I've Moved

Having seen blogs like A Journal of Impossible Things and The R[e]porter, I have decided that a move to Wordpress is in order. Henceforth i shall be blogging there, and i'm taking my blog archive with me. Ta ra.

42 Days

So apparently 69 per cent of us want a law that would allow suspected terrorists to be locked up for up to 42 days without charge. Its worrying to think that the majority of us believe in this completely undemocratic and immoral law.

I suppose it all depends on what question was asked:
a) Do you think suspected terrorists should be detained for a limited period before being charged while an investigation takes place. Perhaps yes.
b) Do you think people should be locked up for up to six weeks without being charged or being told why? I would say no.

The facts are that the current 28 day limit has not been a restriction up to now, and around half the people detained under the Terrorism Act have been released without charge. Of the six that made it to the end of the current 28 day limit, three were released without charge, with absolutely no further action taken by police. The other three were charged.

Such draconian laws do nothing to help fight the 'war against terrorism' and actually act as a propaganda coup for al-Qaida. I applaud David Davis on his resignation to fight against this bill. He found parliamentary voting unable to stop the laws passing, thanks perhaps in part to bribery and deal making by Labour in order to win the vote.

So far the only opposition he'll face in next months by-election is self-ridiculing former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie (with the backing of the Murdoch empire). Barring cowardice from Gordon Brown we should get a chance to see this unBritish law properly decided upon by the British people.

Just a shame only the people of Davis' constituency will be able to do this. The only think i can do to show my support is by engaging in the most popular modern-day democratic forum. Yes, I've joined the 'Support David Davis' Facebook group.

The BNP's Party Political Broadcast

I have a confession. I'm not proud of it and many people will poor scorn on me or mock me for thinking so, but i stand by my belief. Not only does the object of my affection give a chance for new sides to the same old stories to be heard but its leader, who i believe to be a great man, does so in a new and refreshing way.

Yes that's right ... I love The One Show, and the man of whom I speak is Adrian Chiles.

Sitting down to watch it the other day I was annoyed to find I first had to sit through a party political broadcast. But no matter I thought, sometimes they can be quite interesting. What'll it be?... David Cameron at home with his kids trying to convince us he's one of us. Gordon Brown perplexing us with the weird chin thing he does when he breathes, or something a bit more budget from one of the others.

No, to my shock this one was from the British National Party (normally i'd link to an online version but i don't want to give them that oxygen).

What is the BNP doing with a party political broadcast? Have they really reached reputable party status?

I know what the argument is, its democracy, you have to allow for all sides to have their say. But let's not get too simplistic, there are still limits and balances. I actually think for instance that Oxford University was right to host Nick Griffin on a debate about free speech. That's because it was in a forum where debate was intentionally being sought amongst people of opposing views, with a sound enough knowledge to see through the sugar coated hatred of Griffin and who had turned up in full knowledge of what they were going to hear.

A Party Political Broadcast however goes out unchallenged, without an immediate counter argument, to everyone in the country without warning, and under the banner of the PPB which gives a sense of authority to the advert.

However what angered me most were the lies and offensive content of the broadcast. These included messages like 'we stand for good Christian values', as a Christian I found it detestable that they could even suggest that this was true. One supposed testimony from a blonde haired lady stated that the BNP merely dares to say what most of us are thinking, uh... no. And the final, almost laughable statement, that the BNP actually had 'a well thought out policy on immigration' ... to stop it. Add in the fact not a single ethnic minority could be seen in the piece and you can see that the far right party are every bit a bad as everyone thinks.

Apparantly they only need a fraction more to get seat on the London Assembly. Let's hope this hasn't swung it for them.

Reporting on the Day that Terror Came to Bristol

My last day of work experience at Bristol's Star Radio started early, with a trip to Avonmouth to have a look around a recycling facility. I was to talk to councillors about their vision for waste management and power production in the city. But news was already breaking of another perhaps much bigger story.

A controlled explosion had been carried out in Westbury-on-Trym and an arrest under the terrorism act had been made. This must be a simple misunderstanding? Terrorism in Bristol, and in the well-off area of Westbury on Trym, surely not?!

Having spoken to all the relevant people for the recycling story, I was back down the A4 to the centre, wondering how the day would shape out. Would I be off to Comb Paddock to help report from the scene, or stuck in the newsroom editing councillors into 15 second sound bites.

Thankfully it was the former, though arriving back I was told I had messages on my mobile phone telling me to go straight to the scene of the explosion to join the other reporter, without wasting time coming back to the newsroom.

Lesson one learned: keep checking your phone for messages, especially if you know a story is breaking.

