Chapter Four (continued)
Interesting, Amusing, Depressing and Gross Conversation Over Another Long Lunch Break

(To recap: The previous page ended with one student talking about such things as politicians sending people to war.)

Becky Tells The Others What She's Learned About Bias in the Media, and Then Talks About Funny Interview Clips She's Heard

"You know, I don't fancy my dinner any more!" said Becky, pushing it away from her a bit. But then she said, "Actually, I've read a bit about how news can sometimes be not quite what it seems on my media studies course, about bias in the media. I can't remember everything I'm supposed to have learned, but I know that sometimes the questions reporters ask can make a big difference to the way a conversation goes, and they can ask questions that show up what kind of biases they have in their thinking if people can spot them:

"Like if a reporter's interviewing a union leader whose union's on strike, they can ask them questions all about whether they think it's fair to be causing trouble and inconvenience for the public, but not one question about the reasons they feel they've been treated unfairly enough that they want to go on strike. So things like that can do a lot to determine the way a lot of the public thinks about things.

"Or if they want to broadcast a news story about, say, a load of people trying to get into this country illegally, they'll choose what point of view to cover it from, but people listening won't realise they've done that, but they'll think they're just getting the facts of the matter.

"So if they cover it from one perspective, the news might be all about how the numbers of people trying to get into this country illegally is increasing, and that it's causing a real problem for the authorities who are trying to keep them out, and a burden on the health service because a lot of the ones who are allowed in have got things wrong with them.

"But if they're covering it from another point of view, they could mention those things briefly, but say a lot more about the tragic situations a lot of the people who want to come here are escaping from. They might interview some about the reasons they wanted to leave and how they're hoping for better lives. Perhaps people will hear that most are trying to escape war zones or hunger and disease. They might talk about how much their children suffered in the countries they came from, and how they'd like them to grow up having a decent education, so they can have the same advantages people in richer countries take for granted. They might tell their personal stories about how their health has suffered, and how they're glad they can be treated here.

"Another thing is that any news that covers things just from the point of view of the problems that might be caused by immigration might make a distinction between refugees and what it calls 'economic migrants', when there might often not be as much of a distinction as all that, because people in the category of economic migrants could range from people just out to make their fortunes, to people wanting a better life because there's massive unemployment in their countries, so they can't better themselves at home and give their families a good education, and they're often on the brink of starvation. But you might never find that out if the news you read only reports things from the point of view of people who say they're worried about the number of immigrants who want to come here. Really, it's only fair to report both sides.

"If news broadcasters don't report every side of a story, it'll partly be to do with time limits, since they just won't have the time to broadcast everything they could. But it still might be more one-sided than it needs to be.

"The wording on the news could even be different so it gives a different impression; sympathetic news coverage could call some people who are trying to come here refugees, which will remind people every time they hear it that they're trying to escape something bad; but if it's less sympathetic, it might just call them migrants, which won't.

"If some people just hear about the problems the authorities are having trying to keep people like that out of the country, and about the extra burden on the health service from new sick people coming here, they might be angry, and shout about how terrible it is that so many people are trying to come here, maybe suggesting the army ought to be brought in to stop them getting in.

"But if those exact same people hear the sympathetic news coverage instead, about just who these people are and what terrible situations a lot of them are trying to escape from, and how they're unhappy that their health has suffered, they might have completely different attitudes. The very same people who would otherwise be yelling about how these people ought to be kept out more forcefully might be saying, 'Poor things! What terrible lives they must have had! Something has to be done to help them!'"

The students were thoughtful for a few seconds. Then one asked Becky, "Do they play you news clips on your media studies course where you have to tell them if you can spot any biases in them?"

Becky said, "We've done a bit of that. Actually, they played us some funny news clips when we first went on the course, where people were being interviewed. They told us they were examples of how Not to do things. But I think they mainly played them to give us a bit of a laugh.

"There was one from the early 1960s, where someone who was about to become the president of a country in Africa was interviewed by someone at the BBC, and he refused to answer any of the interviewer's questions; he kept saying things like, 'I won't tell you that'. At the end the interviewer asked him if he was going to tell him anything, and he said, 'Nothing!' It was funny! It wasn't as if the questions were obviously designed to make him reveal something he'd have wanted to hide or anything; they were things like, 'In which way is your mind working?' and 'Why have you just been to Portugal?'

"Another clip they played us was of a man in charge of health services in a part of Canada, who was being asked questions by journalists because it had run out of beds for seriously ill patients and there were long waiting lists, and they were trying to ask him about that but he was eating, and whatever they tried to ask him, he said he wasn't going to answer because he was eating his cookie. He walked off and they followed him, but still he kept repeating over and over again that he wasn't going to answer them because he was eating his cookie. He got sacked for that. It was a funny interview though."

One student said, "So he got sacked for fluffing a media interview, but not for running a health service that was failing some patients badly? Strange!"

"That's a point," said Becky. "But maybe that wasn't all his fault. Actually he might have been sacked because his refusal to stop eating and answer questions might have given some people the impression that he cared more about his cookie than he did about the bad conditions in the health service. I'd have thought the actual bad conditions might have given some people a stronger impression that he didn't care, but still! Who knows the way these bosses think!

