Post by kayevcee on Apr 4, 2013 18:17:07 GMT
I don't want to distract from the ongoing Welfare Changes thread, so I'm starting this separately. For those of you lucky people who didn't see yesterday's Daily Mail, the front page was not a pretty sight.
Additional articles on the same subject were no more kind. Basically, the Mail and Sun yesterday took it upon themselves to hold up the appalling case of Mick Philpott and his harem of terrified women as an example of the widespread failure of the welfare state, and implies that there are "tens of thousands" of such families out there and basically uses the whole horrendous affair as a new excuse for their passionate hatred of the disabled, unemployed and working poor.
Perhaps even more troubling, George Osborne seems keen to go down the same path- when someone in Derby today asked him whether the Philpotts were, as the papers implied, a product of the benefit system (as if Mick Philpott would be another productive member of society if child tax credits were less generous) he responded by saying "It's right we ask questions as a Government, a society and as taxpayers, why we are subsidising lifestyles like these. It does need to be handled." Lifestyles like these. Like there's an army of Mick Philpotts out there living up to every malicious stereotype in the book.
We've seen some pretty awful stereotyping and misrepresentation from the rags in this country over the years, but this is crossing a line. Zoe Williams of the Guardian recommended contacting the Press Complaints Commission to voice your objection to this tide of harassment and lies.
I've just gone to their site and registered a complaint myself. You can get to the site via the Guardian article above, or go here. I'm not 100% positive that any part of these articles breaches specific sections of the Editors' Code of Practice. However, I had a go anyway.
In the "which specific section are you complaining under" section, I wrote:
"Section 1 part i)
An argument could be made that the article also breaches section 4 and section 12 part i). Although section 12 i) does not specifically bar discrimination on the basis of financial status, the article does breach the spirit of the section by implying moral equivalence between an undisclosed number (though assumed by the writer to be in the "tens of thousands") of recipients of any form of government assistance and the extreme living conditions of the Philpott family."
If anyone else wants to chip in, it's probably best to use your own words to explain how you think the CoC has been breached.
-Nick
Additional articles on the same subject were no more kind. Basically, the Mail and Sun yesterday took it upon themselves to hold up the appalling case of Mick Philpott and his harem of terrified women as an example of the widespread failure of the welfare state, and implies that there are "tens of thousands" of such families out there and basically uses the whole horrendous affair as a new excuse for their passionate hatred of the disabled, unemployed and working poor.
Perhaps even more troubling, George Osborne seems keen to go down the same path- when someone in Derby today asked him whether the Philpotts were, as the papers implied, a product of the benefit system (as if Mick Philpott would be another productive member of society if child tax credits were less generous) he responded by saying "It's right we ask questions as a Government, a society and as taxpayers, why we are subsidising lifestyles like these. It does need to be handled." Lifestyles like these. Like there's an army of Mick Philpotts out there living up to every malicious stereotype in the book.
We've seen some pretty awful stereotyping and misrepresentation from the rags in this country over the years, but this is crossing a line. Zoe Williams of the Guardian recommended contacting the Press Complaints Commission to voice your objection to this tide of harassment and lies.
I've just gone to their site and registered a complaint myself. You can get to the site via the Guardian article above, or go here. I'm not 100% positive that any part of these articles breaches specific sections of the Editors' Code of Practice. However, I had a go anyway.
In the "which specific section are you complaining under" section, I wrote:
"Section 1 part i)
An argument could be made that the article also breaches section 4 and section 12 part i). Although section 12 i) does not specifically bar discrimination on the basis of financial status, the article does breach the spirit of the section by implying moral equivalence between an undisclosed number (though assumed by the writer to be in the "tens of thousands") of recipients of any form of government assistance and the extreme living conditions of the Philpott family."
If anyone else wants to chip in, it's probably best to use your own words to explain how you think the CoC has been breached.
-Nick
