Whilst my sense of fair play may not be innate, I feel I should tell you that Jeff Zucker's revamp of CNN is changing the recent hierarchy of news channels in the USA. In the last quarter, CNN pulled ahead of MSNBC in prime time, to take second place, though still some way behind Fox News.
The new breakfast programme has had a good start; the arrival of Jake Tapper at 4pm creates a stronger platform for the evening output; amd whilst Piers Morgan still "hammocks" between Anderson Cooper's shows, he's pulling ahead of Rachel Maddow on MSNBC much more often.
On a vaguely-related matter, I look forward to a debate between Piers, campaigner for gun control, and Stuart Prebble, who last week reported on "breadth of opinions" in the BBC's news and current affairs output. I copy the relevant Prebble passage without comment.
The example with which I have regularly irritated journalists
and producers within the BBC during this review involves the issue of gun control in the
United States. I believe that many people listening to or watching the BBC in recent
months would infer from its coverage that the BBC is in favour of gun control in America.
This does not mean that opponents of gun control are not given airtime on the BBC but
that, when they are, it seems to me that they are likely to be challenged in a manner
which is different from the way that proponents are treated. This happens, I suggest,
because of what we could call “an assumed consensus” within which we make editorial
judgements – as evidenced by the Today programme presenter who declared in an
interview on 23 February that “the British people are bemused by the anti-gun control
argument in the US”. All our instincts tell us that having fewer guns in circulation must be
a good thing, and so (to a greater or lesser extent) the BBC treats as eccentrics anyone
who takes a different view.
But let us see if we can look at the situation in another way. Tens of millions of people in
the United States oppose gun control, and they cannot all be crazy. Opponents of gun
control are not people who are in favour of shooting children in schools with automatic rifles – they are people who are every bit as against it as are the rest of us – they simply
have a different answer to the question of how to make such shootings less likely. They
believe that if you introduce gun control into a nation where there are already tens of
millions of legal and illegal guns in circulation, then the law-abiding citizens will give up
their guns, and the criminals will keep theirs; not a situation guaranteed to make our
children safer.
Seeing this argument from all sides involves the very simplest exercise in empathy. It goes
without saying that if the US were starting from a position similar to the position in the
UK, where relatively few guns are in circulation, then every effort should be made to
restrict their further circulation. But that is not the situation in the US; that horse has
bolted, and they are dealing with an entirely different position. If between us we are
unable to stretch our powers of empathy even to the extent of imagining a different
starting point, then what hope do we have of understanding and empathising with the
views of people we disagree with from the Middle East or North Korea?
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment