Friday, April 20, 2007

Reporting from racism central

Today has been a rather weird day. In that I have been professionally disparaged in a national newspaper, called a racist and a bigot and generally insulted.

About a month ago, I wrote an article which was of a slightly sensitive nature racially. It was, I believe, a fair and balanced story although for various reasons it was not possible to gain a response from one of the people involved - who was not, by the way, named, as I did not know this person's name nor had any way of finding it out except by using underhand and possibly illegal methods.

Today, a national newspaper printed a response from this woman. In which, although I am not named, my newspaper is named, and it is very easy from that point to identify me as the initial story is still on our website. In this response, the woman basically refutes everything said in the article to give her view of events, claims I made no attempt to contact her and that she had attempted to contact me following the initial publication of the article, through our website, and no-one had come back to her.

I'm not going to go into the details, but suffice to say there were attempts made to identify her but it was not possible, and there is no record on our website of her trying to make contact whatsoever - maybe it got lost in the ether, but we never received it.

As a result of this article, my original story - with my byline on it - has been besieged with comments (more than 80 at last count) vilifying my newspaper and me. I've been told I should be sacked if I don't apologise. I've been called a racist and a bigot; narrow-minded; a pathetic and lazy journalist; shockingly shoddy and irresponsible; a "journalist" in inverted quotes; the story described as the most pathetic article one reader had ever read and an appalling piece of bandwagon jumping. And worst of all one said that the very tone in which my article was written was racist.

This has been rather unpleasant. To say the least. I'm not a racist. I moved to Oxford because I wanted to live in a vibrant city where people of lots of different cultures and background live together. I'm not a bigot either. Nor am I a lazy journalist - but I'm not prepared to break data protection laws or harass people for a story. There's a code of conduct for journalists, believe it or not, and people who work on local papers can't afford not to follow it. I got so angry reading some of the personal, and ill-informed, comments made I had to go outside and get some air.

I hate intolerance and I hate ignorance. I mentioned earlier that there were edges of unPC comments going on in my newsroom, ironically enough. But I don't just let them go - I tell my colleagues if I think they're being out of line. So it makes me frustrated to be judged by people who don't even know me - and most of whom, it would seem, have not even bothered to properly read my story.

The ironic part of the whole thing is that this response criticised us for not showing both sides of the story. Did they contact my newspaper (which can be easily found online, in the phone book as evidenced by the fact that all of the people who read the story ended up on our website) to find out if her version of events, as to how the article was written and got printed, tallied with her own? Err, no.

Anyway, rant over.

Blimey, I've got to be at E's house in 45 minutes for a commisatory "I'm not a racist" drink and I'm still in my work clothes. Must go.

More on that story later.

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3 Comments:

Blogger mig bardsley said...

Well look on the bright side...you're becoming a famous journalist!

It's rotten about all the comments though and you're most certainly not any of those things. Especially not racist, bigoted or lazy! Or narrow minded.
xxx

21/4/07 2:48 am  
Blogger Dave said...

Support.

21/4/07 7:47 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I third that.

21/4/07 7:18 pm  

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