2013-05-24T09:24:41-04:00 Sian Boyle http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=sian-boyle Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Sian Boyle Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3108833 2013-04-18T19:00:00-04:00 2013-04-18T13:08:32-04:00

Sian Boyle http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sian-boyle/
Elsewhere in the world, the bombing of the Boston marathon naturally devastated the city and sent shock waves around the world, and the loss of lives - including that of an eight year old boy - and appalling injuries sustained is tragic and terrible. Thanks to the efficient emergency services at the marathon and the close proximity of a hospital, the death toll so far stands at only three, but dozens are injured and many have lost limbs.

Thirteen British newspapers led with the Boston bombings the following day, which occurred not only on the same day as the Iraq attacks, but also on the day that Syrian warplanes carried out air raids on Damascus. It would appear that the Western media portrayal of bomb attacks around the world is skewed, and that we've become almost numb to the sheer amount of news stories on car bombs in Iraq and the Middle East week in and week out.

Does the deluge of car bombs in Iraq dilute their significance? Are they now boring to Western media consumers, or less worthy because of their frequency? If anything, the car-bombing deaths in the Middle East should be cause for more coverage, not less, but the opposite seems to be the case. Why are men and women and children in Iraq or Afghanistan less important or less newsworthy than those in America or the U.K?

Shortly after the Boston bombings, the ever steely and assuring Obama made a prompt and laudable speech, promising every possible resource to help those in Boston "in the wake of this senseless loss". But according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, US drone strikes in Pakistan have killed 411-884 civilians between 2004 and 2013, including up to 197 children. In Yemen drone strikes have killed up to 45 civilians including two children. Many would argue that this loss of life too is senseless.

How would those in Boston, or New York or London or Paris feel if "terrorists" had the money and resources to command a series of unmanned computer-controlled precision aerial bombs, which are designed to cause the utmost destruction to human life as efficiently as possible?

One Yemeni blogger attacks Obama and his administration's use of drone strikes and says: "Our children's blood is not cheaper than American blood and the pain of losing them is just as devastating".

In Boston people are hurt and angry, and rightly want answers. Who did this? Why? How could anyone carry out such an act? There are fearful whispers and rumours of Islamic terrorists and heightening security: 9/11 and 7/7 are still raw, and the Boston attacks are too close to home.

'Homeland' is a powerful word, and when it is attacked it accurately evokes the added shock and terror of being attacked by an intruder in one's own home, instead of somewhere far removed in a rough part of town.

But an attack is an attack, wherever it happens. All bombs are terrifying, and victims of terrorism can also be the perpetrators.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.3029182 2013-04-06T17:13:51-04:00 2013-04-07T13:59:10-04:00

Sian Boyle http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sian-boyle/ fell to 45%, which nicely coincides with the culmination of a week's all-out left-right press war on the use and abuse of the benefits system and the Coalition's differing policies for the rich and poor.

In the blue corner, we have the Daily Mail highlighting Mick Philpott, who was sentenced this week for the manslaughter of his six children, as a "vile product" of the benefits system; George Osborne calling for a "debate" on how taxpayers "subsidise" lifestyles such as Philpott's, and Iain Duncan Smith asserting that he too could live off the £53 weekly benefits subsidy.

In the red corner, the Independent and the Guardian are baying for the blood of the Daily Mail, Labour MP Pamela Nash has argued that the Mail's polemic is offensive to those on benefits and Danny Alexander has opposed his Treasury boss Osborne by staking that welfare reform should not be influenced by the Philpott crimes.

Meanwhile, as Stefano Hatfield pointed out in yesterday's i paper, the bedroom tax is now all but forgotten in the benefits-barrage dust cloud.

Why do those on benefits have to be caricatured or characterised in one way or another at all? There are thousands of decent, 'normal' people who are genuinely impoverished, and try to make ends meet as best they can. There are also reaps of incredibly wealthy people, with mansions and several cars and children at the best private schools in the country, who are 'normal', friendly, sane, human beings. In fact, the Big Bad Benefits Scroungers are actually a minority, just like the "dirty rich tax-dodgers" on the other side of the coin.