So, having taken my lovely battered old Nissan Micra up to Comb Paddock I arrive to find a swarm of journalists, producers, engineers, and policeman who've taken over a quiet cul-de-sac in a corner of Bristol I've barely ever come across.

As I arrive and start to take in what's happening a BBC reporter walks past with a puzzled look on his face. As he passes by I hear him mumbling to himself, 'I need a piss, where can i find a toilet'.

So, what do we know at 11 o'clock? A 19 year old man has been arrested. A controlled explosion has been carried out. Neighbours have been evacuated to a hotel. That's about it. We need information. Who is the arrested man? What is he like? What background does he have? (naturaly we're wondering if he's Muslim) Which hotel have neighbours been evacuated to?...

Police aren't saying anything of course, so it falls to the residents to fill in the gaps. We get a copy of the letter they was given to residents by police, generously lent to us by ITV West. I speak to one lady as she walks past. She tells me she's already spoken to a lot of media people already. She describes the man as a well dressed muslim man who's lived there for about six months, though she doesn't really know him.

Muslim man. That's the second person that's said that, or is it the same person, telling two different reporters. What do we say on radio? A 'well dressed muslim'. Why didn't I ask what she meant by that?! But surely that means a man of asian appearance in a suit ... doesn't it? In the end we play with a straight bat and report the hard facts. Pretty much the same one's we have done for the past couple of hours.

We use a small outside broadcast kit which uses 3g and is about the size of a laptop and is really cool. We borrow Sky's generator to power it.

For some reason we can't transfer our recorded audio on the same connection so we rely on a more traditional method and order a taxi to courier a memory stick back to the newsroom.

We need more information, or more precisely, more sources to back up what we think we know. I spot a mass of journalists have developed round a couple. I pick up the Marrantz and join the crowd. They're next door neighbours to the man. They describe him as a caucasion male who wears white islamic dress. They say he's only lived there a few weeks. They'd complained to him about playing really loud music of an islamic chanting style. Alarm bells are ringing in my head. This all seems very real.

But still, are we sure enough of the facts to report them. This woman seems to contradict the first one. What do we do? With more thought and keeping on eye on what others are reporting we eventually report what the next door neighbour said.

But so many question still unanswered. Where are the evacuated residents staying? What was exploded? How serious is this? Who is the arrested man? When will residents be allowed back? Was he acting alone?...

Any remaining residents seem now to be staying out of the way of media swarms. We're not getting any more answer to questions here. The rest can be done from the newsroom where we can keep an eye on agency feeds that are also coming to us from the scene.

The skycopter is doing laps overhead and the same BBC reporter previously mentioned is exitting a neighbour's house with a tray full of mugs for the small army of BBC staff that are now huddled around their broadcast van.

At around 2 we decide to leave. I think we did a good job. Perhaps we were a little conservative in what we decide to report, but its very easy to go wrong and falsely report things, and on a story like this that would land us in all sorts of trouble. We've done live reports from the scene in every bulletin and for our main news show. We've got audio of the 'star witness', the next door neighbour that will later be played on every news channel. I've even managed to get myself in a photo. Not a bad morning. Not a bad day of work experience.

April Fool!

April Fools days is the one day a year when journalists and broadcasters can have a bit of fun without just having to report what the latest poll says, or what Gordan Brown is about to do/is doing/has just done.

Here's a few of the best from today:

The BBC films proof of 'reverse evolution' by showing that penguins migrate to the Amazon.

The glamourous French President's Carla Bruni Sarkozy is employed by Brown to give Britain more style.

The Sun reports that England manager Fabio Capello wants the team all to learn Italian instead of him learning English.

The Metro reports BMW's latest invention to deter dogs peeing on their cars. Just zap them.

BBC local radio stations reported how the problem of immigrant staying too long in our country is being addressed the RSPB. They want to catch birds that are not native to our shores and take them home to where they belong.

And a nice one from Star Radio in Bristol. The statue of former slave merchant Edward Colston in the centre of the city is to be replaced by one of another famous son of the city: Justin Lee Collins.

And finally, when I first read this I thought it was geniune, then someone told me it must be an April Fools so I wasn't so sure. Pay-per-view funerals? You decide.

Upstaged - Jack of all Trades ...

Is this the future of TV?

Upstaged ticks all the boxes by being innovative in its use of multi-platform programming. Firstly it builds an online community through its web site, where they can have their say and vote on what will happen on the TV show. Then people can watch the show on BBC Three. Then if they really want more they can 'press the red button' and get extra live footage. I've heard a lot recently about the future of broadcasting, and multi-platform entertainment is a very dominant theme.

But is this what's its going to be like?!

