Lying by Omittance

So to catch you up with British politics if you’re not already aware, our Prime Minister David Cameron is currently under scrutiny for evading tax. One reason why this is a big deal is because if he is indeed dodging tax, he’ll be a hypocrite and a liar, and his promises will now more than ever be revealed as false and the legitimacy of his attitude towards many issues called in to question. Nobody wants a liar for a leader. (And I certainly didn’t vote for him!)

Now, as one can quite imagine, this has riled up public dissatisfaction with our great leader, and there was therefore a rather large protest in front of Downing Street last week, calling for David Cameron’s resignation (or, as some of the more ambitious folk went for, a full on public revolution). #ResignCameron started trending on social media websites sometime before, and continued for some time after, and the crowd that came together in front of Downing Street was rather sizable… sizable enough to make it onto a supposedly unbiased, public-serving news program such as the BBC News, for instance.

It did not.

On BBC News and many of the papers the next day, there was not a single mention of the protest which had gathered outside Downing Street in an attempt to change the leadership of the country – as is our right as a democracy. Calls for a snap election were silenced through the BBC and other news outlets’ deafening ignorance to these events, muting megaphones and bleaching placards blank. 2,000 – 5,000 people were estimated to have gathered, a figure which is apparently not newsworthy.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, the BBC may have gotten away with this. However, due to the rise in social media and camera-phones being readily available, demonstrations such as the protest for Cameron’s resignation no longer rely on the medium of television to be shared, and can instead find its home on social media. What perplexes me is that there is still some journalism which hasn’t cottoned on to the fact that by failing to report such things, public outcry will later follow, painting their own news stations and papers in grim light and reinforcing the idea that the public is controlled through a silent censorship of what makes it into the news which they digest, and take for fact. If journalists do not report on such events, then the people will, and the people are all the more likely to bias things, leave facts out and tarnish the reputation of news resources.

But then, news resources often tarnish themselves. Whilst doing some research for this blog post, I used The Independent’s article as a resource to find out how many people were estimated to have gathered in protest on Saturday. For further frames of reference, I turned to other news sites, and only then discovered through The Mirror’s article that what I had previously understood to be a peaceful protest had apparently descended into violence. I’m no fool; I know that each paper has an ulterior motive, and whilst one will focus on the ignored activism, the other will focus on alleged barbarism.

I’ve said it before on this blog, and I’ll say it again. No matter what ‘wing’ you swing for, if you skew the facts with your bias, you are misrepresenting true events. Journalism should, in my opinion, be an objective tool which is used to present unbiased facts to the public, who can then make their own informed opinions about what’s right and what’s wrong. You may argue that it is impossible not to use a certain level of bias, and perhaps that’s true… but for The Independent to completely omit the fact that some level of violence took place within the protest is almost akin to a lie.

(Quick addition: I do not endorse any particular newspaper in this blog post.)

And let’s not forget where this blog post all started – with BBC News completely omitting the notion of any public unrest taking place on Saturday. The only reason I can think of for them to do this would be so as not to encourage more people to go and join the protest whilst it was still underway, lest it become an unwieldy mob. But it’s been days since this event took place, and there’s still no word from the BBC about it. It’s frighteningly reminiscent of the history lessons in which I learned about how censorship was enforced in societies of old, as a tool to keep the lower class in check.

Democracy is, in theory, supposed to be a solution to give the people a say in the way their lives are allowed to be lived. But as long as we are being manipulated by news resources with an ulterior motive, we cannot look through the manipulation of our government, cannot make an informed decision on the next, and therefore cannot prosper as a society.