Surely if being poor was poor people's fault, then there would be more who could just work a bit harder, get off the dole and Bob's your uncle, they're not welfare spongers anymore! (Pardon me while I chortle.)

Tory politicians such as I've-been-unemployed Duncan Smith and ivory tower Osborne really, utterly, do not have a clue. Ian Duncan Smith's sprawling mansion did not simply land in his lap because he has a good 'work ethic', just as the majority of people on benefits did not end up on £53 per week because they are lazy and stupid, or indeed child-homicidal arsonists. Some people are born into disadvantageous circumstances, and some people fall on hard times: almost anyone could become disabled or ill, or suddenly lose their jobs or homes.

Do the politicians and media commentators persecuting those on benefits really know what it's like to be poor?

Do they know what it's like to ration out food, or go without so their children aren't hungry; to forgo Christmas presents for the third year running; to mentally count the pennies' difference between bags of frozen vegetables in the supermarket aisle; to sleep five in a room or on a blow-up mattress on the living room floor; to have not been on holiday in eight years; to have wet feet in winter because there are holes in your soles; to never have the luxury of an impulsive shop-bought coffee; to walk three miles to the cheaper grocery shop and then carry the bags all the way back; to not be able to simply redecorate that peeling wallpaper or shabby carpet; to wear three jumpers and shoes inside because the heating is too expensive?...

Do they really know what being poor, on a day-to-day, year-to-year basis is actually like? It's not fun, and there's no let up, and the last thing people who have a genuinely difficult life need is to be stigmatised and vindicated as if they somehow want, choose or deserve it.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2110869 2012-11-11T19:00:00-05:00 2013-01-11T05:12:01-05:00

Sian Boyle http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sian-boyle/ BBC director general George Entwistle has resigned after a record low of 54 days in the job. I can't help but feel a little bit sorry for him; he's had one sh*t-storm after the other, and it must be nauseating to kiss goodbye to your £450,000 a year salary before you've even upgraded your mobile phone contract. His appearance just before his resignation on Radio 4's Today programme, however, in which John Humphrys interviewed him in the manner of a cruel schoolboy stabbing a writhing fish in a bucket, was uncomfortable to say the least: "Did you see the film the night it was broadcast?" "No, I was out." "Did you read the Guardian's front page yesterday?" "No, I was giving a speech." Amidst the stuttering and spluttering, Humphrys pinned down Entwistle to such a degree that - rightly or wrongly - he came across as absent and incompetent.

I have a growing sense that the rest of the media are mirthlessly rubbing their hands together while watching the omnibenevolent BBC stumble and fall, get up, shoot itself in the foot, and then fall over again. The BBC are always the impeccable good guys, the license-fee kingpins who perennially toe the line and hold everyone else to account, and those who were live-streamed on the BBC website squirming in their Leveson chairs are probably relishing even slightly the thought of Newsnight et al getting a dose of castigating headlines and glaring scrutiny.

Incidentally it's been quite interesting, if not bizarre, to see the BBC adamantly play out its accountability virtue in a kind of twisted labyrinthine pseudo-parodying meta-journalism. There were Jimmy Savile's sexual abuses at the BBC, which the BBC reported on from outside the BBC, with archive footage obtained from the BBC, and questions over whether the BBC was right to allow such practices at the BBC. Then BBC's Newsnight programme was outed for not airing an investigation into Jimmy Savile's abuses at the BBC because the BBC was airing a tribute programme to him at the time. BBC Newsnight reporters criticised their BBC Newsnight editor Peter Rippon who then stepped down, before BBC veteran John Simpson waded in to say the BBC was facing its 'worst crisis' in fifty years. BBC's Panorama then investigated BBC's Newsnight, and then BBC's Newsnight jumped the gun and decided they'd better broadcast something, so they put out a programme which falsely implicated Tory peer Lord McAlpine in child sexual abuse. The victim of the abuse then appeared on BBC news to say he'd got it wrong, so BBC Newsnight was back in the slaughterhouse. BBC Director General George Entwistle then gave that fist-eating interview on BBC's Today before announcing his resignation from the BBC on the BBC news channel.

