract me. Oh, wait...).

I think election coverage always makes for interesting reading/viewing/listening. For one thing, politicians are at their very most clichéd - everything is a soundbyte, a campaign promise, a slogan. I find it infuriating, but it makes for some good observations. Election campaigns are one of the times when the various news outlets' editorial biases show most strongly (including, of course, outright endorsing a party or candidate). I'm hoping that watching the Canadian and UK campaigns at the same time will provide for interesting insights. And of course, there's always room for a slip-up here, a scandal there, a "bigoted woman" comment with the mic still on (or Nick Clegg's recent "If we keep agreeing there'll be nothing to debate" aside). One thing we probably can't depend on is proper analysis of policies (or the for/against arguments, in the case of the referendum) - it's always more interesting for people to read politicians making outrageous statements about how their opponent will ruin the country than to actually engage in informing the public. I'll keep an eye out for any coverage that actually does this particularly well, or particularly badly.

Strangeness of TV news

Off to the Frontline Club again tonight - hoping to hear some fascinating views on Libya from Noman Benotman, former Libyan jihadist leader, and Al Jazeera's Marwan Bishara.

A quick point on a very odd tactic used, badly, by the BBC and Sky News this afternoon. Prime Minister's Questions happened to coincide with Muammar Gaddafi's latest address in Tripoli. Even though Gaddafi's ranting is ridiculous and usually hard to listen to anyway because of the translation, both networks seemed reluctant to leave their live broadcast of it. Solution? Split screen. On the left, silent, was Gaddafi and his crowd. On the right, David Cameron and Ed Miliband battling it out on PMQs.

The effect was strange and generally terrible. Split screens usually imply that one has something to do with the other. We were watching Sky, and the screen didn't even try to explain why both were up there. The result was that it looked as if the crowds listening to Gaddafi were reacting to Dave's jibes - one man looked particularly uncomfortable when Cameron took a shot at Nottingham Council. When Gaddafi was on screen, you couldn't help but somehow look for comparisons with whoever was speaking on the right - not exactly the effect they were hoping for, I'm sure.

What were they thinking? And why did it continue for the duration of PMQs?

PS

Further to yesterday's post, check this out. The tool itself is pretty cool, but Chris Atkins' work brings up some of the same points I was trying to make yesterday:

"But it was Atkins's bogus Facebook campaign calling for the return of the prime minister's new cat, Larry, that has been most successful. Within 24 hours of the site having been created, the Mail ran the story under the heading: "But that's my auntie's cat: Man's claim on 'stray' No 10 ratcatcher (… and there's a Facebook campaign to get him back)." It also appeared in the Metro, under the heading: "Dear David Cameron: You've stolen my aunt's cat, please return him."

But the entirely made up story received most attention on Gaby Logan's BBC 5 Live show, in a light-hearted slot before the 1 o'clock news.. Discussing the story with chief political correspondent John Pienaar, Logan joked that the dispute over ownership of Larry the Downing Street cat was likely to "run and run".

Media and Protest

I went to a discussion at the Frontline Club last week on whether the mainstream media 'gets' protest and how coverage of protest movements has been affected by social media. The talk had been scheduled ages ago, in the wake of the student protests in the UK over tuition fees and the education maintenance allowance, but since then, Tunisia and Egypt happened, and Bahrain and Libya were on the brink. As a result, the panel included a BBC editor, an Al Jazeera English reporter, the founder of a media website and a student protest organiser. The debate and the questions afterward ended up focusing quite a bit on the role of blogs, Facebook and especially Twitter in organising protests and getting the word out about what's going on.

What I noticed, though, was this. When people talk about the movements in Tunisia and especially Egypt, it is with an air of total hope, pride and agreement. And the mainstream media coverage is in large part responsible for informing that view, for perpetuating it in the way these stories are covered. Aside from a few articles questioning the future of Israeli-Egypt relations should Mubarak's regime fall, there never seemed to be any question in anyone's mind (except Ezra Levant in a February 1 Ottawa Sun piece) as to whether the protests in Egypt were inherently good. Coverage was glowing. Any and all damage or problems were attributed to police, paid Mubarak thugs, unruly elements. Never were the protesters generally described as anything other than great. Which was fine for me, because that happens to gel with my personal view, and I was happy for the Egyptians and Tunisians for what they had done and the future they could now hope for.

But then I thought about what this discussion could have been about if it had happened a month earlier, or if Tunisia and Egypt hadn't happened yet. A discussion about the way the media dealt with the student protests in the UK would not have been this positive. Mainstream coverage of domestic protests almost always focuses on what goes wrong. The biggest stories to come out of the tuition fee protests were the damage at Millbank Tower, the kid who threw the fire extinguisher off the roof of said tower, the attack on Prince Charles and Camilla's car, and Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour's son Charlie's various charges for his involvement. There was no talk of revolution. There was no obvious slant to the reporting that said what the students were protesting for was right or wrong, no tone that made them obvious heroes. There were quotes from protest organisers and student leaders condemning the violence and saying it was caused by a small minority, but this didn't translate into the media coverage in the same way it later would for Egypt. Most people would look at the TV coverage or the newspapers the next day and say, "Look at those students destroying everything." There were citizen journalists, bloggers, Twitter users out there during the protests, posting their views on what was happening, reports and pictures of police brutality or peaceful activity. But there was no media embrace of these people, no big fuss about how Twitter was revolutionising the movement, no scramble to identify the most important bloggers/tweeters and make sure we always had their opinion.

And so, why the difference? Before the Q&A part of the Frontline Club event, and right before my phone died and I lost the ability to follow the livetweeting of it, I tweeted, "Different stories here - does msm romanticise protests elsewhere but vilify them at home?" Then, realising where I was, I decided to put the question to the panelists - between a protest leader, a BBC editor, the CEO of a citizen journalist website and an Al Jazeera reporter with experience in the British media, surely there would be some interesting ideas? People asked many questions about the role of social media, all met with long, thoughtful comments from the speakers. Finally, it was my turn, and I asked about the difference in the way international and domestic protest is covered. Does it have to do, I wondered, with political or corporate agendas, with a plurality of views available, with an inability to identify a definite enemy, with having more reporters on the ground and not needing the Twitter view?

And the answer was...nothing. The question was virtually ignored. The moderator, actually, said it was a great question and commented that as a former foreign correspondent, he could attest to the fact that in foreign reporting you are allowed to sort of "take a view" on things, to decide who are the good guys and the bad guys and report from that perspective. He then deferred to the BBC editor, who shook his head and said he had already spoken a lot tonight. The Al Jazeera reporter said that the question didn't really apply to her as Qatar-based AJ doesn't really have any news. And so, in a joke about the lack of anything happening in Doha, the question was lost and the panelists moved on to the next one. I was disappointed. I had really hoped for some answers on this.

When I got home, I saw a tweet from the BBC editor, responding to my last comment, saying "good point". When I asked him for his views again, he said they were "not for public consumption". The next day, I noticed a discussion between the website CEO and someone who had attended - and the CEO commented that he was more interested by my question than the point they were discussing. You know, the question he didn't say one word about at the debate.

In the end, I was left with two questions. One: what are the factors that contribute to such differences in the way protests are covered at home and abroad? I have some ideas, ranging from the fact that the public's a lot less forgiving about damages when it's their own stuff being destroyed, when it's their city up on the TV screen, to political influences in editorial decisions, to snobbery about the role of citizen journalists, to the need to simplify international problems into good guys and bad in a way we can't do here, to the fact that you just can't get everyone behind hating David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the way you can for Hosni Mubarak. And two: why don't journalists want to talk about it?