"Anyway, we were asked to suggest ways he could have handled the interview better, like saying, 'I'm going to do my best to improve the health service. I care about the bad conditions and I'll explain some more in the press conference we'll all be attending in half an hour. Right now this is the first break I've had all day so I'd like to relax and get my thoughts together for a little while, but I look forward to speaking to you then.'

"There was going to be a press conference in a mere half hour, so really, the reporters could have waited!"

The Students Talk and Joke About How Good News is Hardly Ever Reported, and One Tells a Funny Story About a Charity Event At Her School

One student said, "News reporters seem to just love to run after bad news, just for the sake of it. There are a lot of efforts going on to try to make the world a better place, but we almost never hear about them on the news.

"It was funny once when I was at school: One girl decided to organise a sale of old magazines and things, just a little thing really. Some of her friends helped, and it made about twenty pounds - not much, but not bad at all considering all they were selling was old magazines and things, and the people buying them were all school kids. They wanted to give the money to a charity that helps people in developing countries.

"After the sale, a few people helped count the money, and they added up the amount each one had and put the total together. The girl whose idea the sale was might have put just a little bit extra in it to make it up to what she thought was exactly twenty pounds - I can't quite remember.

"But anyway, she gave it to the short-tempered maths teacher, who had contacts with the charity so she said she'd give the money to them.

"A few days later, the maths teacher put on her dragon outfit and came huffing and puffing into the school hall where they were all sat down. ... Well OK, she didn't really have a dragon outfit. But she went up to the girl who'd had the idea to have this sale and had a go at her, not giving her a word of praise for having held the sale at all, but sternly telling her she'd given her thirteen pence less than she'd said she had. But she said she'd made up the full twenty pounds out of her own money before giving it to the charity.

"The amusing thing was that a while later, the girl got a letter from the charity, saying, 'Thank you for the twenty pounds and six pence you sent us.' It seems the maths teacher who'd criticised her couldn't count properly either!"

The students giggled.

Then one said with a smile, "There must be lots of charity events going on, but you hardly ever hear about things like that on the news, do you; I wonder if there's a written policy somewhere, that they'd be ashamed to show outsiders but that exists in a locked drawer somewhere and gets shown to all new people who've come to work in news rooms, that says, 'Good news is Not news. You will Not report on charity events or other encouraging things unless they're very popular, so people would wonder why you weren't doing it if you didn't!'"

The other students grinned.

Then one said, "Yeah! I've listened to quite a lot of news bulletins on the BBC World Service. But I've been put off listening to those, and the news on other radio stations, because they seem to just want to fill them with as much gore as they can, for no good reason I can work out. But there are some things I've noticed with listening to quite a few of them:

"One is that they often don't seem to put stories in order of their real importance. I mean, say if there's a story about how a scandal's broken because a lap dancer's just revealed in a magazine that she had an affair with the current American president when he was just a minor politician in 1992, and the president's angrily denying it, it'll probably be the top headline, ahead of stories about things like a civil war that's been raging for decades ending in Africa, forty people in the slums of Indonesia being killed by a bomb, Canada being wiped out by a freak mega-hurricane, ... well allright, maybe that would take first place, because it would be so unusual - I mean, it can't be every day that Canada's wiped out by a freak mega-hurricane! ... But you know what I mean; it seems it's not what's important that matters most on the news, but maybe what some news committee think will titillate certain kinds of people who they'd just love to listen more so it would increase the ratings. I don't know; but I do wonder!

"Anyway, when something like the American president's former sex life's the top headline, I tend to think, 'Well if that's the most important thing going on in the world at the moment, we can all sleep safely in our beds tonight; there's obviously nothing on the news we need to worry about', and I quickly turn it off.

"And another thing is that I've noticed they seem to have pet obsessions for months in a row with certain parts of the world that they keep reporting on again and again, while other parts of the world seem to be just ignored. So, for example, you might get an unusual number of stories about things going on in South America for a while, for no reason you can work out; and then you might start thinking, 'I haven't heard anything about Australia for ages! I wonder if they've just forgotten it exists! Or maybe nothing's going on there at all. Wow, a whole continent with nothing at all going on! I wonder if all Australians just lie in bed all day doing nothing, except their cricket team, who maybe manage to haul themselves up sometimes to travel to other countries for a leisurely few days playing what passes for sport in some people's minds. Or could Australia have fallen off the world somehow? Maybe it did it so slowly it wasn't dramatic enough to make the news.'

"But that's the kind of thing some news broadcasters do - ignoring certain parts of the world altogether for a while, it seems to me.

"Or it's as if similar things going on in different parts of the world are thought to have different amounts of importance; for example, you might hear about a suicide bombing somewhere in the world, and assume there must have just been one explosion in the whole world that day, only to find out weeks later that for the past few weeks, there's been a whole series of bomb blasts in some war zone in some little country in Africa that have harmed hundreds of civilians, but it just hasn't made the headlines before, as far as you know. ... Mind you, it's not as if I listen to the news often enough that I could be sure things didn't make the headlines at all in a day!

"But as well as that, so much of the news is about death and serious crime, you get the impression that that's all that matters in the world to the people putting the news together! And because the news doesn't seem to contain much variety of things, just murders, and interest rate rises, and more murders, and politicians saying ignorant things, and then more murders, and so on, it makes me wonder if the people who gather news to go in the bulletins just skim-read what's coming in from their reporters, looking for words like 'murder' and 'death', and they just automatically disregard anything less dramatic, unless it's about interest rates, or politicians being boring.

"Maybe it's as if words like 'killing' jump out at them when they're practised at skim-reading the reports; and maybe they even feel glee every time they find one, and the more they find the better they feel, because they need to find them quickly because of time pressure, because they've never got that long to put each news bulletin together; so if lots of horrible crimes have been committed in a certain day, maybe they'll be especially pleased. Maybe when they're looking through the reports coming into the newsroom, they think excitedly, 'Murder! Yes! ... A ferry accident! Yes!' And that kind of thing.

"And if they can't find enough nasty stories of global importance to fill up a whole bulletin, maybe they start looking at particular countries to see if they can find ones there. I mean, just to give an example, I heard a story one day on the news on the BBC World Service about a theatre director in South Korea who'd been charged with quite a few sex crimes. Well, they must have been tragic for the victims, of course; but surely they weren't really of importance to the entire world! So what was the point of telling us about them, if it wasn't just to fit more stuff about crime into the news?

"So it really does seem as if they're not trying to find the stories of most importance for the world, but picking out stories they think are suitably sensational or something! I mean, maybe it's not like that at all. Maybe people who put the news together aren't happy when they find stories about murders and things. But you'd have thought anyone who got upset by things on the news wouldn't be able to tolerate doing the job, so they wouldn't do one like that, or else they'd try, but soon get so depressed, they couldn't bring themselves to haul themselves out of bed and go in to work! Imagine if no one came in to put the news together one day, and everyone tuning in to the news heard the newsreader announce, 'There's no news today!'

"But maybe if people who put the news bulletins together are just skim-reading for words like 'murder', if something good happens, say if a local church has raised half a million pounds for a children's charity that's got a good reputation, they either won't notice it, or they will, but they'll quickly reject it as not newsworthy and move on."

One of the other students grinned and said, "A local church raising half a million pounds? Hang on, local churches raise money by doing things like bring and buy sales and cake sales. Imagine how expensive the cakes would have to be if they raised half a million pounds from one of those! Imagine someone announcing, 'Come and buy a Christmas cake! It's two thousand pounds, but I promise you it's really worth it! It's got extra fruit and all!'

"Really, if a thing like that happened, where they actually did manage to raise half a million pounds, it would be such a novelty, you'd actually get reporters flocking to the place to find out about it!"

The student who'd been complaining about news bulletins grinned and said, "Well that's true. Yeah, OK. But you know what I mean.

"And news broadcasters don't seem to have the slightest bit of interest in telling us things that are actually relevant to our lives or helpful most of the time; it's almost as if they might read a news story coming in from their reporters and think, 'No, we can't have that one! It would be very useful for a lot of people to know it, but it's got absolutely no shock value whatsoever! We'll have this one about a little girl in Pakistan being strung upside-down from a bridge instead!'"

Another student said, "I don't like the news either! I remember I used to listen to a local radio station when I was getting ready to go out in the mornings, and there were a couple of DJ's who used to chat and play music, and one in particular was fun to listen to because she was cheerful and humorous; but all their efforts to cheer us up were just about wasted if we were listening when it was time for the news every hour, because it would always be depressing, telling us about the most serious crimes in the area recently, and that kind of thing!

"Wouldn't it be good if the news was optional, you know, like if at the top of every hour, an announcer would say, 'The news is on in a minute for those who want to hear it. For those who'd rather not, press the pink button, and you can hear a clip from an award-winning classic comedy programme instead.'

"Or maybe there could be several buttons on the radio, one for science and technology news that anyone interested could hear instead of the gory news, and one for stories of genuine global importance, and one for tittle-tattle about celebrities, and that kind of thing. I wonder how many people would still want to listen to the news if they were being given options like that! Maybe only people who couldn't get to their radios in time, or who were too lazy to bother, would end up hearing it."

Another one of the group said, "The only reason I ever listen to the news is because I'm wondering if any major disasters have happened, like earthquakes that have killed lots of people, or if the end of the world's getting closer; so I want to be warned if it is! I wish I didn't feel as if I had to listen sometimes! But with our politicians, you just never know how close the end of the world might be getting! Actually, I think it would be good if every part of the country had 'end of the world alarms' in it, and if it was thought that the end of the world was getting closer, the alarms could be set off, and that would be everyone's signal to listen to the news, because something they might really need to know was on, so they wouldn't feel as if they had to listen to it the rest of the time if they didn't want to.

"Mind you, maybe one day, there would be an argument between the presidents of America and Russia, and a lot of people might be at work when it was happening, and they might hear the alarm, and wonder what was wrong, and decide to listen to the news later; but by the time they did, maybe the presidents would have made up, and the argument would have gone right out of the headlines, so they might be puzzling over which story meant the world was getting closer to ending.

"So you know, say the first story on the news said, 'France has been brought to a halt today by a strike of all the train drivers in the country.' You might think, 'Well OK, so France is being brought to a stop; but could they really think that means it'll somehow make the whole world end?'