What next for the great British Broadcasting Corporation? I predict that this car crash will play out, more heads will roll and the internal and external torrent of frenzied accusations will inevitably dry to a trickle. But I think it's important to remember that the BBC has produced excellent journalism, and in the scheme of things, a couple of (albeit very) bad decisions on Newsnight don't constitute the abolishment of the programme or of the BBC's entire ninety-year-old reputation. Compared with the nebulous virtue of print media, Newsnight made journalistic and editorial errors while newspapers involved with the hacking scandal made moral ones.

Savile must be turning in his grave, but only to light up a cigar and have a chuckle at it all...]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2040286 2012-10-29T14:06:26-04:00 2012-12-29T05:12:02-05:00

Sian Boyle http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sian-boyle/ a report on women in the media that male journalists completely dominate their female counterparts, writing 78% of all front-page articles examined and accounting for 84% of those mentioned or quoted in lead pieces.

On work experience placements I've observed senior-level boardroom conferences at the Times, the Guardian and the Sunday Times. At each of them the male:female ratio averaged at about 11:2. In the boardrooms themselves the men were far more forthright in discussions and women spoke - and were heard - less. Women are clearly under-represented in the media and in journalism, but the question is why. Why do less women get bylines, less women appear in broadcasts and less women make it to boardroom level only to be heard less once they reach it?

I argue that this isn't down to some deep-seated intrinsic misogyny but more a case of psychology, and how men and women subconsciously interact with each other. During the first week of my journalism M.A. at City University, I noticed that despite the women being equally as intimidating on paper as the men, the latter seemed far more confident about speaking up in our class of fifty, and although the male:female ratio is slightly more balanced at around 30:20, I couldn't help comparing it to the newspaper boardroom scenes I'd witnessed so many times.

In a discussion with some of the men on my course I put it to them that maybe they speak up more in the classroom (and therefore the workplace and boardroom) more than women because they think differently. Men generally have a tendency to think first and act second, whereas with women it's the opposite, or, as we put it in the pub, "Men care less about looking like a tw*t for a few seconds than women do". The nanoseconds it takes to make a decision on whether to say something in a discussion is crucial before the topic rolls on, but in this time women may subconsciously consider their contribution as well as what the what the implications of making it are, by which point it's too late to have their say.

In addition to men and women thinking differently, there is the obvious impact of the fairer sex generally being fairer voiced. Humans naturally hear- and listen- to a voice that is deep, loud, low and slow, so in a racing debate it's easy to see how a higher-pitched, softer, quieter and faster-speaking voice could be drowned out or ignored. I also think there's something in the psychology of appearance and work-wear. The man's suit, subconsciously, is a power symbol, both to himself when he puts it to enter the work-place arena and to those around him. Women's work wear is wishy-washy to the point of insignificance, with no clear definition between work wear and other-wear, which creates a degree of uncertainty both visually and in the mind.

So what's the solution? Slip on a man's suit and start boorishly shouting your opinions every few seconds? Not exactly, but I would advocate a variation on that, by psychologically squaring up to the men. Women should take a chance on speaking out more, as well as slowing down the pace of speech and lowering the tone of voice. High heels don't just make legs look amazing, they also give an added few inches and men hate it when women are taller than them, let alone when they are forced to literally look up to them.

I told my male colleagues early on in the course that my intention was to speak up in discussions as much as them, as terrifying as it is, because my motto is "fake it 'til you make it". I hope that after a year of discussions in front of fifty people, I'll become more articulate and will learn to present my opinions cogently and forcefully, so that if I ever make it to boardroom level at a newspaper, men - and women - will sit up and listen to what I have to say.

It's in women's hands to shift their unfair under-representation in the media. Deliver that pitch. Have your say. Argue your case. Get that byline. Speak your mind. Louder, better, faster, taller, stronger. Projecting an air of confidence which we may not feel is half the battle won.]]>