Continuing my digest of the BBC (an institution that I love and hate in equal measure) I had to comment on just how confused and contradictory they’ve been in responding to the news that the first female British soldier has been killed in Iraq (helicopter shot down, I believe).
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4753801.stm
This feature article that was advertised on the BBC news frontpage with the headline:
“Battle for equality
Is a woman’s place in the British armed forces?”
Now, the tensions and contradictions are rife even in the title. The very notion of ‘a woman’s place’ (i.e. one inherently different to ‘a man’s place’) is totally at odds with the ‘Battle for Equality’. Any discourse seeking gender equality is, at least in part, a discourse that should celebrate the similarities between the genders.
The article begins
This is a classic journalist hoodwink, particularly in second stage, autocritial articles like this one. Let me explain: the helicopter crash killed 5 people but only 2 werely publicly recognised (i.e. named), one because he was the highest ranking soldier killed so far, the other because she’s the first female solder to be killed. The other 3 were basically ignored (an editorial travesty in itself). So the BBC and other news media organs have created the story, have made the fact that she’s the first woman soldier to be killed into an issue. This article is what some term ‘second stage’ or ‘autocritical’ i.e. an article commenting on the story after it has initially been created. As such the ‘public attention’ mentioned is very real because the BBC (and others) have already created the story and people are therefore interested in it.
But the phrase ‘the death of… has drawn public attention’ is an outright lie, the death of that woman did sod all to draw attention to anything, the media discourse about her death is what has drawn the attention. But because this is a second stage article it can rewrite the history of the story, naturalising it and treating what was created 2 days ago as an inherent fact of the discussion. This sort of phrase is used in almost every type of media article that talks about the media itself. It plays a confidence trick, pretending that it’s talking about an objective reality that has actually happened, rather than a constructed history and discourse, which is what it is actually talking about.
2 paragraphs later we see a slip of more than Freudian proportions.
A couple of seconds ago this writer was telling us that it was public attention rather than press rhetoric that was making this woman’s death into an issue, now she (it would be a woman, no way the BBC would let a male journalist write this article, and therein lies the first editorial flaw) seems to be admitting that she’s commenting on not an issue but a shitstorm brewed up by bored and moronic journalists. Whatismore the commentary that is being provided merely replicates (without criticising) the story that has been told. The article admits that the only reason that Mulvihill has dominated the front pages is because she’s a woman but that is, of course, the reason why this article is being written, the reason why an editorial decision was made to take the time of a not very talented or informed female journalist and devote it to some autocritical claptrap under the guise of ‘furthering the discussion’…
Again, treating the press as though it were some separate entity rather than the exact same thing as the article criticising it. Same ontology, same rhetorical ploy. Naturalise the story as things stand and half of the work is done for you…
Including by the writer of this article and her editor. Once again the values of the story being told are reflected in the commentary of that story, the autocriticism is itself little more than a retelling of the same story and as such is failing to be critical at all.
Here the writer relaxes into unqualified, comforting stereotypes. This is totally unsurprising and happens with almost every mainstream discussion of anything to do with gender. There’s no way that the writer would say, even if it were (dunno either way), ‘women are particularly good at torturing prisoners, planting mines that won’t go off until a small child steps on it 20 years later, and shooting people between the eyes’ because it wouldn’t be a pleasant, suburban, middle class way of looking at things.
This I just found amusing - this Prof is meant to be a professor of military sociology, it’s his job to know these things, not say that he’d be surprised if X weren’t the case. Clearly neither the prof nor the journo did any research into this.
Again, the slip between ‘the event’ and ‘the discourse we’ve whipped up about the event’ is an attempt to cover the writer’s tracks. An event cannot turn up the volume on anything, only a discourse, or possibly a stereo, can do that.
The implications being
- That there’s absolutely nothing wrong with sacrificing men
- that a woman’s life is worth more
- that (as with 19th century patriarchal conceptions of gender) women are the ‘thing to be protected’ and men are ‘things that do the protecting’, to the detriment of both
- that women should join the army through choice rather than a sense of duty, that a woman in the army is either doing it because it’s an expression of her individual self as a woman or a demand made by her gender
The first sensible thing said in this article. Of course Kate Adie is a seasoned professional with years of experience of actually reporting from warzones so she’s got a much more realistic understanding of what woman can and cannot do, as well as the grim reality of warfare.
I’ve written this as an example to all the posters on the site of one way of writing an effective critique of a bit of media. I’m not bitching or criticising, but writing ‘the TV is run by Neocons’ over and over isn’t going to change a damn thing and it only makes you look like brainwashed simpletons. A lot of you blame ‘the media’ for everything from your milk being sour to whatever war happens to be floating your boat. If you want the press to be of a better quality then demand it by having a better quality of discussion about it. Just because journalists are, for the most part, childish simpletons with stupid opinions doesn’t mean that you have to be likewise when criticising them.