"And then the second news story might be, 'The queen is due to give a speech to parliament tomorrow.'

"You might think, 'Well queen's speeches have never made the world end before; what makes them think this one will? And how do they think it will make the world end? Do they think she'll say something so offensive about some other countries that they'll want to go to war with us, and it'll end in a world war? Then why don't they stop her?'

"And then the next news story might say, 'The Chinese economy is forecast to grow by 6 % this year, since industry there is booming!'

"You might think, 'Surely it isn't this story they think could lead to the end of the world? Do they somehow imagine the American president will get so jealous about it, he'll want to nuke China for it or something, so World War III will start?'

"And then maybe the next news story would say, 'A South African cult leader has been imprisoned for claiming to be God and defrauding his followers out of lots of money, by convincing them he could do miracles for them if they helped him take over the country.'

"You might think, 'What, do the news broadcasters really think he might be God, so they think he'll be so angry about being put in prison, he might end the world because of it?'

"And then the next story might say, 'A Broadway play about the Russian Revolution was interrupted today by a Russian couple who stood up and heckled the actors, telling them their attempts at Russian accents were appalling!'

"You might think, 'What, is the American government so insane and angry about that, they're threatening to nuke the whole of Russia and bring on World War III?'

"And then another news story might say, 'A tiger has escaped from a zoo in Norway, and it's still on the loose!'

"You might still be puzzling over which of the stories means the world's going to end soon, and you might think, 'Do these daft news broadcasters think the tiger's going to eat everyone one by one, and then swim all the oceans, going to all the continents and eating every single person on them, so human life on earth ends altogether?'

"And then there might be a story that says, 'A biscuit factory is closing in the north-west, with the loss of three thousand jobs!'

"You might think, 'Hang on, that might feel like the end of the world to biscuit lovers, but it doesn't mean it will be really!'

"And then the news might get to the last story, and say, 'South Korea has sent North Korea 200 tons of summer fruits as a goodwill offering.'

"You might still be wondering which story means the world's in danger of ending, and you might think, 'What, do the news broadcasters think that if a lot of the fruit turns out to be over-ripe and some of it's beginning to go rotten, the North Korean leaders will get so angry they'll go mad and nuke the world, or that if it's past its best and it's started fermenting, it'll get them drunk, and they might go crazy in their drunken state and nuke the world for fun or something?'

"And then the news might end, with you not having a clue which of those stories was the one that made the End of the World Alarm go off, or whether they quickly decided the world wasn't going to end after all, and the story went out of the headlines."

The students sniggered.

Becky Tells the Others About Ways Tabloid Newspapers Can Be Biased

Then Becky turned the conversation serious again for a while, by saying, "I think the news sources that report the most nasty stories, and the worst ones for bias as well, are probably the tabloid newspapers.

"I read that newspapers tend to report news from a particular angle, depending on what their owners believe; you know, like if their sympathies are with poorer people in the country, they'll be more likely to find out their points of view on things such as cuts in benefits and what it's like to work for low wages than they will if they're writing from the point of view of people who want to support the government and big business owners, in which case they'll be a lot more likely to give the impression with what they write that government decisions are good, and to feature the points of view of business owners who might say they find it hard to afford to pay higher wages to their workers, so people can end up sympathising entirely with them, because the points of view of the people who are actually having to live on the low wages they're paying aren't being reported.

"But anyway, I read that that's not the only reason people can get a one-sided impression of things; there are some newspapers where some of the reporting isn't of such a high quality as it is on some of the others, and some of it can actually be deceptive.

"I found out that there are certain papers that are often critical of certain categories of people in society, and sometimes they can actually give the impression that they're doing worse things than they really are. Maybe they do it to stir up anger and interest that'll make people want to keep buying more papers to find out the latest so it'll make them more money, I don't know. But that might be where a lot of some people's bad feeling towards immigrants and some other groups comes from, and why some people can end up having a one-sided view themselves."

One student smiled and said, "What, are you saying you think some people might be addicted to getting angry, and the people who write the papers will know that, so they know that if they keep annoying them, they'll keep wanting to buy more papers?"

The students chuckled. Becky grinned and said, "Who knows! But there must be some reason people keep buying them.

"Anyway, I don't know for sure, because I've never read those papers myself, but from what I've read, they can use quite a few tactics that can end up misleading people."

"Like what?" asked one student.

Becky said, "Well, I heard that one misleading thing some of them can do is to turn what isn't really a story worth reporting into something that sounds sensational, by leaving out certain facts that would make readers realise it isn't actually much to worry about, for most people, and by using headlines that exaggerate the problem .

"For instance, I heard about one article that made it sound as if immigrants were committing a lot of crimes; it gave the crime statistics, and there did seem to be a lot. The headline and sub-header used phrases like, 'shocking figures' and 'crime wave', and said the crimes included child abuse, and things like that. So it made it sound as if there was a major problem. But apparently, somewhere near the end of the article, it revealed that almost all the offences were nothing to do with child abuse but were very minor ones, like not following the proper immigration procedures, such as by not turning up for a medical test they were supposed to attend, not producing their documents when they were asked to, and working when they weren't supposed to because the law says asylum seekers aren't allowed to work while their asylum request is being considered. Less than a dozen of the crimes in the statistics were the kind of crimes that anyone needed to be worried about.

