An interruption in the Comic Relief goodness for a bit of Sunday Express badness...

I've only just heard about this article in the Scottish Sunday Express from 8th March (I know, it shows how keenly I follow the news. I apologise).

There are pictures of the article in question hosted on my flickr (I downloaded them from the tinternet myself, and figure the more places you can find them, the better). View at full size to read the piece in full.
Front Page
Full Article

Basically, it's a standard "ooh, aren't young people terrible. We were never ever like that were we" piece, using Bebo and Facebook profiles for Damning Quotes. Only, in this instance, the point of the article has been to go out and find Dunblane survivors (now that they're 18, and so legal to prey upon), and then criticise them for growing up into real people.

Before I do a generic Blogger Ramble on why this is bad and what I think, here are links you can go to to find more out about the article, and places you can complain to.

• First, here is the Express' contacty complaints page, which is probably the most handy in this situation.
• Bloggerheads has an ongoing back and forth with Derek Lambie of the Scottish Express, information on how Elizabeth Smith MSP's comments were taken out of context. (there are also links to PDFs of the article), and a list of advertisers with the Scottish Express with a template complaint letter you can send to them.
• This is a link to the Press Complaints Comission. The page also has the code of practice which applies to members of the press. You can quote in your complaint which specific aspects of this code you feel have been contravened by the article in question. (I quoted Accuracy for the out of context quote, Privacy and Harrassment)
• It may seem obvious, but the very best way you can complain about this is without succombing to the trap of personal insult. That way your complaint will always be better than their article.
  

Underneath the article is a bit more of a praising one for the Good Dunblane survivors who have gone to Uni. God Bless Them. See how they, unlike the others, are being a credit to some imaginary sense of duty to Do Academically Well that must, obviously, be placed heavily upon a five year old who has been shot in the stomach.

There is, of course, the standard assumption that to be drinking and making mistakes is not actually living life to the full at all, because you'll not get a degree out of it.

Obviously these 18 year olds are living a WASTED LIFE and will never come to any good, whereas the ones at uni are perfect individuals.

Maybe it will turn out that the sainted ones end up having nice middle class lives that do the country credit, and all the others die in a ditch full of meths and smelling of wee. But lets not just go and assume that straight away, eh? There's plenty of room for error and improvement in everyone's life - 18 is a bit young to be able to say "You are Good. You are Bad.", even if you can be sure of what Good and Bad actually are, and then apply them with great confidence to strangers.

Tabloids are forever writing hateful and overly reactionary articles - it's their stock in trade as much as young hot teens (unless they're under 18, in which case it'll be a dirty pedo story, not a topless model). To be honest, you could probably safely find a reason to go to the Press Complaints Comission for 80% of the content of the mirror/sun/express etc.

I'm joining the Up In Arms furore over this one because, honestly, I really think it's horrible, and overstepped the mark by quite a considerable degree. If follow up newspapers, broadsheets and tabloids alike, can report that The Public said a firm "No. Bad. Don't do that" to this sort of reporting, or even just this story in general, then so much the better.

Too much time is spent going for the easy "You're rubbish because you're young and you're doing stupid things" angle. Most of it is inevitable - that's what you do when you're not young anymore; you look at the people who are young and think "I bet I did that better". If you're of an aggressive, bitter, or just plain argumentative state of mind, you shout it loudly, and use words like "shameful" or "disgusting". If you get money writing your opinion, you do the same, only in print, to an audience of millions.

Of all the teenagers that are the subject of Apalling Binge Drinking articles and Teenage Pregnancie horrors, some will, in ten or twenty years, be writing nearly exactly the same stories about nearly exactly the same things in exactly the same newspapers. That's just the way it goes.

But sometimes the articles are too vindictive, or too mean, or too shamefully written. Like this one.

This is the complaint I sent to the Press Complaints Comission:

I am writing regarding the article on Dunblane survivors, to complain in the strongest possible way.

Accuracy:

The piece used a quote from Elizabeth Smith MSP out of context. By bracketing it with quotes pertaining to the Dunblane survivor's sites specifically, it implied she was speaking specifically about the content of the Dunblane survivor's sites, when it was a previous statement on social networking sites in general.

Privacy:

The article has pried into the lives of a group of teenagers for no other reason than to chastise them for overcoming what must have been an appallingly traumatic event in their very young lives.
That their details are up on a social networking site does not mean it's then fine to broadcast those details in a national newspaper, along with a judgmental holier-than-thou attitude.

That they are now happily and confidently making the same mistakes as teenagers all over the world and living life as normal young adults, with all the non-saintly behaviour that entails is surely the best possible outcome of what was a terrible, terrible event.

Harrassment:

To actually TARGET these people because they were nearly shot and killed when they were little older than toddlers is unforgivable.

They did nothing wrong. They were four and five years old. Hopefully their memories of the day are muddled and hazy. So, realising they've turned 18 and are now fair game for some persecution, a journalist going out of their way to say "Oh, look at them. None of them are weeping recluses. They don't cut themselves every day at the anguish of their memories. They have not devoted themselves to the church, or become young community leaders." as if this is some failure to honour a tragedy thrust upon them is, at the very least, extremely unfair.

Not only that, but their names were printed, so that every single Express reader could then go online, find their sites and - if they were in a bad mood, or just feeling vindictive - berate them themselves! What do you think would be more distressing at the moment? A harrowing memory from their days in the first year at school, or a sudden influx of strangers fourteen years later telling them they are an insult to their friends who were shot and killed that day?

I think that they have grown up as normal, fallible teenagers is a credit to their parents, and the community that cared for them after such a shocking and unimaginable event.

To publicly attack, castigate and attempt to shame anyone because they aren't living a life forever focussed on an horrific event that occured when they were four years old is actually unbelievable.

Unsurprising from from an over-reactionary BNP leaflet, perhaps. Par for the course from some kind of irrational evangelical group; but NOT acceptable from a mainstream national newspaper, with a national newspaper's responsibilities. By publishing this horrible, bullying, victimising mess off a non-article, its nasty (and, frankly, disturbing) practise of rooting out a victim simply to make them in some way personally to blame for an attack and murder in their past is condoned and tacitly encouraged. There really is no excuse for it.

(apologies for over-wordy or unnecessary rambliness. It's been a while since I did proper writing...)