Impact is mercifully free of shock journalism, retaining a common sense for which I can only be thankful, but all too often our most influential and widely followed news sources resort to scare tactics in order to compete with their rivals. Shock journalism supposedly ‘informs’ the public of all those hidden dangers that are lurking on our doorsteps, helping keep us safe at night, yet the sad fact is that more often than not the thrill-value of such journalism – which is intended purely to whip people up, after all - relies on misinformation and half truths, and as such can spread highly dangerous thoughts and views to a wide audience.
Dangerous journalism of this nature generally comes in two forms: the first is that which is actively detrimental to national security and well-being, such as the recent, highly moralistic publishing of photographs of Bob Quick - the then head of Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism and security department - carrying top secret documents into Number 10, which forced anti-terrorism raids to be rushed forwards and nearly ruined; the second is that which serves to unnecessarily anger or scare the public at large, making issues out of inconsequential details that can lead to distorted world views being fed to people, warping their political and social beliefs as a result.
The growth of the BNP is a perfect illustration of the effects such journalism can have, and exactly why it can be so dangerous. The number of votes they received in general election quadrupled between 2001 and 2005, a direct result of the combination of their higher media profile, which has raised awareness of their image and ideology, with shock journalism along the lines of the Daily (ever entertaining) Mail’s recent ‘Hundreds of illegal immigrants armed with knives and crowbars swarm round Calais trucks heading for Britain’, and their separate article in which a rise in crime was attributed to immigration. One of the BNP’s most hyped themes, that of ‘British Jobs for British Workers’, runs beautifully parallel to the hype surrounding unemployment during the recession, and a combination of bad journalism and clever party-presentation has led many people to believe that booting anyone not descended from Oliver Cromwell from the country will restore a great deal of jobs in Britain to their rightful, British owners, cutting unemployment dramatically.
Not only is this untrue, but the idea that allowing immigrants and asylum seekers into the UK is crippling the economy is also a complete fabrication; government spending totalled £1.4trillion in 2009, with the cost of keeping UK borders open but controlled £150million, 0.01% of the national budget for that year. The vast majority have no intention of ‘sponging off the state’ either. Indeed, the Institute for Public Policy Research recently concluded that migration has very little effect on wages or employment in the UK, and that if it does have an effect it’s just as likely a positive one.
Aside from this, journalism designed to scare or stir people is also able to create situations that never existed in the first place - need I even mention the furore over Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s antics? They may not have been to everyone’s taste, but the number of complaints made by actual show listeners was almost 0% of the total - the rest came from the Daily Mail’s armchair army, roused by the paper’s bloodthirsty coverage of the incident. Whilst my final example may well be a more trivial one than that of the recession or the BNP, it still bears the exact same message, that shock journalism is not only crude and unnecessary but can also pose an active threat, whether to the welfare of its subjects or in its intentional misleading of the public as a whole, and perhaps journalists in the position to do so should take their social responsibility into account more fully before engaging in such reporting so eagerly.
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