Time to kill the swingometer?

Over at politicalbetting.com, there is an article comparing the US network's coverage of the presidential primaries with what the BBC puts on for General elections. The Beeb does not come out well.

"[On US network's] there are no lofty hosts like the Dimblebys. there are few outside broadcasts except those following the key players, and the US news networks don’t seem to have those silly time-wasting three-party discussions where politicians try to score points off each other. The US coverage also avoids those irrelevant “How are they seeing it in the White Lion?” sequences which seem to be a speciality of the BBC."

I was lucky enough to be watching the results of Super-Tuesday in my college common room, which has a sky package that includes CNN and Fox. This was a revelation because the approach they took was forensic, analytical and informative. It takes politics seriously and assumes a degree of intelligence and engagement on the part of its audience. I came away from that evening feeling I had not only learnt the results but also a lot about American politics in general.

It is really time that the BBC acknowledged that if someone is up at two in the morning watching election results then they are interested in what is happening and do not needs gimmicks to be kept awake. The BBC being outrethianed by Fox is a painful sight. It is one that we can only hope ends soon.

P.S: There's an alternative and more amusing take on the election coverage courtesy of the Daily Show.

My Dreadful Confession

While I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I did nothing interesting enough to be scandalous

Both Nick and Chris are in a spot of bother over dum things they did as teenagers. In Chris’ case it was (probably) writing an article arguing for tolerance of hard drugs and (probably not) taking said drugs. This is the case that is attracting more attention, which is perhaps surprising because the skeleton that has fallen out of Nick’s closet is far more unusual. To quote BBC news, “As a 16-year-old exchange student in Munich, he was given community service after setting fire to a rare collection of cacti in a "drunken prank". In addition to his community service, he narrowly avoided being expelled from Westminster. The presumptive future Lib Dem leader says that: “I did some damage to some plants. I am not proud of it. I think we all have blemishes in our past."

Not me. I am ashamed to admit that but I have been such a goody two shoes throughout my life that there is nothing scandalous in my past I can think of. It is early days, I am only in my fourth week of University. But given that I don’t drink, smoke, take drugs, break the law in any serious way and that my love life has never been terribly exciting, this is a state of affairs I can’t see changing.

Let this be a warning to you all. If politicians are hounded for silly mistakes they made a long time ago then no good will come of it. If people with blemished pasts are put off going into politics then the people left will be a lot like me: dull, puritanical and self-righteous. So, If you don’t want to wake up one morning and discover that I have my finger on the nuclear trigger lay off Nick, Chris, Dave, George, Boris and the rest.

Blinded by empathy

The strategy we are pursuing to protect children is flawed because we misunderstand the nature of the danger they face. A series of high profile but atypical cases have led us to give too great an emphasis to the threat posed to children by strangers and not enough to the threat from their own family.

When I was at primary school, we were constantly warned about 'stranger danger.' This campaign was inspired in part by the murder of Jamie Bulger which had happened a few years before hand. The problem with this is that children are far more likely to be at risk from people they know.

The Home offices figures on homicides amongst the under-16s show that nearly half of them were committed by the victims parents and that an individual is three times as likely to be murder by someone they know than by a stranger. Even these figures do not tell the whole story because if you were to take out teenagers then the portion killed by strangers would fall still further.

Yet it is not the stories of children suffering at the hands of their families that makes the headlines. The murders of the Sarah Payne, Holy Wells and Jessica Chapman and now presumably Madeline McCan are all examples of the minority of cases where the killer is a stranger. This is probably because these cases play to the fears: many parents worry that they will be unable to protect their children, few fear that they will themselves be the source of the danger. It is far easier to comprehend some twisted stranger murdering a child than someone is supposed to love and protect them doing so.

This may be an unavoidable part of life but media attention should not be allowed to dictate public policy or public perception in the way that it all too often does. The revulsion at the murder of Sarah Payne led to demands led to demands for a 'Sarah's law' that would give the public information on the whereabouts of registered sex offenders. Such a law is undesirable for a number of reasons: it encourages vigilante violence, it makes it harder to rehabilitate offenders but worst of all it encourages people to see pedophiles as the 'stranger danger' and consequently lowers our vigilance towards the danger from friends and family.

It is too easy to get pulled in by individual cases. The unfolding tragedy in Portugal is just the latest heart wrenching tale that can distort our view and lead us to make bad judgments about what we should be doing to protect children.

