[Media-watch] Good Morning Scotland and Jo Wilding

[Stephen McKee]

Did anyone hear the GMS interview with Jo Wilding?  (You can hear it again 
by going to the site and clicking listen again.  The interview is at about 
7.45).

I sent the following via the form-mail at the BBC Scotland website:

To: http://www.bbc.co.uk/feedback/

Mhairi Stuart’s interview with Jo Wilding before 8 this morning was 
unedifying to say the least.  For the majority of the interview, Ms Stuart 
repeated, in increasingly irritated tones, an obscure point about Ms 
Wilding’s non-affiliated status.  It seems that Mhairi Stuart thought that 
only someone who was a member of an organisation such as Amnesty could be a 
credible witness.  I am surely not the only Amnesty activist to be deeply 
puzzled by this notion.

To say an account can only be authoritative if it has been commissioned by 
an international organisation is a strange interpretation of the notion of 
credibility; it is a view that seems to say that only bureaucracy bestows 
validity.  I, for one, would find something approaching the opposite view 
rather more persuasive.

But Ms Stuart pressed and pressed Ms Wilding on this, to the detriment of 
what could have been an interesting interview, and in the process you cut 
across Ms Wilding’s attempted condemnation of Saddam, only to later ask her 
if she would be conducting a similar exercise to look at Saddam’s behaviour. 
  This is a fallacy that is repeated time and time again: the implication 
that those who question the conduct or motives of the  “Coalition” are 
somehow “pro-Saddam”.  The case against Saddam has been put.  It is 
generally accepted that he is a brutal dictator.  But that does not mean 
that those of us who live in Western democracies should therefore let those 
Western democracies off the hook.  And it certainly does not mean that any 
humanitarian disaster that may result from the pursuance of Saddam should be 
overlooked.  However they may come about.

As Ms Wilding herself said, she was presenting her account for us to weigh 
up for ourselves.  I would have liked to be given the opportunity to do so, 
rather than be treated to the spectacle of Mhairi Stuart labouring an 
obscure and irrelevant point.





_________________________________________________________________
Worried what your kids see online? Protect them better with MSN 8 
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/parental&pgmarket=en-gb&XAPID=186&DI=1059