P BABY: NO MORE DRAMA

There seems no end to the current media frenzy over the child, known as Baby P, whose death at the age of 17 months more than 15 months ago only came to national attention last week. His identity and that of his natural father and mother, his younger half-sibling and the mother’s live-in bloke (who, along with her, has been convicted of his killing) are being withheld “for legal reasons”, though the names were briefly revealed on the BBC’s website. These legal reasons are never explained. If, as has been widely speculated, it is to protect the identity of the sibling, it seems unnecessarily punctilious. The sibling will certainly have been taken into care and can perfectly well be given a new name.

Despite this safeguard, cameras have been allowed into the flat where the child died, now stripped of its furnishings, and photographs showing his likeness have been widely circulated. ITV News has bought the rights to at least one of these pictures. I cannot but wonder who has been paid. There have also been distressing graphics of the injuries the child received during his short life. This is just the kind of 6 O’Clock News story that drives me to Eggheads on BBC2, in front of which I would ordinarily not be seen dead.

Armchair pundits, among whom I readily number myself, have turned their special venom on the hapless social workers of Haringey. Because Baby P died on their watch, they have, in an inimitable headline from The Sun, ‘BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS’. Being wise after an event that they didn’t even know had happened until they read about it in the news columns is the special talent of armchair pundits. Columnists who couldn’t find Haringey in the London A-Z (let alone their arses with both hands) profess to know better than seasoned social workers what constitutes a palpable risk. Columnists whose entertainment expense accounts are higher in a week than a social worker earns in a month demand that heads roll.

Social work is a vocational career. You need infinite patience and human sympathy. You have to be ready to work anti-social hours and be poorly paid. And you are immediately made aware that it is an art rather than a science. The decisions you make are based wholly on impressions and assessments that are subjective. There will be people whose casework you take on who will tell you what they think you’ll want to hear; others who will have few means of articulating what their situation is; and most of them will be in some degree desperate and not all of them can be saved from self-harm or harming others. Nobody pays you any heed until something “goes wrong” and then a bunch of scandalised know-alls in London, whose knowledge of social deprivation derives almost entirely from an occasional look at EastEnders, start writing about you as if you yourself are a serial killer.

I honestly don’t understand why cases like this are taken up by the media at all. They have no news value. Editors prate about “human interest” but if viewers, listeners and readers are “interested” it is because the media does its best to make them so. It’s mere prurience. The day after the Baby P case went large, there was a brief story, played almost as big for a day or two, of a mother who had been sectioned after killing her two small children. Tragically for the pundits, there was no evidence of social workers stoking the fire of this particular case so it fell off the news agenda. That didn’t prevent the BBC Television News bulletins from carrying a vox pop with a neighbour who was too emotional to be able to contribute anything useful. What is the value of this kind of coverage? Do the editors believe that we need to be shown someone upset before we can understand that the case is upsetting? And what are we supposed to do with this knowledge? Wring our hands? Take to the streets? Perhaps write to our MPs – not least the prime minister and the leader of the opposition – and ask them to stop uttering the word “families” as though it has a religious connotation when all the media evidence suggests that families can actually be fatal for children?

Going through the courts at present is the Shannon Matthews kidnap case. This is of course sub judice and, besides, I deplore lofty conclusions drawn from cases by those who weren’t in court and/or haven’t read the comprehensive transcripts. But if it turns out that the jury finds an attempt was made to extort money as “reward” by the faking of a kidnapping, I hope the media will not be too slow to draw some inferences about what such a scam says about its own conduct. Even the people around Matthews – who between them would be unlikely to muster an intelligence quotient to rival that of a mayfly – might perceive that sucker-punching the media with a plausible kidnapping tale ought to be pretty easy and, the media being the route to instant celebrity, potentially rather lucrative. And of course the media does love a “human interest” story. Don’t rule out the possibility that, whatever the outcome of the court case, some level of media interest in these feckless people will survive in one form or other. “Based on a true story”, anyone?

ON MANŒUVRES

During the near-month that I was thwarted from going on line by BT Broadband’s tardiness, arrogance and incompetence, there were many developments in the real world that made my blog finger itchy. The capture of a group of British sailors by Iranian forces, their videotaped humiliation and the self-inflicted wounds by which they handed Tehran the moral victory once back home would certainly have drawn me to the keyboard.

The misjudgment of allowing members of the apprehended party – inevitably in practice the two dumbest sailors, Mr Bean and the chain-smoking mum – to sell their accounts to the tabloids made both the military and the government a laughing stock around the world, especially in the Middle East. Which of us wouldn’t volunteer to spend a fortnight relaxing in the custody of a foreign land if the reward were a six-figure sum for confirming a tabloid editor’s prejudices? (Not me, actually, but then I’ve been to Tehran and I have no wish to return, especially not in its present volatile state).

Meanwhile there has been a will-he-won’t-he fracas – it hardly merits the word “debate” – concerning HRH Prince Harry and his loudly expressed desire to get himself killed in Iraq, either in an explosion or by beheading as a captive. When the inevitable happens, remember how I warned you that the media would hail him as a hero, whatever he was actually doing at the time of his demise.

The establishment’s need to dress up the playboy princeling’s behaviour (past, present and future) in myth-making terms is very germane to the larger point I want to make. That concerns the military’s most ill-advised accommodation with the media’s unsubtle voyeurism about any matter that can be passed off as “human interest”.

There was a time, not so long ago, when all military matters were deemed secret, confidential and not for public discussion. To report even quite banal aspects of military management was a breach of the Official Secrets Act. Of course, the culture of confidentiality allowed all manner of ills to be winked at in service life and I certainly deplore such unaccountability. Indeed, I remain of the view that no profession, including the military, should be allowed to act as judge and jury in examinations of breaches of the rules, especially where the civil law ought to take an interest.

But inevitably the pendulum has swung too far the other way. Now top brass are becoming familiar spokesmen on news bulletins, ready with their sound bites and their pat answers. Successive prime ministers and home secretaries used to hold to the line that upon military issues they never confirmed nor denied any proposal or rumour. Mr Blair still says as much on intelligence questions but we already know a great deal more about the workings of MI5 and MI6 than any previous generation did.

As far as military operations are concerned, it is now standard practice that both print and broadcast journalists talk to military personnel on the front line, before, after and sometimes during engagement with hostile forces. A new term has rapidly established itself to describe journalists who accompany troops in war situations over a sustained period: those reporters are “embedded”.

It’s hard to figure why the commanders should believe that, on balance, more is gained than lost by this dubious accessibility. War is characterized by dehumanizing tendencies. Individual combatants are rather more likely to be seen in an alarming or shaming light than in an inspiring one, even when the unheroic is only expressed in the banality of their language.

Doubtless the front line equivalent of paparazzi will hound 2nd Lieutenant Windsor – or is he a colonel by now? – to ensure that plenty of pics are seen back home. I can see it now: “Prince Wazza!!” as the poor boy makes use of the latrine he has just dug in the sand. I imagine his majestic grandmother would have preferred it if the first intelligence of Harry’s tour of duty in Iraq had emerged upon his return. On the other hand, the Palace is no doubt advised to go for the headlines just as avidly as the rest of the establishment.