Update: This story has rather been overtaken by events. I think that my main point still stands even if the particular example may not.

DOH!

This will be my final potshot at the Sun over its absurd shark stories but I just can't resist posting something about the Sun's story turning out to be a hoax.

The video that sparked this whole thing was of a Great White shark, the only problem was that it was not in Newquay but Johannesburg. The film was taken by a night club bouncer while on holiday in South Africa, he sent it into the Sun as a joke, not expecting it to be taken seriously.

According to the Guardians report into the incident: "Newquay townsfolk seem to have thought the story was nonsense from the start. For one thing, the water looks mirror-like and it is usually choppy off north Cornwall. Nor did the angle look right if the shark had really been 100ft (30 metres) away.

A Newquay lifeguard, Paul Benney, said he had smiled because he had known Mr Keeble had just returned from South Africa. "He also has really bad eyesight so I laughed when I read he saw it from 100ft away. We have had a few kids a bit scared about sharks here but we told them not to worry. You are in far greater danger of being hurt by a weaver fish than a shark, he said."

I doubt that the Sun will mind being duped given how well its shark editions have sold but should the rest of us?

Some people have expressed concerns about the fear of shark attacks will drive away tourists. The Google searches that have led people to this site would support that. Nervous individuals are googling questions like: "how often do sharks attacks happen in the UK." However, I suspect that provided surfers don't start losing limbs that the fear this story has caused will pass.

What is has given us is a response next time the Sun runs a story about 'Gypsy beggar camps in Romania' or something similar, the voices of reason will have a perfect response: 'Oh and I suppose there is a Great White shark in Cornwall.'

More Shark nonsense

JK Galbraith once joked that the 'economists exist to make astrologers look good.' I sometimes think that something similar goes on with Britain's trashier tabloids because there can be no reason for the Daily Star other than to make the Sun look good. Not to be outdone by the Sun's screw up over supposed sightings of a Great White Shark in Cornwall, the Star produces its own not terribly scary scare story.

Now you might think that in order to make the front page of a national newspaper it would have to have been spotted somewhere pretty unusual, like say the North Pole, the Falkland Islands or the River Thames. In fact, this sighting is in the Mediterranean, which is part of the Great Whites natural habitat.

The supposed danger posed to British tourists is also overplayed (I will overlook the Star's indifference to non-Brits being attacked). As the article admits the last shark attack in Spain occurred close to fifteen years ago and (they don't admit this) last year their were only sixty shark attacks across the entire world, of which a mere four were fatal. It is far more likely that a tourist will be killed by drowning than by a shark.

But you will be reassured to know that the Star still manages to blame Eastern Europeans for this.

Great White Farce

Apoligises in advance. For most of this post I am going to sound like a ten year old who has been told they're not going to Disneyland after all. This is because I had been led to believe that someone had seen a great white shark here in the UK. Now as you may have gathered from the first post on here, I am fascinated by sharks. So my reaction to the news that the surfers and swimmers of Cornwall might be eaten was not 'oh dear' but 'oh cool!'

I should have paid more attention to where the story came from. The Sun splashed the sighting all over its front page and breathlessly reported how 'shocked tourists told of their terror last night over the Great White shark sighting off Cornwall.' Now, supposed great white shark sightings in UK waters are nothing new. I remember seeing a report of one on Newsround and since I haven't watched newsround for the better part of a decade this sighting must have happened I while ago. Nor are these claims totally implausible. Great Whites are regularly spotted off the coast of Northern Spain and it would be quite possible for one to swim from there to the UK.

What made this story different is that there was video of the 'shark.' This makes it easy to tell whether this really was a Great White. Which is exactly what today's Guardian does. They showed the video to David Sims, who leads the only scientific study of large sharks in the UK. His conclusion was that the 'Great White' was in fact a dolphin and a harmless Basking shark. Dr Sims cuttingly remarks "The Sun seems to run this story every summer. Just because parliament has gone into recess does not make this a great white shark."

There is a serious issue which this story raises. It is yet another illustration of just, how bad the Sun's journalism is. There was nothing preventing someone at the Sun showing the video to Dr Sim or another shark expert. They apparently did not do so and as a result printed a story that was inaccurate. But this is not the first howler from the Sun and they are often far from harmless.

Thanks to the Sun, thousands of people now wrongly believe that there are Great White sharks off Britain's shores. Which makes me wonder, what else do they believe just because the Sun told them?