Kenneth Roy
The pensioner and the BBC
It was mercifully brief, so here it is in full – a recent item on BBC Scotland’s news website:
Effort to bunker Trump thrown out
A pensioner’s legal challenge to stop Donald Trump building his £1 billion golf resort on her land in Aberdeenshire has been thrown out of court.
US tycoon Mr Trump hopes to build the world’s greatest golf resort at Menie, north of Aberdeen.
Molly Forbes asked for an interim interdict to halt the work while she challenged the way Aberdeenshire Council granted planning permission.
She was denied in a written ruling at the Court of Session in Edinburgh.
Within the tiny compass of these 83 words, there was a remarkable amount of nuancing going on. Let’s attempt a modest deconstruction.
‘Thrown out’ (twice)
A phrase heavy with implications. Why not just ‘rejected’?
‘A pensioner’
Now, what exactly does Molly Forbes’s (unstated) age, or status with the Department for Work and Pensions, have to do with anything? What relevance does it have to her application for interim interdict? What is this opening reference trying to tell us about her?
I pointed out in a recent column that a newspaper had described a 61-year-old woman crushed to death by a folding bed in Benidorm as ‘elderly’, but we expect such absurdities from the mainstream press. The BBC is in a different position. It is a public service broadcaster with some residual public service values. Yet it appears to believe that the most important thing about Molly Forbes, the fact to be stated before all others, is that she is ‘a pensioner’. I suppose Mrs Forbes should be grateful that the BBC didn’t describe her as a ‘frail pensioner’ – the media’s term for the victim of an assault. Then there is the exalted category of ‘brave pensioner’ – the victim of an assault who takes on her (or his) assailant. The worst that happened to Mrs Forbes last week was a slight mugging by the Court of Session.
From a list of Scotland’s most senior judges, I checked the ages of the first nine against their entries in Who’s Who in Scotland:
Lord Osborne, b. 1937
Lord Gill, b. 1942
Lord Hamilton (Lord Justice General), b. 1942
Lord Nimmo Smith, b. 1942
Lord Kingarth, b 1949
Lord Eassie, b 1945
Lord Reed, b 1956
Lord Wheatley, b 1941
Lady Paton, age unstated
Of the nine, then, five are what the BBC would call ‘pensioners’ and another will become a pensioner sometime this year. But I predict that you will not see any of them described on BBC Scotland’s website in these terms. You will not read an intro beginning –
‘A pensioner, Lord Osborne…’
– although His Lordship has been entitled to claim the state pension for the last eight years.
Could it be that, consciously or sub-consciously in the collective mind of my old employer, Mrs Forbes – unlike any of the above-named – is powerless, utterly without clout, a figure who invites our pity or wry amusement, and therefore fair game for any patronising appellation it cares to give her?
‘US tycoon Mr Trump’
If he lived in Britain, ‘Mr Trump’ – observe that ‘the pensioner’ is never granted the dignity of being called ‘Mrs Forbes’ – would himself soon be eligible for the old age pension. He will 65 in June, 2011. But I don’t expect the BBC to call him a pensioner even then.
‘US tycoon Mr Trump hopes to build the world’s greatest golf resort…’
In whose opinion? It sounds here as if the BBC is rather rooting for him. I am assuming, however, that this is Trump’s own, far from impartial, view of his yet-to-be-built golf resort, in which case the phrase ‘the world’s greatest golf resort’ should have been put firmly within quotations. Alternatively the beginning of the sentence could have been re-written with a greater respect for accuracy:
‘The property developer hopes to build what he describes as the world’s greatest golf resort’.
You may not think any of this is important. Considered on its own, it isn’t. But if you believe that perceptions are created from the subtle prejudices displayed in a minor news item, and if you then multiply this case many thousands of times a year, the potential for forming or shifting public opinion becomes all too apparent. We are on the brink of a general election campaign which is likely to be bitterly contested and the outcome of which is far from certain. The BBC needs to be on sharper form. It needs to use language more skilfully – and fairly.
The broader picture is more significant still. The BBC news website is immensely influential. For many people, it is a first point of contact with the day’s news; more useful, more immediate, than any broadcast bulletin. But beyond the power of its website there is the increasing dominance of the BBC in general, at a time when its terrestrial rival can no longer afford to provide an alternative source of news north of the border. In the unholiest of alliances, the publishers of the Sunday Post, the American owners of the Herald, and the financially troubled Johnston Press are bidding for a pilot franchise to run ITV’s Scottish news operation. Such a scenario, if it came about, would be fraught with the potential for editorial compromise.
In these unhappy circumstances, we are likely to depend more and more on the quality and impartiality of the cash-rich BBC. That is why the story of the pensioner and the tycoon is so depressing. It is all too typical.
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13.01.10
Issue no 193
The pensioner, the tycoon and the BBC
Kenneth Roy
on how a public
service broadcaster
stereotypes
people
[click here]
What Orwell teaches
us today
Alex Wood
on the evil of Doublethink
60 years after the
author’s death
[click here]
Snow stories
I
Douglas Wood
The bonspiel that
never was
[click here]
II
Liz Taylor
A friendly siege
in the Borders
[click here]
Violence upon
violence
Alan Fisher
reports from Pakistan
[click here]
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