It seems when the idea for this show was thought up they got to the point when they realised it would work across platforms and forgot about the rest of the programming making process, like the bit where you try and make it good. This programme is embarrassingly poor. I saw one the other day. There were no more than 20 people in front of the stage watching the live show, which included a comedy act that wasn't funny and a singer/dancer that could do neither. I also noticed that the charts logging online viewers votes did not have a scale to show if there had been four votes or four thousand. I suspect it was nearer the former.

I really hope that this is an experiment that is not continued. Before going all '360 degree commissioning' on us, please programme makers, get your priorities sorted and make the programmes good enough to work on just one platform first of all.

Petition Launched for Cathays Cemetery's Decaying Chapels

The history of Cardiff can be read through the engraved epitaphs spread throughout it, but Cathays Cemetery lies unnoticed and forgotten by most of us.

After decades of neglect the two chapels at the entrance to the 19th century cemetery are now a fenced off eyesore, where once they provided a grand welcome to the quiet retreat just outside the little, but growing, town of Cardiff.

A group from the welsh capital, The Friends of Cathays Cemetery, want the two chapels to be brought back to their former glory from their current crumbling state. They've set up a petition to try and encourage Cardiff Council to repair and maintain the grade 2 listed chapels.

Cathays Cemetery itself is one of the biggest cemeteries in the UK and was built in 1859, when Cardiff was just a small town.

Buried in the grounds are a number of characters from Cardiff relatively short history, including boxer 'Fearless' Jim Driscoll, who reportedly missed a world title fight because of a previous commitment to visit some nuns, Ernest Thompson, who pioneered hot air balloons during the first world war, as well as many of the men who helped established Cardiff as the biggest exporter of coal in the world.

A similarly historic cemetery in Bristol was featured on the BBC's Restoration programme, but no one has noticed the fact that Cardiff's biggest cemetery is decaying. The buildings are two twin chapels, one Church in Wales, the other for denominations such as methodists.

To give your support to the decaying funeral chapels sign the petition set up by the Friends of Cathays Cemetery. There are also guides of the cemetery aimed at visitors who want to walk around and find out a little of the history buried in the 110 acres site.

The Archbishop and the Lazy Journalist

'Muslim Laws Must Come to Britain', was the front-page headline on the Daily Express on Friday. The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, had apparantly said something so controversial that neither Madeleine McCann nor Princess Diana made it to the front page.

However it would seem the 'World's Greatest Paper' (correct use of quotation marks) does not even know basic punctuation. Not only is this not a direct quote from Archbishop Rowan Williams, it's not even a paraphrase of what he was saying at a speech at the Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday. In the speech titled Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective, he discussed how overlapping authorities might be used in cases involving certain religous issues or parties. At no point did he say Muslim or Sharia law must come to Britain.

What he did say in the six thousand word lecture was '... if what we want socially is a pattern of relations in which ... groups of serious and profound conviction are not systematically faced with the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty, it seems unavoidable'. In short, if we don't want people to feel separated from society because of the laws they hold themselves to, then a system of overlapping religous and civil authorities should be introduced. He was not only talking about Sharia law either, but also Orthodox Judaism. His speech was intelligently written and argued and based on a number of scholar and acedemics from the religious and secular world.

Though I highlighted The Express earlier in the blog, that was just a snapshot of the terrible reporting of the story. It seemed every media group was doing their upmost to report the story in the most simplistic, lazy and unintelligent way possible. I wonder how many of those reporting the story actually read the speech for themselves rather than taking much reported soundbites out of context. If they had they would have found it was quite a dull and complicated speech that was only ever addressing things like marital law, financial law and conflict resolution. Despite what many caught up the frenzy might have thought he was not sanctioning the chopping of hands or anything else so Draconian. He himself said any new system would have to 'not collude with unexamined systems that have oppressive effect or allow shared public liberties to be decisively taken away by a supplementary jurisdiction'. Unfortunately this section of the lecture was buried towards the middle and doesn't make a great headline.

This is not the first time we've seen a talk on religious issues jumped opon by the media looking for an easy story. A similar incident occured in 2006 when the Pope quoted a controversial text in a speech trying to encourage more thought into religious issues, which as was proved by the reaction to the case, is greatly needed, not least by the media.

I am currently training to become a journalist and it's seeing stories like this that inspire me to want to work in the media. Such poor reporting of a story aggrevate me so much to want to do a better job myself. Its a high hope, but i think i'm entitled to such ideals at this stage of my career.

I don't necessarily agree with the Archbishop. What i don't agree with is the way the media and therefore the public have reacted to the speech. I was most disgusted today to see someone shouting at him to resign as he left a service in Cambridge.

With such critisism thrown at Dr Rowan Williams from many directions, he's been forced to defend his speech by reiterating what he actually origanally said. Whether or not this gets the message across or saves him from having to resign remains to be seen.