Uncategorized

Does Anybody Know What’s Going On?

It would appear not, if this country’s news outlets are anything to go by. Sky News, in particular, in their desperate bid to fill airtime and webspace in the absence of actual facts will apparently happily run anything, no matter how unfounded or inconsistent (for example, their reports about the windows being blown out on the bus in Hackney were accompanied by… a photograph of the bus in Hackney with its windows intact).

Most of yesterday’s “reports” consisted of highly reliable “eyewitness accounts”, but sometimes Sky resorted to second hand accounts. For much of yesterday their website had something along the lines of “an eyewitness said that an Italian man who was on the train told her…” Well, that’s clearly a conclusive and reliable report, then. (I think this was the same person to utter the classic statement–later removed from the site–about there having been a small blast. Apparently it wasn’t enough to hurt anybody, but was enough to blow open the rucksack in which the device was located, and as a result “the man holding the rucksack looked rather dismayed”.)

By the time I got home, the networks had endured several hours of coverage with no new information, and as such were deep in the realms of speculation, reporting the news they wanted to report without letting anything as silly as the facts (or lack of them) get in the way.

Today the police seem to have shot a man dead on the tube at Stockwell. Bearing in mind the fact that they managed to arrest several people yesterday who weren’t in any way connected to the (attempted) bombings, you’d want to hope that they were mighty sure that they were shooting dead (five times) the right person on the tube at Stockwell, and not just targetting anyone with the wrong colour skin and heavy luggage in the wrong place at the wrong time.

(According to the BBC: “They brought in the air ambulance. They did everything they can to revive him. He died at the scene.” I dunno. Wouldn’t doing “everything [you] can to revive him” perhaps include not shooting him five times?)

5 thoughts on “Does Anybody Know What’s Going On?”

  1. They have to shoot to kill – apparently if they shoot the torso, legs and arms they risk hitting the suspected explosive device. I take your points but I do think the police are doing pretty well at the moment. Of course I hope they don’t do another Harry Stanley and I’ll reserve judgement on this particular incident until someone reports something more than, as you say, regurgitated second hand accounts.

    To be honest, I’m having a harder time being sympathetic about Blair – there’s only so long he can simply keep coming up with, “Carry on as usual”. It suggests that he has no idea what to do…

  2. Oops, sorry, the above was me. Forgot my name there for a minute.

  3. Yes, well I suppose you could argue that the second part of this blog entry (composed as it is of pure speculation based on potentially unreliable information in the absence of actual facts) is rather hypocritical, given that I spent the first half of the blog complaining about our lazy media perpetuating pure speculation based on potentially unreliable information in the absence of actual facts.

    If I was cleverer than I am, I guess I could always claim I was making a deliberately ironic satirical point.

    In truth, I’m just rather worried about this latest turn of events. Of course the police officers involved in these kind of events have a very difficult job to do, and have to make literally life or death decisions in a split second, but people do make mistakes. It’s a lot easier to try to put those mistakes right when you haven’t shot somebody five times. Of course I hope they haven’t done another Harry Stanley (or indeed, another one of these), but at this stage, who knows?

    As for Blair, I suspect you’re probably right. I’m sure he hasn’t the faintest idea what to do now, except maybe hand over to Gordon Brown and leave him to tidy up the mess…

  4. I agree it’s probably a bit early to comment on what’s been happening today. I hate to say it, but if the police were after this guy and chased him right onto the Tube, I don’t think they felt they had much choice but to shoot. Can you imagine the public outcry if they’d been chasing him and they’d actually let him get onto the Tube and get away? If there had been any consequences, then then the police would have been massively and perhaps rightly blamed for not taking the guy out.

    I agree that the risk of human error and misjudgements in these situations is very scary. But trying to running away from armed police in the current climate of fear is pretty damn unwise. Fatally so, in this case.

Comments are closed.