"But anyone who didn't read the article to the end wouldn't have known that. And then some websites reported the story, but didn't say that most of the crimes were very minor; and some even said that all the crimes were of the worst kind."

One student said, "That's bad! I wonder why some people who own papers want them to do that kind of thing, and why some people want to keep reading that kind of stuff! Do you know, I heard that before toilet paper was invented, people used to use bits of newspaper instead; someone would tear a newspaper up into little squares, make a hole in each of them, and hang them on a hook in the toilet. At least, that's how things were sometimes done, from what I've heard. It sounds as if that would be a fitting fate for some papers!"

The students giggled, and one said, "Hey, imagine if in the loo in the House of Commons before toilet paper was invented, some of the bits of newspaper they used had pictures of the prime minister on them, and everyone avoided using those because they thought it would be disrespectful, till the only ones left were the ones with his picture on. Imagine him going to the loo day after day after that for days, only finding pictures of himself to use, and saying to himself, 'Oh no, not again! Oh well, I suppose the only thing to do is to wipe my bottom with a picture of myself again!'"

The students laughed.

But then Becky said, "The thing is though, I don't know what kind of percentage of articles in a tabloid newspaper tend to be sensationalised or whatever, and what kind of percentage will be decent articles that are well worth reading. For all I know, it might only be a small minority of their articles that are seriously biased or whatever. I just think that if people read or hear something in the media, and they suspect it might be sensationalised, or that they're only getting one side of the story, or an exaggerated version of it, or something like that, they just look for information from other places about the subject as well, if they're interested in it, to try and get a fuller understanding of it."

Then one student asked, "What else have you heard about tabloid newspapers being biased though?"

Becky said, "Well, from what I've heard, another thing is that sometimes a paper will be biased in its reporting of the statistics in a story it reports on, and it won't give a full enough impression of what the story really is for anyone to get a proper understanding of it; for instance, if there's a survey that finds that most people who were questioned in some big cities said they were happy with their lives, but there's one or two things a paper can turn into something that sounds bad, it seems they often will, from what I've heard, hardly saying a thing about how the story's mainly good.

"Or they might report it in such a way as to make more of something in it than it should, so people might think the thing is more of a problem than it really is. They might have a sensationalist headline, for instance, that says a lot of people are unhappy with immigrants living in their communities, when it turns out that what actually happened was that a survey was done that found that a minority of people said they weren't happy with them, and that most people didn't say that, but in answer to another survey question, they said the immigrants didn't integrate much into their communities, as if that has something to do with how happy they are, when it actually doesn't. But anyone who isn't really thinking about what they're reading might assume it must do, since the paper seems to be implying it does, because it starts talking about how a lot of people say immigrants aren't integrating after the headline that says a lot of people don't feel happy living in their cities.

"But when you think about it, sticking with that example, apart from the fact that people wouldn't necessarily have meant the thing about immigrants not integrating with everyone else to be a criticism, just a fact, so it would mean the paper might be interpreting the statistic as meaning there was a problem when the people who were asked the question might not have meant that, there's the question of how many people who said immigrants weren't integrating would actually even really know what they were talking about, because after all, unless you do a lot for your community and attend loads of events where you'd probably meet immigrants if they were integrating well, how will you know whether they are or not? Maybe a lot of people will have been asked the question out of the blue and had to think of an answer on the spur of the moment, so they would have answered before they really had time to think about it and make up their minds for sure.

"And the paper might be making a big deal out of nothing anyway, because surely immigrants not integrating will only cause a problem if there are ignorant and unhealthy beliefs in the immigrant communities about people from the country that's taken them in or about other things, that might cause problems if they don't change, or else if they refuse to learn the language but just expect everyone else to cope with theirs. If they've got nasty or silly beliefs, then integrating might mean they'll be more likely to be influenced by people who think differently, or they'll find out more about what the people around them are really like, so there bad old attitudes might fade away, so integrating would be important. But otherwise, it wouldn't necessarily matter much, I wouldn't have thought. And a lot of immigrant communities might not have bad attitudes.

"And also, say the immigrants are refugees trying to escape danger, who haven't even had time to learn the new language yet. How can they be expected to integrate, when it would mean being around people who spoke a language they didn't know, so it would be difficult? But it seems there are some papers that'll try and make a big deal of it if they can, so it might give the impression that it's causing a problem for everyone else. They'd probably take the opposite attitude if there was a story in the papers in some countries that people from this country were living in other countries but not integrating with the locals; they'd probably be asking how they could be expected to, when a lot of them wouldn't know the language, and when they'd naturally want to spend a lot of time around people they knew, eating food they'd always enjoyed, and so on.

"So it seems that sometimes when a newspaper reports something, they might have a double standard, or there's more to the story than you might think there is just from reading the article. ... Or les to it.

"And I've heard that some papers can report stories in such a way as to give the impression that a certain problem like a crime is more rampant in some communities than others, although they don't actually say so. They can just end up giving that impression, by, for instance, giving the statistics for the number of people from a particular country who've committed that particular offence recently, when there's a news story about one of them, but not revealing that actually, a similar number of people from this country have committed it too. I mean, there are some crimes that are much more common among people from some countries than others; but sometimes that impression can be given when it isn't really true.

