UK Politics
Why dead Arabs come last
Published 16 April 2007
The rules that determine whose story leads the front page and who gets buried on page 14 can be racist, sexist, chauvinist and snobbish, but the readers are as much to blame as the editors
Here's a little quiz, with a moral or two attached. Why was Faye Turney's story worth so much more than the stories of the others held captive in Iran? And why, the day after four British soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in Basra, did the faces of just two, Joanna Yorke Dyer and Eleanor Dlugosz, dominate the front pages?
Women on the military front line, whether they are being captured or blown up, have a higher news value than men in similar situations.
Next question. After the Daily Mirror was beaten to the Turney interview by the Sun, to whom did it turn next for a first-hand, exclusive account of captivity in Iran? Not to one of the officers in the group, who might have offered the most authoritative insights, but to the youngest sailor, 20-year-old Arthur Batchelor.
If you can't have a woman, then, in news terms, the next best thing is a man who looks like a schoolboy. "I was frozen with terror . . . to be honest I just cried like a baby," was the headline on Arthur's tale.
Final question. About whom, in these two overlapping stories of the bomb and the captives, did we read almost nothing? Across the papers, scarcely a sentence was devoted to the fifth person killed in the attack in Basra, an unnamed interpreter, said by most papers to have been Kuwaiti.
So there you have it: women at the top of the ladder (especially if they have small children or an Oxbridge background); young, vulnerable men just below them; other British men next; and Arab interpreters who lose their lives helping British forces several rungs below that. That is a snapshot of modern news values.
Journalists get a lot of stick for this sort of thing, and it is certainly not pretty. The hidden hierarchy of values that determines what goes on the front page and what gets buried on page 14 can be racist, chauvinist, sexist, snobbish, macabre and heartless.
But let's not blame journalists alone. They have accomplices in this particular iniquity, and those accomplices are their readers. If newspapers dwell on the deaths of female soldiers and leave dead foreigners to the 25th paragraph, it is because they are trying to give the readers what they want (as opposed to what they may say they want).
The people who run Tonight with Trevor McDonald won't even have needed to discuss the choice of Turney: she was obviously the hottest potential interviewee of her group, simply because long experience showed that more people would tune in to watch her.
By the same token, Yorke Dyer's picture was on the front page of the Telegraph, the Mirror, the Sun, the Express and the Mail, but only the Telegraph also showed the two male British victims of the attack in which she died. Editors knew that more people would want to read about her, just as they knew that their readers, as a whole, were not interested in the dead interpreter.
Journalists these days do some bad things, and they also do some things badly, but in a desperately competitive news market, one mistake they rarely make is to foist unwelcome things on their readers. On the contrary, the great struggle is to please those readers, and slow the rate at which they desert.
So although news journalists may be guilty of pandering to prejudice of one sort or another (for example, by dwelling on Turney's motherhood when we were hardly told whether any of her fellow captives was a father), they very rarely create the prejudices in the first place.
This is an old argument, and it has an unsatisfying chicken-and-egg quality to it, but it is too often ignored when the press is accused of being cynical and immoral. Readers don't take their share of responsibility for what is wrong, and journalists have little to gain from trying to make them do so.
Littlejohn: not an apology
The stony hearts of Richard Littlejohn's regular readers may have missed a beat on Tuesday when they read the following in his Daily Mail column: "I did wonder if perhaps I'd gone a bit far, even by my standards. I braced myself for a backlash."
Only a couple of days earlier, his former boss at the Sun, David Yelland, had told an interviewer: "I still feel guilty about some of the people I hurt while I was the editor of the Sun." Had this confessional bug infected Littlejohn, of all people? Had the great vituperator finally found a conscience?
Relax, it was just what you might call a literary device, enabling him to rant some more about the same subject (the spinelessness of the navy) that he had ranted about last time out - and, indeed, to do so even more intemperately. For, as he explained, the backlash never came and, "if anything, most of you thought I hadn't gone far enough".
Yelland now admits that he rarely had a good night's sleep when he was at the Sun, where Littlejohn was his star writer. Something tells me Littlejohn himself sleeps like a baby.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
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