You may have heard of Jody McIntyre – he is the wheelchair user who was violently dragged from his chair and along the ground twice at the student demonstations in London last week. McIntyre, who has cerebral palsy, was interviewed by the BBC last night about what happened.
If you have any confusion about who was responsible for violence at the student protests, watch this video in full. You can also read Jody’s account of what happened on his blog.
The interviewer, Ben Brown, is clearly a piece of human shit – you can make a complaint about his conduct here.
The media have put a lot of effort into making Camilla-and-Charles-were-frightened the main image of violence last week – the real violence was perpetrated against people like Jodie McIntyre and Alfie Meadows, who had to undergo life saving emergency brain surgery after being beaten by the police.
Bonus: here’s Ben Brown being made a fool of.
the BBC treatment of Jody seems pretty light in comparison to er, Richard Littlejohn…
fuck. me.
This point has to be made again and again, it is easy to throw Littlejohn out, as he is is so bad. But it is the subtle selection of narratives in the main-stream media (the same process that selects those valued and rewarded in society) that needs to be pointed out, and that is more invidious.
There is a great section in this 1996 interview with Andrew Marr (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4827358238697503#) where Chomsky catches the point exactly, whatever you think about him in general.
Chomsky on the BBC/Media
8:40 ‘Unpopular ideas can be silenced without force…’
9:10 ‘Journalists are self-censoring…’
9:30 ‘It selects for obedience…’
11:10 Chomsky ‘I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying, but if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you are sitting…’