"Or sometimes the media can do that kind of thing with a nicer story, but the reporting's not really all that much better, it seems to me, because instead of reporting on what would be most useful to hear, they go for something that sounds unusual or gimmicky, maybe in the hope that it'll just catch people's attention - that seems to me to be their priority sometimes. So an opportunity to make what they're doing more helpful to people gets missed."

"Full of the joys of spring, aren't you, Becky!" interrupted one student sarcastically.

Becky smiled and joked, "It would be inappropriate if I really was full of the joys of spring, considering it's winter. It would be like if summer finally arrived, and someone said, 'I'm going out to buy some new winter clothes to start wearing now.'"

The students grinned. One said, "It would be even dafter if you started wearing summer clothes now, when it's winter! Imagine it! You'd have to run around all day to try to avoid getting hypothermia! Still, I suppose it would be good training, say if you ever wanted to run a marathon or something!"

Another student chuckled and said, "Yeah! You'd have to run around the lecture halls all through your lectures, trying to concentrate on them at the same time as trying to run fast enough to keep warm. Imagine saying to the lecturers, 'Don't mind me. I'm just training to do a marathon ... I mean, training to avoid hypothermia ... I mean, trying to avoid hypothermia.'"

Another student grinned and said, "If you managed to keep that up all day, now that would be worth a news organisation reporting on!"

They all giggled.

Then Becky said, "Yeah, it probably would! But anyway, what I was saying was that I heard a radio programme that seemed to be going for novelty value or something like that instead of usefulness not long ago, when I was listening to the BBC World Service one morning while I was eating my breakfast before my mum drove me here. I expected it to have information in it that would be useful to some people, but I was disappointed, although that programme's usually good.

"They were reporting on problems for disabled people getting work that day. There was one report from India, about how most blind people couldn't get work; but then the report was all about just one new job opportunity that had been created for a small number of them, where blind people were employed sniffing perfume all day to see how good the quality was. But the report was strange, because it didn't explain what would happen if the blind people didn't think a perfume was very good - I mean, I can't really imagine a perfume company boss thinking, 'Oh well, half a dozen blind people have said this isn't very good; we'd better reformulate it and try again!' I mean, that just wouldn't happen, would it, surely! So the report left things a bit mysterious."

One student laughed and joked, "Well, perhaps the reporter had tried sniffing the perfume all day themselves, and maybe people do go a bit mysterious when they've been doing that all day!"

The students laughed, and one joked, "Yeah, that might be one side effect!"

Becky protested, "This report was supposed to be serious though! And I wasn't very keen on it, because it was saying that not many blind people are employed in India, and it was only focusing all the time on this perfume-smelling job, as if the reporter was thinking it was interesting because it was something where you had to use another sense entirely instead of sight, so blind people could do it, whereas if they'd wanted to make their report as useful as it could be, it might have said a bit about the perfume job, but also little things about much more common jobs blind people would easily be able to do, or could do with just a little bit of adjustment to the environment around them, trying to give employers and blind listeners new ideas about what could be tried, and reassuring employers that more might be possible than they thought.

"Actually, there were a couple of things about the report that made me laugh a bit though. One was that the reporter said, 'Blind people's sense of smell is superior to sighted people's.' I mean, I wouldn't have expected someone on a programme like that to say something that unscientific! I mean, how would that work! As if you could go blind, and then, as if by magic, suddenly you discover you can do something else better than you could before.

"Actually, I've heard a bit about this kind of thing, and blind people's other senses really can seem to work better than other people's, but what really happens is that if you can't see, you'll be trying harder to use your other senses a lot of the time so they'll help you pick up on things you wouldn't detect if you weren't concentrating on using them so much.

"For instance, you'll likely be listening out for things more as you walk around, because some things in the environment can give you clues as to where you are, say if you're near a stream, and you hear it babbling, or whatever streams are supposed to do, and most people who can see might walk towards it, not registering that it's making a noise till they're nearer it than the blind person is when they first hear it, because there's no real reason they should notice it, whereas for the blind person who's listening harder, it might be a clue to tell them they're getting near to somewhere they need to go, or a clue that there's a hazard there because they don't want to fall in the stream or something, so they might hear it sooner, because they're listening out for such things; and also they're not being distracted by all the things a sighted person would be able to see, so they'll be concentrating on what they're hearing more.

"Or the same could work with the sense of smell, if, say, the blind person's more alert to what smells are around, because they use them as landmarks, say if the smell of a coffee shop gives them a good clue that they're near the bus stop they need to stop and wait at to get their bus or something. But if a blind person's always in an environment where they've got no more cause to use their sense of smell or hearing than a sighted person has, there's no reason it would be automatically better.

"Mind you, it would be good if it was, wouldn't it! Imagine if bodies even grew extra bits to compensate for something that stopped working. So if you lost your eyesight, you might suddenly grow eyes in the back of your head, for example. Mind you, then you'd want to walk backwards everywhere. Or imagine if you lost a finger in an accident, but then ten more suddenly sprang up in its place. Or imagine if your tongue stopped working, and suddenly you might grow ten more overnight, maybe in unexpected parts of your body. Maybe you'd grow one on your hand, and it might look enough like a finger for people not to notice, so someone might shake your hand, and if the handshake was a bit hard, your hand might seem to say, 'Ouch! It's time you learned to shake hands more gently!'"

