Start of an occasinoal series of posts about how journalism seems to work in the 21st Century. Inspired in no little part by Private Eye, Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe and Anton Vowl’s Enemies of reason.
BBC News provides an RSS feed so that readers can stay up to date with their stories. All well and good. But very often the short link title is very different to the published headline and both are often different to the actual content of the article.
Take the following story:
Pupils forced to listen to Mozart
So the article’s lead paragraph heavily implies that playing classical music is a more effective deterrent to classroom disruption than not playing it, yet the actual article doesn’t back this up in the slightest. An executive summary of the article might more accurately be
Excentric headteacher with an obsession with William Blake poetry has slightly new idea for discipline at his school.
The RSS link title is even more misleading -
‘How Mozart is the ultimate deterrent for naughty pupils’
‘Ultimate deterrent’! ‘ULTIMATE’! ‘DETERRENT’! That means it’s the bee’s knees, the dog’s bollocks of ‘deterrents’. But notice how both quoted words are never vindicated in the actual answer; there’s no mention of any other forms of discipline for comparison, not even by inference. We’re not told that this school has found a marked improvement in classroom behviour, nor is the school compared to similar schools with a different discipline policy.
There’s also no concrete evidence to back-up the ‘deterrent’ angle. We can I’m sure agree that the style of discipline is unusual and seems well thought out and, actually, quite a good idea (I think the aim of making detention a way to try to instill the joy of learning is an extremely admirable one) – but it can only be a ‘deterrent’ if it has been shown to actively make kids more reluctant to risk a trip to detention. This, of course, is what the BBC is trying to make us think in the way the article is couched. We’re supposed to imagine these kids so abhored at the idea of listening to Classical music (to rhyme with ear-rape) that they’ll do anything to avoid the horror of The Magic Flute, even if it means behaving in class!
But there is nothing in the artical that suggests anything of the kind. No statistics of ‘repeat offenders’ as we might call them, showing how the figure has gone down since the introduction of the policy, no soundbites from pupils saying how they ‘hate dis classical shit, innit?’. Nothing. As I said, you could replace the entire article with one sentence:
Excentric headteacher with an obsession with William Blake poetry has slightly new idea for discipline at his school.