Lifted from the comments, a reminder, were one needed, that you don’t despise the media anywhere near enough.
In this case, it’s Flemish public television – not unlike our own BBC – and one guest’s realisation that any discussion of rising intolerance and a growing enthusiasm for violence against women must arrive at certain predetermined conclusions, regardless of the facts:
Eventually, a young editor sent me a brief PowerPoint presentation that had been circulating internally. To my surprise, every chart contained a bar for respondents of “foreign origin,” alongside the categories for age and education. Less surprisingly, that bar was often the highest of all. The internal presentation even drew attention to the elevated levels of intolerance among respondents of foreign origin—several times.
Then I noticed a marginal comment from a VRT editor that was clearly not intended for outside eyes.
It instructed the news desk not to report the breakdown by foreign origin, even though the data had been collected.
The seemingly routine attempt to deceive does rather invalidate the ostensible core function of this publicly funded organisation. It throws everything they do into question. How could one possibly trust them? It quite literally wipes out their credibility as a broadcaster. And by extension, any claim to public funding or favoured status.
In a saner world, it would be the end of them.
I say ostensible function because it’s not altogether obvious – to say the least – how one could reconcile some supposed broadcaster’s mission to convey the facts, and to bring into being an informed citizenry, with doing everything possible to prevent precisely that.
And doing so in a manner one might regard as practised.
Update, via the comments:
Should anyone assume that our own BBC is any more trustworthy in this regard, by all means think again. Do note the willingness of senior BBC employees to lie, repeatedly. Brazenly. Supposedly in the name of some fluffy and fragrant tomorrow.
Update 2:
In light of the above, it may be worth revisiting this gathering of Canadian media luminaries, at Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication, where much bewilderment is expressed regarding the public’s supposedly inexplicable dislike of journalists:
Indeed, almost any kind of demurral is framed as an attempt to “silence” the journalists’ self-declared heroism, to deny them their cosmic destiny. And hence, it seems, the imperative to shut down reader-comment sections on national newspaper websites, on grounds that readers are no longer content to confine their feedback to the polite correction of typos.
Throughout, the air is heavy with self-elevation, and claims of being scrupulously unbiased and “speaking truth to power” are deployed entirely without irony.
However, the more plausible explanations for why journalists may not be held in the highest possible regard remain oddly untouched. Even when Hill Times columnist and “anti-racism expert” Erica Ifill boasts that she doesn’t bother to interview white men.
And the implications of a room full of statusful media professionals being fixated with the supposed pathologies of “whiteness,” and being pretentious and neurotic, and mentally uniform – and both distant from and disdainful of the concerns of the public that they claim to serve – are, needless to say, not vigorously explored.
Readers amused by eye-widening self-flattery will find much to entertain.
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