The media focus on the anti-pope protests, but ignore World Youth Day, perhaps because its attendees aren’t cool
Andrew Brown
The Guardian
18 August 2011
If I were a Catholic, I would be feeling rather pissed off with the BBC. The news bulletin in this morning’s Today programme carried an report of the Pope’s visit to Madrid that concentrated entirely on the “thousands” of protestors against the visit. It did not once mention World Youth Day, the extraordinary global Catholic gathering that the Pope is also visiting. That has brought something like 1.5 million young people from around the world to the Spanish capital to greet him. Whether or not you approve of this, it is important and – above all – newsworthy simply because it is unexpected and goes against the grain of what the media tell us. So why is it not reported?
One might think this is an instance of consciously anti-Catholic bias and perhaps it is. But I doubt that. In many dealings with BBC radio I have only come across one producer who fitted the Daily Mail stereotype of someone actively biased . I suspect it isn’t rooted in theological animus, but something far more cultural. The kind of young people who go on organised pilgrimages to greet the Pope are not the kind of people most journalists want to become, or have been. They are quintessentially unfashionable.
Journalists are almost inevitably sensitive to fashion in ideas, in part because their own fates and careers depend so heavily on it. The ability to sense what people are interested in right now is a skill highly valued in the trade. At the same time, the desire to be one of the inner ring, to know things that other people do not, and to be wafted to the front of any queue, is powerful in us, not least because it is doomed to be unsatisfied. In the last analysis the people who know what’s going on are those who have the power to change it, and very few journalists ever get that…
The article continues at The Guardian.
