Every morning one of the first things we do is check the New Zealand media to see what's been happening at home while we were sleeping. Yesterday morning we woke to the following headline in the New Zealand media, Man Dives Off Tower Bridge In Taxi Protest.
The headline caught my eye for several reasons: drama, danger - that bridge is bloody high, protest and I had just blogged a bit on the Olympic Lanes which were at the centre of the protest. I see the London cabbies' point about the lanes. London traffic is bad enough without the Olympics, but with the Games and then the removal of access to entire lanes, driving in London will be a nightmare. How are paying taxi passengers going to take it when they get charged for sitting in traffic with a wide open lane just next to them? A £130 fine isn't going to make it worth the cabbie breaking the law to satisfy the angry passenger. Is it?
Anyway, I thought, well, this is a story to watch through the day. What a way to draw attention to your cause? He must have been arrested. There will be comment on rights and wrongs. What did the Mayor think? After all, the bridge was chosen because the Mayor's offices are near by.
I turned the BBC Breakfast progamme on. Nothing was being reported. I bought the Guardian and the Telegraph later in the morning and nothing in them either. Now, the protest happened in the late afternoon the previous day. There was plenty of time to do the story. I wondered what was up? Did the New Zealand media get it wrong?
I turned to Google. The story was being reported around he world, but not in London or the UK. There were a few UK minor stories about the protest and maybe a couple of blog posts mentioning the jumper at the time it happened. The only UK based media with a full story was the BBC website, but that was not being broadcast widely, if at all, domestically.
It was all very odd. I mean this is the land of scandalous reporting of minor details of people's personal lives and the land of reporters who hacked the phone of a murdered teenager for a story, but a man jumps off a bridge in protest and nothing - zilch, nada.
I get that you don't want to encourage the let's-try-this-at-home brigade by showing it over and over. The guy was damn lucky to have survived. Clearly, the tide was high, he pick the right place and he was very lucky on his timing. But why NO reporting? The rest of the world thought it newsworthy. Was it because he lived? Or, is there some law, code or agreement that stops the media from reporting such matters? And, if there is, what other stories have the British media agreed not to tell us?
No comments:
Post a Comment