Okay, slight exaggeration… but why did no-one realise that this looked stupid? And whatever happened to authoritatively delivered news from behind a desk?

On a more serious note, today is a day to be thinking about a true news giant. Alan Johnston, the BBC’s Gaza correspondent, has been missing for a month now. It seems so meaningless and useless in the situation, but I send all my best to Alan and his family, and I urge you, my readers, to support the BBC’s campaign for his release.

In a perverse way, the ongoing coverage of teenage knife crime amuses me. Tabloids will insist that all teenagers are delinquents, and yet come August, they all have 25 A-Levels as a result of dumbing down. In reality, only a minority of teenagers sit A-Levels (let alone pass them), and far fewer still are ‘bad kids’ (no matter how they might look).

And let me bust one more myth. We are not in the middle of a knife-crime explosion. Here’s a graph. Not a particularly pretty graph, but a graph nonetheless.

Knife crime has been at reasonably consistent levels over the last ten years. It’s reasonable to hypothesise that the teenagers of 1996 were involved in just as many knife crimes as the teenagers of 2006. There have been around five fatal stabbings per week for the last ten years. There has been no dramatic increase. But suddenly, every one of those five has become headline news. It’s being noticed more, but it isn’t happening more. Sorry to burst the dead-tree media bubble.

But that doesn’t answer the crucial question: Why is there teenage knife crime on our streets?

It’s nothing to do with a lack of activities for teenagers. If you apply that theory to any other section of society, its flaws are clear. Did Ian Huntley commit the Soham Murders because he didn’t have a social worker to take him bowling every week? Did Harold Shipman bump off old people because he didn’t have a club of like-minded individuals to socialise with in a controlled setting? Was Hitler a community volunteering project away from sticking with painting and decorating? I think not.

And it’s nothing to do with the prevalence of knives on the streets, either. Sixty years ago, knives were much more common amongst teenagers, and teenagers were also much more adept with the use of guns thanks to National Service. Weapons don’t kill people: People kill people.

Also sixty years ago, there was a very clear, defined enemy. The Germans. Teenagers would probably have had little hesitation in taking out their frustration on any Germans they happened upon, but fortunately that didn’t happen very often. They were rebels with a very defined cause, and a cause which society supported and viewed as ‘healthy’.

So what’s the ’cause’ today? Who are our enemies?

In the absence of a clear enemy, society as a whole has started to attack within its own group. Football rivalries become as embittered as those between warring nations, and so violence ensues. Rivalries between middle-class parents to get their children into the schools at the top of artificial league-tables get out of hand. Minor road incidents turn into violent road rage. And rivalries between gangs of friends escalate to stabbings. It’s not rocket science.

As a nation, we have nothing to unite against and fight. Yet we have a human need for rivalry and fighting, so in the absence of a defined enemy, we fight each other. It’s happening throughout all age groups and in many walks of life, but because the media has an obsession with demonising the youth, it’s this that gets highlighted.

This is not the end of society as we know it. We do not have a generation of evil teenagers. It’s a natural development, which will probably subside as the nation becomes united again behind some visionary cause.

So please, just for me, can we stop harassing these poor teenagers? Life’s tough enough for them without criminalising them with silly ASBOs, slapping discriminatory policies all over them, and constantly criticising them.

Fix the behaviour of your own generation before criticising theirs.

Dave Gilbert’s written a great piece for the Beeb talking about his role in developing online news services. Well worth a read.

It strikes me as interesting today that BBC News 24 is referring to Iran’s detention of 15 Royal Navy personnel as a “kidnapping”, which seems to me to be extremely loaded language.

Iran contests that the boats involved in the incident were in Iranian waters, while the UK and US state that they were within Iraqi territory, so it appears one word against another. If the Iranians are right (and it is very hard to tell in such disputed territory with complex divisions), then they are well within their legal rights to detain the Royal Navy personnel, so to describe them as “kidnapped” in this rather less-than-clear situation seems unfortunate at best.

Most other news organisations – including their own website – are using diplomatic terms like “seized” or “detained” which, in themselves, do not imply that either side is right. So why is BBC News 24 deliberately choosing to do differently? I hope, not least for the renowned journalistic standards of the Beeb, that this wasn’t a decision taken because “kidnapped” fits better on a headline graphic.

Some of their presentation decisions are already irritating and somewhat questionable, but if presentation is the reason for this decision, then standards really have reached a new – very depressing – low.