The students laughed, and one said, "That would give the person with the hard handshake a bit of a shock, wouldn't it!"

Becky said, "Yeah! And if the person who'd had their tongue damaged got it repaired, they might apologise with their original tongue. Then they'd have a job trying to explain what had happened, wouldn't they, with whichever tongue they'd chosen to explain it with, unless it was so common for people to grow extra bits of themselves that everyone knew that kind of thing happened. Mind you, I suppose it could be even worse for the person who grew the extra tongues if, say, they grew a couple on their feet. Imagine if the tongues had wills of their own, and they suddenly piped up sometimes, saying things like, 'Ugh, it's about time you changed your socks!' or, 'Come on, you've been sitting around for long enough; we're getting bored! It's time you did some exercise!'"

The students laughed again, and one said, "Imagine you were sitting with someone and your tongues started talking like that. If the person didn't know you had extra tongues, and they'd never heard of that kind of thing happening because it was so rare, they'd wonder what was going on, wouldn't they! How would you explain it? Imagine desperately trying to think of some excuse you could use so you could get out of telling them about your extra tongues and sounding like a weird freak!"

Another student said, "Yeah, if you told them you had tongues on your feet, they'd probably think you were getting all mysterious, like conspiracy theorist-type people who believe there are UFO's often flying above us and things."

Another student giggled and said, "Imagine saying to the person, 'I've got UFO's on my feet. It's them talking. If I were to take my shoes and socks off, the UFO's would start flying, and my feet would zoom up way into the air, pulling the rest of me with them, so I'd end up flying upside-down. I have to keep my shoes and socks on at night when I go to bed in case they do that. Actually I haven't taken them off for years. If you don't believe me, I could take them off now so you can have a look."

The students laughed again, and one grinned and said, "I bet no one would dare to take you up on the offer! I bet everyone would prefer to pretend they believed you than to risk you taking your shoes and socks off, only for them to find that it really was the first time you'd taken them off in years!"

They laughed again.

Then one student said, "The tabloids would just love a story about that kind of thing, wouldn't they! Can you imagine the headline? 'Cheesy Feet Man Claims to Have UFO's on His Feet'! Or, 'Sweaty Feet Man Hasn't Taken Shoes Off in Years!'"

The others laughed again.

But when the laughter died down, one said seriously, "Becky, tell us more about bias in tabloid newspapers."

Becky said, "Well, another thing I've heard that some newspapers can do is to stretch the truth, like saying that some famous person has connections to criminals, when it turns out that they just have a family member who they never speak to who's married to someone who was once put in prison for a minor offence or something. So what the paper says isn't downright wrong, but it's giving the impression that things are much worse than they really are.

"Some newspapers can distort the truth, from what I've heard, especially if they're talking about one of their favourite target groups for picking on; so they can make something that a lot of people would think was good if they knew the truth about it look like a real scandal, similar to what I said before. Only the most careful readers who read the article to the very end might eventually find out the truth, and realise that the rest of the article is making a sensation out of nothing.

"I heard about an example, where there was an article in a newspaper where the headline declared that a shocking amount of public money was being spent on giving immigrants treats like days out. I'd say that was bound to stir up resentment among people who, say, had to work really hard in jobs they didn't really like if they were going to be able to afford nice days out for their families. But the paper was being misleading, so they'd have got completely the wrong impression, unless they read right to the very end of the article, where they'd have found that the story was completely different from what they'd have got the impression it was about from the headline and first paragraphs of it.

"The paper called the money that was being spent on the immigrants public money, which gave the impression the scheme was a government scheme using tax payers' money; but actually it was money that members of the public had bought lottery tickets with, and some of the lottery money would always be given to charity, so it was really charity money. And more importantly, only a small percentage of the money the headline said was being used to give the immigrants treats really was; most of it was being used by a charity to help them with needs they had, by giving them counselling, education and skills training; and the immigrants it was talking about were actually young refugees who'd come over here without having their parents to look after them!

"A more sympathetic paper might have reported the story in a completely different way, talking about the troubles the young people were having, and how nice it was that a charity was helping them, and all about what it was doing for them.

"And I've heard that this kind of thing happens a lot.

"I've heard that another thing some tabloid newspapers can do is jump to conclusions about things without having much or any evidence they're right; for instance, some of them might have headlines like, 'Anger as Political Correctness Seems to Force Renaming of Easter Eggs to Avoid Offending Certain Religions', and then there might be a story about how a chocolate company has changed the name of a product it used to call an Easter egg to just a chocolate egg, and it might be just assumed that the company was forced to do that to avoid offending certain groups; but the paper might not have asked the chocolate company why they really did it, and it might turn out that they really dropped the word Easter so they could start selling the eggs all year round to make more money."

One student said, "That's bad! Mind you, it sounds funny, you saying the words, 'chocolate company', as if the company itself is made of chocolate. It just reminds me of a daft joke my mum told recently. She said, 'Do you know there are some farmers who have started feeding their chickens chocolate, and now the hens have started laying chocolate eggs?' I don't know if she was hoping we'd believe her at first. Maybe that's the kind of story they'd feature in some papers on April Fool's Day!"

