I always thought Robbie Burns was living dangerously when he wrote the lines:
“O was some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us.”
If we really were to know how others regard us, the chances are we’d jump off the nearest cliff. A modified version might help, though: if we could set a softened version of what others think of us alongside how we see ourselves, it might be sobering and instructive.
The big danger I see is that people will test the wind and then present – especially in politics – that version of themselves that they think others will find most acceptable. This is a mistake. Much better to note and respond to the criticisms or comments of those we respect and ignore the views of those we don’t. Why would you accept the assessment of you made by someone you consider a fool or a bigot?
I always thought Robbie Burns was living dangerously when he wrote the lines:
“O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us”
If we really were to know how others regard us, the chances are we’d jump off the nearest cliff. A modified version might help, though: if we could set a softened version of what others think of us alongside how we see ourselves, it might be sobering and instructive.
The big danger I see is that people will test the wind and then present – especially in politics – that version of themselves that they think others will find most acceptable. This is a mistake. Much better to note and respond to the criticisms or comments of those we respect and ignore the views of those we don’t. Why would you accept the assessment of you made by someone you consider a fool or a bigot?
All of which leads us to today’s Observer. There’s an article in it titled “Is the BBC news broken? And if so, how do we fix it?”
Having lived abroad during the 1970s, I was delighted to return h ome and experience the quality of writing and the civilized tones of the British media. There was of course the shock-horror rags such as The Sun but newspapers like the Guardianand the broadcasting of BBC radio and TV struck me as models of moderation and fair-mindedness. Then came two events: the 1981 hunger strikes and the 1982 Malvinas invasion.
The handling of the hunger strikes by the Guardian and the BBC made me uneasy. It wasn’t that they were telling lies: it was something about the way they reported them that alertedd me to the fact that their viewpoint wasn’t the viewpoint I was increasingly taking. Why did neither question the notion of labelling political prisoners as criminals?
But the biggie was the Malvinas reporting. As Maggie Thatcher sent her troops off in their warships, the BBC and the Guardian dropped all pretence of neutrality. They adopted Thatcher’s line that this was an outrage committed on British citizens by bellicose Argies, and our boys were heroes who were sailing thousands of miles to protect peace-loving British territory.
Political infant that I was, I was shocked. Why, I wondered, had no media outlet criticised Thatcher for her “Rejoice in that!”, when news came through of the sinking of the battleship Belgrano as it was sailing away from the conflict zone and the loss of over three hundred Argentine lives? I suddenly realised that when the chips were down, both the BBC and the Guardian were organs of the British establishment.
From there to lookingat how both were reporting the Troubles was a short step. It became clear that any statement issued by the British army was accepted as the simple truth, any statement issued by opponents or victims was a tissue of lies.
Today, the Ballymurphy families, like the Bloody Sunday families before them, are seeing how the British authorities are capable of not just wrong-doing but lying about that wrong-doing, and continuing to lie for decade after decade. And has the BBC or the Guardian ever challenged them about these lies? My memory is that challenging programmes such as Death on the Rock, about the Gibraltar execution of three IRA people by the SAS, were told by commercial television, not Auntie.
But read the article yourself and see if it adds anything to what you know already.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/may/26/bbc-news-brexit-balance-bias
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