Murdoch's London Times Disgraceful Cartoon

[Guest fountainhall]

I regret this merits a new thread, for it represents a disgustingly foul new low for Murdoch's British news empire - in of all newspapers, the mighty Times. And it comes just after Murdoch talked about the appearance before the parliamentary committee as "the worst day of his life."

 

As we all know from the dreadful and horrific reports on TV, the drought in Somalia is the worst for many, many years. Readers of The Times would expect it to be treated with dignity, sympathy and sincerity, at the very least. So what does Murdoch's editor do? He prints a cartoon that shows some starving Africans, one with a bloated belly and a bubble caption reading: "I've had a bellyful of phone-hacking . . ."

 

How any self-respecting individual could stoop so low and be so utterly insensitive, uncaring and bloody-minded is absolutely beyond belief. I hope the outcry worldwide will now greatly increase the pressure on this evil old man.

[Guest]

I bet all their journalists have their snouts in the trough looking for another big story to divert the media pack onto.

 

They all lose interest when the next story comes along.

[KhorTose]

I remember the first time Michael Jackson was busted for child molestation. Right away, after buying off his accuser, he made a song called "They really don't care about us" were he said the system was no good, and how so many were persecuted. Among the lines was this:

 

Tell me what has become of my life

I have a wife and two children who love me

I am the victim of police brutality, now

I'm tired of bein' the victim of hate

You're rapin' me off my pride

Oh, for God's sake

I look to heaven to fulfill its prophecy...

Set me free

 

I remember thinking at the time, that this is what a guilty man would do, In many ways that cartoon of Murdochs gives me the same feeling.

[Rogie]

It's very easy for journalist's to get all indignant from the comfort of their office, but I found this article fair and balanced. Andrew O'Hagan, writing in Britain's Guardian newspaper recently:

 

But the last week has shone a light into the empty places of our conscience. With the hacking scandal, we can name the guilty parties and make a hoopla of doing so, but I ask the millions who read those papers and fed those empires and lapped up stories about dead little girls where they really stand in their moral crusade. And does it extend at all to the dead and dying little girls of Africa?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/22/no-stomach-starvation

 

The article refers to something called Plumpy'nut; not familiar with it I looked it up (using a link conveniently provided in the above article):

 

Inspired by the popular Nutella spread,Plumpy'nut is a high-protein, high-energy, peanut-based paste in a foil wrapper. It is categorized by the WHO as a Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF).

 

Plumpy’nut requires no water, preparation, or refrigeration and has a 2 year shelf life, making it easy to deploy in difficult conditions to treat severe acute malnutrition. It is distributed under medical supervision, predominantly to parents of malnourished children where the nutritional status of the children is compromised. It is manufactured by Nutriset, a French company based in Rouen for use by humanitarian organizations for food aid distribution.

 

The ingredients are peanut paste, vegetable oil, powdered milk, powdered sugar, vitamins, and minerals, combined in a foil pouch. It tastes slightly sweeter than peanut butter. Each 92g pack provides 500 kcal or 2.1 MJ.

 

Plumpy'nut contains vitamins A, B-complex, C, D, E, and K, and minerals calcium, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, zinc, copper, iron, iodine, sodium, and selenium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumpy%27nut

_______________________________________________________

 

Not to invite comparison in any way to the plight of children in East Africa, but I was surprised to come across this article detailing a rise in cases of rickets in parts of Britain:

 

Cases of the crippling children's bone disease rickets are being seen in Cardiff, BBC Wales has learned.

 

Caused by a lack of vitamin D, the disease can lead to deformities like bowed legs and stunted growth, but it largely disappeared last century."We're still seeing rickets in children in Cardiff in the 21st Century - which a lot of people might be very shocked and surprised by, thinking of it as a Victorian illness. But no, it's not.

 

"You get women living in certain communities that perhaps don't go out much because of religious, cultural traditions. They're covered up when they do. They don't get enough access to sunlight. So they get vitamin D deficient."

 

"Every pregnancy, you use up your vitamin D stores and if you're not making enough to replenish them, you gradually get more and more depleted. By your third or fourth child, that child is born already without enough vitamin D. So they'll be presenting with rickets at around 18 months."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-14256950

[Guest fountainhall]

It's very easy for journalist's to get all indignant from the comfort of their office, but I found this article fair and balanced.

Fair, balanced and an accurate summation of the world's priorities and short-term attention span. But there is, I believe, a slight flaw in the writer's argument.

 

I found these two paragraphs especially thought-provoking -

 

This week, while the famine was happening, every media outlet in the western world devoted itself to the circus surrounding a gang of communications reprobates. Public outrage over News International is justified, of course, and the abuse suffered by the family of a murdered girl cannot go unheeded. There can be no hierarchy of moral outrages, and the wrong done to Milly Dowler and her family and dozens of other victims should be its own category. But must it chase the possible death of 500,000 children off the front pages? We don't have to find the Murdochs acceptable in order to find the famine intolerable, but it is no category error to think of them at the same time.

 

We are each of us children of many things, and one of the things I'm a child of is Live Aid. I was 17 in 1985. We had our arguments with it, but there was no doubting the sudden power of that idea, pushed hard by Bob Geldof, that our lives were bankrupt in the face of third world suffering. It didn't make every pleasure a guilty pleasure, but it made a generation aware that there was a price to be paid for its satisfactions. Yet it is now obvious that this was a realisation we failed to make permanent. Too many of our own children don't know where Somalia is and they don't care, so long as the stories of celebrities and their misdoings can continue to upholster their privilege and entitlement, a world beyond right or wrong.

I am particularly struck by the sentence "our lives were bankrupt in the face of third world suffering." I generally don't give a damn about who David Beckham's sleeping with on the side, or why someone's engagement is off. So the tittle-tattle of tabloid gossip is merely of passing interest to me - if at all. But like millions I was affected by Live Aid. Why was I affected? Because a pop star had started a movement to actually do something? I don’t think so. Surely the real reason we were all affected was because for the first time in our lives we were actually seeing the suffering, the squalor, the bloated bodies, the flies, the very stench of miserable, unnecessary death on such a massive scale as we sat in our own comfortable homes.

 

Surely it was not the print media that rammed this home to us? It was television. It was those ‘live’ moving pictures of what was happening in real time that hit our minds and our hearts and made us feel the ghastly effects of famine on the human family. In exactly the same way that it was television which turned the tide of the war in Vietnam. The print media just cannot convey that immediacy.

 

The same remains true today. But I think with one caveat. With each repeat of the same disaster, there is a trigger in our brains which seems to lessen the guilt and the shame we felt first time around. I made contributions to the Asian tsunami appeal, to the Pakistan and Sichuan earthquake appeals, and more recently to the Japan disaster relief appeals. These were cataclysmic events that killed tens of thousands made shockingly real on our ever larger TV screens. But with the horrible famine in Somalia – the worst in 50 years, it seems – is there not another trigger that tells us in the crudest and unkindest terms – "Oops, been there, done that"? No matter how dreadful, the world has a craving for something new – “news”.

 

This, of course, is no excuse for inaction on our parts. But it does perhaps explain why it is right that the print media devotes more of its time to those “news” items which cannot be so effectively dealt with by television. We were riveted to the DSK case mostly because of the drip-drip-drip of revelations in the print media. We are riveted by the Murdoch case because he is one of the all-powerful, a man millions loathe. We WANT to see him brought down and the detail of the case is far too complex for television alone. This story cries out for the print media, a media he with a strange irony helped embolden.