The students grinned, and one said, "Imagine if hens really did start laying chocolate eggs, for some reason or other, and some people didn't realise for a while, so they started eating chocolate egg on toast for breakfast in the morning!"

They giggled. Then one said, "Imagine if some people really did eat that kind of thing, deliberately, and they somehow didn't realise anyone would think there was anything wrong with it. So a businessman might stand up in a meeting and give a proud speech, part of which said, 'I'm thoroughly dedicated to making this company money! So much so that I always leap out of bed enthusiastically in the morning, just whack a good-sized slab of chocolate on a nice bit of buttered toast, and then come straight here!'"

The students were amused. One chuckled and said, "Maybe we'd all be more enthusiastic to get up in the morning if we were looking forward to eating chocolate for breakfast!"

Another student grinned and said, "What, would you like chocolate on toast? I think chocolate would be too sweet to eat first thing in the morning. Mind you, it would be even weirder if that businessman said proudly that he whacked a slab of chocolate - or a mashed chocolate egg or something - on a bit of toast covered in peanut butter or something!"

The students giggled.

Then another one said, "Actually, I'm a bit surprised that anyone who reads the papers every day manages to get up early enough in the morning to get to work on time, since they can be so depressing that I'd have thought people would feel as if they just couldn't face them and want to stay in bed ... unless facing their bosses if they got in late would be even worse!

"Hey imagine if everyone who reads papers in the morning started getting so depressed because of all the stories about crime and things that loads and loads of people stopped being able to get up in the morning, and the problem got so bad that the hours of the typical working day had to be changed from nine to five, to something like six in the evening till two in the morning! Imagine if it announced it on the national news, saying something like, 'The hours of the typical working day have been changed, so from now on, most people will be required to go to work in the evening and work late into the night. This is believed to be because millions of people are becoming far too depressed by their morning papers to be able to get out of bed and make it into work at anywhere near the right time!'"

The students giggled, and one joked, "Yeah, but what if people started all reading the evening papers instead, - if there are still evening papers, - and they got so depressed by those that they couldn't even get up in time for an evening start at work? Maybe they'd change the working hours again, so everyone had to work at night. Or maybe the government would make it illegal for anyone under retirement age to read newspapers, in the hope that it would stop happening. Imagine it! You'd hear pensioners saying to middle-aged people, 'No, you're not allowed to read that; you're too young!'"

The students laughed.

Then one asked seriously, "What else do you know about bias in the papers, Becky?"

Becky said, "Well, another thing I've heard that some papers have been known to do is to put shocking claims in quotation marks in headlines, like about how much money they seem to be saying a particular family is going to receive in benefits, but then it turns out that that's only someone's guess as to how much they might be entitled to, which is why it's in quotation marks; and the paper might not explain that that person might be completely wrong. So it'll look to anyone who doesn't read the article all that carefully as if the immigrants really are going to be receiving that much in benefits. So the paper can be making people angry for no good reason.

"And if they carry on doing that kind of thing, readers might end up with the impression that whole groups of people get far more money than they deserve. I mean, the government might be wasting a lot of money on some projects and people it shouldn't be, and if they are, then it's good if the press find out about it and tell everyone; but it's not fair for parts of the media to give the impression that certain groups of people will be massive burdens on the system if either they won't be, or things just aren't as bad as they sound, or if they are, that new ways are being found to cope with the problems.

"Or sometimes, when news organisations are writing about something someone said, one little bit of it can be taken right out of context by some of them; if one little thing sounds controversial, they might put it into a headline as if to give the impression that it's the only thing the person said, when actually, reading more of what they said might give a completely different impression. For instance, if someone running for government office says they intend to close down a lot of mines and factories, the media might keep quoting that, and it might cause them to lose a lot of support. But what they really said might have been that they would close down mines and factories, but that they had big plans to create lots of new opportunities for work in the communities that would be affected by the closures. Maybe some papers would talk about that at the end of an article, but anyone who just read the headline and first paragraphs wouldn't realise.

"So it seems that the media, especially some newspapers, report a lot of things in a way that just isn't fair to people. Some newspapers and websites are more likely to give people a fuller understanding of the truth than others. But even the most respectable news websites can sometimes try and make a story sound more sensational than it really is. For instance, say someone famous makes a speech, and most of what they say just sounds nice, but one sentence they say sounds as if it would be controversial if that was the only thing they said, without all the rest of it that gives the listeners a good understanding of what they really think and how they can see things from both sides, it seems that even the most respectable news outlets can just take that one sentence and turn it into a headline, and then not say much about the rest of what they said.

"I mean, people who say sick or nasty things deserve to have them broadcast to the world so people can find out what they're really like; but there are times when a sentence or two could be made to sound a lot worse than it really is if that's the only thing that gets reported on, like what I was saying about how a politician might say they're going to close mines and factories if they get into power, and how that might be reported on as if it's the only thing they said, when the very next thing they said might have been that they were planning to make sure there were a lot of new jobs created in the areas where the old industries were being shut down."

The students were thoughtful.