[Media-watch] For your attention

[hsstjjp at brunel.ac.uk]

Julian Petley spotted this on the MediaGuardian.co.uk site and thought you should see it.

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Weapons of misinformation
War - what is it good for? Whipping up old paranoias, argues  Diane Taylor
Sunday March 30 2003
The Observer


It's not that easy to find a British nursery school angle on the war in Iraq, but the Times Educational Supplement managed to when it ran a story recently headlined Pupils Get Trigger Happy. 

It said that in the run-up to the war, nursery teachers had reported a rise in the number of violent games witnessed on their premises. It was illustrated with a picture of a three-year-old boy at New River Green early years centre in Islington, north London. According to the TES caption he and other pupils "brandish their own weapons of mass destruction" (ie: a piece of plastic used for super-hero play) as one child says to another: "You be Saddam, I'll be Bush."  

There was just one problem with the story: the head at New River Green said she had seen no increase in war games when asked about the issue by the TES reporter. However, she agreed to let a TES photographer visit the nursery and take photos of children to illustrate an article the newspaper was planning about super-hero play. The three-year-old who was snapped for the front-page picture had attended the anti-war demonstration on February 15 and his mother, Sheila Harrison, was angry and distressed about the article and the way the photo of her son had been used.  

In a letter to the TES, which she wrote on behalf of parents at the nursery, she said that the photo of her son was staged, that the reference to Bush and Saddam role-play was total fabrication and that no comments were contained in the article from nursery staff.  

"As parents, we are outraged that we are exploited in this way and extremely disappointed by the poor standard of journalism displayed by the TES on this occasion. Full of inaccuracies, woolly reasoning and sensationalism this article was both offensive and misleading."  

David Budge, deputy editor of the TES, said: "We regret the upset that this photo has caused. We don't believe we breached the industry's code of practice." However, he said that the paper was having a "fundamental rethink" about its policy on the use of such pictures in the light of this incident.  

"The TES is a very responsible newspaper which is very sensitive to the feelings of schools and parents," he added.  

The story about children wielding their own brand of weapons of mass destruction isn't the only one of contested accuracy   to hit the newsstands in recent weeks. As reported in Media Guardian last week, hot cross buns have become a political hot potato following a story in the Sunday Telegraph on March 16 claiming that several councils had banned hot cross buns from school canteens on the grounds that they might be offensive to non-Christians.  

All the councils quoted in the Telegraph's article have denied that they have imposed any kind of ban on hot cross buns. In a joint statement to the Sunday Telegraph they say: "We all encourage a multi-faith approach to education and life in general and celebrate the cultural diversity of our communities."  

This story is very similar to one which appeared in the London Evening Standard and Daily Mail soon after the death of the Queen Mother, which claimed that some schools with large numbers of non-Christian pupils had banned the screening of her funeral for similar reasons. Again, the local education authorities accused denied that such a ban existed.   

It is a variation on the theme of "political correctness gone mad" which surfaced in the right-wing media in the 1980s with urban myths about certain Labour-controlled councils banning black bin bags, the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep and the use of the term "black coffee" on the grounds that such things were racist. None of these reported bans ever took place.  

At a time of war in the Middle East and terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Allah, the buns and guns stories provide a way for some newspapers to update their assault on social trends that disturb them.  

Sadly, the striking nature of the stories about cute kids wielding "weapons of mass destruction" , the food bans and the rest are so visually striking that they are likely to remain etched in the memory of the casual reader long after any kind of low-key retraction or apology has been printed; and, by the time the fuss dies down, they will have achieved their aim of oxygenating paranoia.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited