- Matt Morris
- 11 Dec 06, 04:07 PM
When someone's been murdered, does it matter what they did for a living?
Many people have contacted 大象传媒 News to complain that we have made a point of describing as "prostitutes". The problem must be the description, and not the language. At least once on Five Live we referred to the women as "sex workers". This euphemism hardly rebuts the basic complaint, expressed succinctly in one text message we received - "just call them women".
The complaint took two forms - we wouldn't bother to report that a murder victim was, say, a plumber, and when we report that the victim was a prostitute we are being judgemental and implying that her life was less worthy than another's. In the end I don't think either of these points bears much scrutiny. It all comes down to reporting the relevant facts.
In this case, the fact that the women were prostitutes was crucially relevant. It suggests, if nothing else, that prostitution is a dangerous way to earn a living and that a prostitute is more likely than most people to meet a murderer. That has to be the starting point of the police inquiry. The assistant chief constable of Suffolk has urged prostitutes in the area to stay off the streets.
And implying that a prostitute's life is less worthy than another's? We protect ourselves from that accusation partly by neutral, impartial presentation of the facts. OK, but sometimes people have an emotional response to the news however it is framed. That means there should be careful scrutiny of headlines and scripts to avoid the unnecessary use of emotive words such as "prostitute".
It also means asking the type of questions asked on Five Live this morning - i.e. when a prostitute is murdered, do the police devote as much time to the inquiry as they would to any other murder?
Matt Morris is head of news, Radio Five Live
- Steve Herrmann
- 11 Dec 06, 03:32 PM
What should do to communicate better with its 459 million people?
I was at a meeting last week where the European Commission invited editors and reporters from media organisations around Europe to give their views on this as part of .
We volunteered some practical and fairly uncontroversial suggestions about how EU institutions can best get their day-to-day messages across, such as ensuring officials at all levels are equipped to respond promptly to media interest and questions, using the potential of the web to fuller effect, making sure there鈥檚 good forward planning for information about big events.
There was criticism of some media coverage of EU affairs as superficial or one-sided. The journalists countered that their role was to hold the EU to account rather than simply convey its messages. There did seem to be a general recognition that journalists often don鈥檛 do enough to explain what the EU actually does and in fact sometimes don鈥檛 know enough themselves to report on it confidently. (It was in recognition of this that the 大象传媒 last year put its news journalists through a short online training course on reporting the EU).
Margot Wallstr枚m, the Commission Vice-President, who hosted the meeting, spoke lucidly about the need for transparency and openness at all levels of the EU and the right of citizens to be informed and to have a say. (Perhaps to encourage others along these lines, she runs ).
That all seemed entirely sensible. But there was a wider issue lurking behind the discussions, which is whether Europe鈥檚 people feel a sense of real connection with the EU and its workings and if not, why not, given that its institutions are acting in their name. That is a harder one to tackle.
Steve Herrmann is editor of the
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