Media In Focus
Following on from my previous post about how, in a time of great financial crisis, many in the media have got their focus and priorities entirely wrong, another fantastic example of such wings its way to us via the ever-relevant BBC website.
The BBC are reporting that porn protesters have hit Westminster to complain about new laws that will ban the possession of extreme images showing ‘a threat to life or serious injury to a person’s genitals’. Wonderful stuff as you can imagine.
Now, the protest consisted of a mere twenty people and it would seem that as a consequence the BBC felt the issue of violent pornography and yesterday’s march warranted an entire news article on their website with an accompanying video.
However, compare this with the level of coverage two other past protests held outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster gained that concerned calls for the Government to honour its manifesto commitment to give a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
The first was back in October of 2007 and the second in February of this year, both of which I was in attendance. Now, the Referendum rallies were not mass protests on the scale of the million strong Countryside Alliance or Stop The Iraq War coalition marches – but they were still pretty sizeable with a couple of thousand people in total, and very many more than the twenty individuals at yesterday’s ‘porn protest’. Yet did the BBC (or any other news agency for that matter) cover the Referendum protests? The answer is of course, no – they did not. Not once.
Calling for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty did not just concern a few sick and depraved individuals wanting to photograph one another performing bizarre sexual acts, but the freedom, liberties and democratic rights of an entire nation of millions of people.
Yet, it is apparent that the BBC and most other news corporations hold the discussion of the laws on violent pornography more important than whether we wish to be a sovereign nation. Even the professional photographer and ringleader of the porn protesters, Ben Westwood (son of fashion designer Vivienne Westwood) acknowledged that:
There are more important issues to be debated than this.
In that Mr Westwood is entirely correct, but it would seem that large swathes of the media would disagree. Sadly, some things it would seem never change.
