The Moral outrage of the morally corrupt

 

So, the BBC news presenter at the centre of the recent mass guess who game that has played out on twitter, has been named as Huw Edwards, perhaps one of the most recognisable faces of broadcast news in the last 20 years, a 61 year old father of 5 who will forever be a part of British history as the news presenter who broke the news of the death of Queen Elizabeth II to the nation.

Now I'm not here to defend Huw Edwards, I think the things he did were creepy, it's not the first time or the last a middle age man is going to do creepy shit, but I think rather than use the Huw Edwards story to score points morally and politically, we must now look at what causes a man who is so recognisable and so famous, to seek sexual gratification with people young enough to be his child, or even grand child, and what made him think he could get away with it?

Police investigating the incidents have concluded that no law was broken, by Mr Edwards, but that doesn't mean that what he did wasn't wrong, and now he will have to pay the cost for that.

The big problem I have with this whole saga, is that there are people who are piling in on Edwards, despite their own shortcomings as human beings, there are so many people in the media who are quick to pass moral judgement on people, who are Harley the personification of morality.

Lets take for instance the Sun newspaper , the so called news paper who started this whole story saying it was a public interest story, are far from the guardians of British values and morality if you cast your mind back to 1983, those of us old enough to remember those days will remember that a superstar was made, she was everywhere, the most famous face of the early 80s, Her name was Samantha Fox, and she made her page 3 debut at the age of 16 under the headline of “Sam, 16, Quits A-Levels for Ooh-Levels”.

How does a newspaper stoke moral outrage, and keep a straight face knowing they not only solicited semi nude pictures of a 16 year old girl, but they printed them for everyone to see over their cornflakes?

But that's not the only display of the morally bankrupt rag's two faced faux moral outrage, in 1999 singer with the popular boy band Stephen Gatley revealed that he was gay in the Sun newspaper, the paper that basically forced him to “come out”.

His band mate and friend Shane Lynch recounted the events that lead up to the story running in the Sun while talking to other house mates in the celebrity Big Brother house,

'I'll tell you what happened, we were in Germany, on tour, and he got a phone call to say the press were going to run with a story on him, and he was distraught.

'They said to him, "Look, you can tell your story or we are going to print your story". It nearly destroyed him, it really nearly destroyed him. And then he did it, he came out.'

The Sun has a history of not letting the truth get in the way of a good story, in July 2003, the Sun ran a story under the headline “Swan Bake”.

The story alleged that ‘callous asylum seekers are barbecuing the Queen’s swans’ – just to imply a bit of treason in case you weren’t already mad at people murdering some swans and then chowing down the evidence* – and that ‘East European poachers lure the protected Royal birds into baited traps, an official Metropolitan Police report says.’

The allegations – which get quite specific – were page one news.

‘Police swooped on a gang of East Europeans and caught them red-handed about to cook a pair of royal swans,’ the story read. ‘The asylum seekers were barbecuing a duck in a park in Beckton, East London. But two dead swans were also found concealed in bags and ready to be roasted. The discovery last weekend confirmed fears that immigrants are regularly scoffing the Queen’s birds.’

It all sounds a bit suspect, doesn’t it? Swans will notoriously follow you down the road against your will if you look a tad nervous, why would anyone feel the need to set up an elaborate swan trap? And why would East Europeans be doing this, when in East Europe their favourite cuisines are – famously – NOT SWAN.

There must be some evidence to it, right? Because – and I’m being extremely fair to it here – claiming that a specific nationality of immigrants are luring swans to their death (like a pied piper whose pipe makes pleasing swan honks) and then whacking them on a barbecue without any solid evidence of investigations or arrests is completely batshit. Right?

Enter journalist and former asylum seeker Nick Medic of Presswise, looking pissed.

Nick, irritated at the barbarism the piece implied, took the unheard of step of checking whether or not the story was actually true. He rang the police, who informed him there had been no arrests, charges or even cautions for swan killing or indeed roasting. In fact, after searching some more, there was no evidence other than conjecture that any swans were even missing. 

After being approached by Medic, The Sun printed a small clarification, making clear that there had been no arrests or charges in relation to ‘offences against swans’ and that ‘The Sun […] referred to asylum seekers being responsible. We have no information at all that supports this contention and indeed when we spoke to [the journalist who wrote up the Swan Bake piece], he agreed that this was a mistake.’ As they’d printed ‘Swan Bake’ on the front page, they ran this correction also on the front page on page 41 – for an audience for whom I would argue getting past page 3 is a bit of a struggle. 

The Leveson inquiry included Swan Bake as evidence newspapers ‘wilfully’ produce stories ‘which are factually incorrect’ in order to ‘fit with a newspaper’s adopted viewpoint’. ‘Unidentified people were cited as witnesses to the phenomenon, but it seemed there was no basis to the story: The Sun was unable to defend the article against a PCC complaint,’ they noted.

In essence, imaginary swans had gone missing and some very real asylum seekers took the blame. But to be fair to The Sun, ‘swans we aren’t sure existed in the first place may have died (you don’t know!) and one local and potentially racist person we are unwilling to name reckons it’s actually the immigrants based on nothing’ is a lot more difficult to work into a pun.

Extract from the book Sunburn by James Felton

when it comes to the sun, I think as a nation we should follow the lead of the great city of Liverpool, and Never Buy the Sun, after their Horrific handling of the story of the Hillsborough disaster, where they blamed Liverpool fans for the deaths of 97 Liverpool fans, and accused fans of.

• Picking the pockets of victims

• Urinating on the police

• beating up a police officer who was giving CPR to a fallen fan

The Sun is not a news paper, it's a propaganda machine that will destroy lives, businesses and reputations for the highest bidder, it's the epitome of client journalism.

Hopefully the sun will go the same way as its Sunday sister paper the news of the world, But even if it does, you have talk TV and GB News who are already taking over as the outlet for the hard of thinking, and those two outlets are not without their Sun-esque style of reporting, from Presenters arguing that you can grow concrete, to having to rush to a commercial break after a poll on Brexit went spectacularly wrong, when it revealed that its Brexit heavy viewership when asked if you would vote for or against Brexit now, 45% voted yes they would, and 55% said no leaving presenters Martin Daubney and Angela Rippon flustered and clamouring to dig themselves out of the hole they found themselves in.

and as I write this blog, Twitter is asking a lot of questions about why certain GB News presenters are silent and missing from the airwaves and social media.

My point is, people make mistakes, people are flawed and do stupid things, but we need to ask ourselves are a morally corrupt media really the best guardians of our moral well-being?

After all, it wasn't the BBC or Hew Edwards that had Garry Glitter on their show was it.

Photo by Monstera: https://www.pexels.com/photo/speaker-screaming-into-loudspeaker-for-announcing-breaking-news-5849560/