Denne kommentaren sto i The Guardian i dag. Ian Mayes er avisas
ansvarlige for tilbakemeldinger fra leserne, og har fast spalte hver
lørdag.
Det er ikke bare fryd og gammen med rutinemessig offentliggjøring av
epost-adresser og med epost-kampanjer.
Open door
Lobby fodder
The readers' editor on... the use of mass email campaigns
Ian Mayes
Saturday March 31, 2001
The Guardian
With the electronic media has come the electronic lobby. We are still
not quite sure how to respond to it. We have encountered it now in a
number of causes: the Guardian's alleged unfairness to the Blair
government in the early months after the election (I dispute that
there was a significant lobby at work there but some of my colleagues
disagree); the alleged demonisation of the Serbian people in our
coverage of the war over Kosovo; and most recently and most vigorously
the paper's alleged anti-Israeli prejudice. The pro-Arab or
pro-Palestinian lobby, which exists, is not on anything like such a
large scale.
The pro-Israel lobby - that is what it is in intent if not always in
effect - can mean two or three hundred organised emails piling into a
queue in the paper in the space of a few hours and threatening to clog
up the works.
Lobby emails, on any issue, are usually easy to recognise. Very often
they simply follow a pattern provided by the organiser, but variations
usually retain headings or phrases from the original which clearly
indicate their source. Some newspapers after sampling a couple erase
the rest unread.
The New York Times, which I visited recently, has been coping with one
lobby accusing the paper of minimising "the protests surrounding the
presidential inauguration". The paper's recorded message on its
reader comment line, says: "If you're calling as an individual about a
correction, or with a coverage question we can answer - and not as
part of a group campaign - we will try to reply."
The comment editor of the Guardian wrote about the pro-Israel lobby on
his pages a few weeks ago tracing one significant part of it to an
organisation based in London. His section is a favourite target. The
letters page of the Guardian is another. In both cases, you might
fairly say, well, they would be. Individual journalists who write
about the Middle East in the Guardian are also bombarded with emails,
some abusive in the extreme. The most abusive are reserved for
colleagues who are Jewish.
The comment editor is now reluctant to provide email addresses at the
end of pieces which might provoke what he calls hate mail. He feels
that the experience of the past weeks has strengthened the case for a
parallel email network to ensure that messaging around the office is
not jeopardised by the mass invasion of personal queues.
The lesson of lobbies of this kind, on this scale, is that they are
perceived by most of those on the receiving end, not as the bearers of
reasonable argument but as bullying and inhibiting to real debate. The
message is seen to be the threatening weight of numbers.
These lobbies have been described to me as potentially
counter-productive by others seeking to promote Israeli views by
different means. One said that the noise created by this stimulated
clamour of voices crowding in all together was drowning out attempts
at more reasonable discourse. An organisation which seeks to promote
Arab views, and which uses what might be called selective email
lobbying, says that if it saw signs that the mass-email lobby was
succeeding, it would certainly change its own tactics to do the same.
Each side in the present conflict in the Middle East has accused the
Guardian of favouring the other. Some journalists say, that is OK
then, we must be getting it right if both sides are complaining. The
other possibility, as another colleague pointed out, was that we were
getting it wrong in both directions.
One of the problems for the paper is that lobbies, large or small,
almost always include a great many people who do not normally read the
Guardian, whose attention has been drawn to a particular report or
article in the paper and who therefore see it removed from the context
of the Guardian's coverage as a whole. They are unaware, perhaps, of
one important fact, that the comment pages always, but especially with
reference to conflicts (the Gulf war, the wars in former Yugoslavia
for example), seek to provide a platform for the widest range of
opinion. They do that independently of the Guardian's leader line.
The editor had this in mind when he formulated a model email of his
own, to be used at the discretion of Guardian journalists, to reply to
senders of emails criticising the paper's Israel coverage. In it he
rejects any accusation that the coverage "indicates a strong bias
against Israel". He lists commentators from all sides of the conflict,
and concludes: "I believe the paper has distinguished itself in the
depth, range and breadth of its reporting and commentary."
Whether we like it or not, the email lobby is here to stay. It is a
natural product of a democratic medium. If I thought it worth saying
in a situation which generates such high passion, I would add, "But
please, let's be reasonable."
* Readers may contact the office of the readers' editor by telephoning
020-7239 9589 between 11am and 5pm Monday to Friday.
Mail to Readers' editor, The Guardian, 119, Farringdon Road,
London EC1R 3ER. Fax 020-7239 9897.
Email: reader@guardian.co.uk
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
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______ _________________________________________________
/ | jonivar skullerud jonivar@bigfoot.com |
| jon | http://www.bigfoot.com/~jonivar/ |
\______ | |
\ | None are more hopelessly enslaved than those |
ivar | | who falsely believe they are free. -Goethe |
_______/ |_________________________________________________|
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