Image courtesy of dragonhhjh at TV Forum

News reaches my ears this afternoon that ITV are pulling their much-criticised quiz channel ITV Play, and replacing it with ITV2+1. Which is distinctly not ITV3. Though with all the recent controversy, it seems rather fitting that the service has been replaced with one with a name that makes it look like ITV can’t add up.

Apparently this has nothing to do with the recent concern over premium-line phone-in competitions. Despite the channel being based on, erm, premium-line phone-in competitions, and recently being pulled temporarily due to an investigation into – oh, premium-line phone-in competitions. The reason it won’t be returning is because they’ve decided it doesn’t make the best the best use of their available spectrum. Of course, it was the best use of this spectrum less than a year ago when it launched.

I shouldn’t be too hard on them. The fact that it’s gone is doubtlessly a good thing. But it will be staying overnight – you see, it is the best use of space then. Mainly because it’s profitable. And if there’s one thing ITV can add up, it’s shareholders’ profits.

There’s a very interesting piece by Mark Lawson over on the Guardian’s Arts Blog about the myth of live TV. It’s a few days old, but still worth reading.

News has rather belatedly reached me that Dale’ Supermarket Sweep has been resurrected by an evidently desperate ITV.

This begs only one question: Why?

[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/sweep.flv” title=”Will You Dance With Me?” /]

In the series opener of her US chat show, Tyra Banks takes on the media, complaining about a photo that was published of her under headlines suggesting she’d gained forty pounds. The tirade she unleashes was heavily promoted beforehand, and it is clearly something of a ratings-grabbing stunt. I’ve included a eight-and-a-half minute chunk of the programme below, to set the whole thing in context for the majority of my readers who may have missed the story. The much repeated tirade is in the last minute-and-a-half or so of the video.

It has to be said that this is an odd, odd piece of television. The creator and judge of America’s Next Top Model protesting at accusations she’s put on weight, whilst simultaneously claiming to think that ‘curvy women’ are ‘sexy’. The sentiment is very good, but the hypocrisy stinks: If curvy is sexy, then why is she so ‘humiliated’ by the idea of being curvy herself? She surely can’t have it both ways. She criticises others’ obsession with weight, yet knows her own exact weight from over two months ago. She says she’s no longer a model, yet shows pictures from her swimsuit shoot. She says perfection is unrealistic, yet admits that she has her photos retouched. It’s all just hot air.

[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/tyra.flv” title=”The Tyra Banks Show (Warner Bros)” /]

Perhaps this video symbolises everything that’s wrong with the fashion industry. Everyone pays lip-service to the ideas that big is beautiful, healthy is good, and ultra-slim is bad, but nobody in the industry actually believes it. Which is odd, because I don’t think anyone in the real world finds Size Zero models attractive.

Fern Britton won an award last week for being the woman most men ‘secretly adore’. How sad it is that men don’t feel able to say they’re attracted to women like Fern, and that The Sun insists on branding her an ‘unlikely babe’. When we finally get over these silly mass-market produced images of beauty, and accept real beauty – beauty that lies in the eye of the beholder rather than the eye of fashionistas who decree the latest ‘sexy look’ – then perhaps we’ll be finally able to tackle the misery these ill-conceived perceptions cause.

The most respected journal of weekly news takes on the most austere and professional of the BBC’s journalists… or not. The rag and the hag have had a bit of a tiff. (For those unfamiliar with the key players, one’s ‘Not as bad as the Daily Mail’ and the other fronted a massive cock-up).

A couple of weeks back, the Mail on Sunday did a big two-page spread about how all but one of Natasha Kaplinsky’s family had been rounded up, shot, and dumped in a ditch by the Nazis. Her grandfather was the sole survivor. A terrible, tragic fate.

Except the story may have contained one or two tiny errors.

As MediaGuardian are now reporting, the person the Mail on Sunday thought was Natasha’s grandfather actually wasn’t, Natasha’s family were not killed, and the people who were killed were not slaughtered in a mass execution. And they weren’t shot and dumped in a ditch, either.

In fact, it’s quite difficult to find much about the story that is true. Much like a lot of the Mail on Sunday’s reportage, then.

Monday’s edition of The Guardian’s famous (and hugely successful) series of wallcharts has, it would seem, succombed to Grauniad Fever.

Of the forty breed featured, the names of six were spelled incorrectly, and the classification of one was wrong. That gives an 82.5% accuracy rate – not brilliant for an educational wallchart.

Of course, this isn’t the first wallchart to feature mistakes, but this example from yesterday’s newspaper is certainly the most extensive correction I’ve seen featured about a single one of them. On the plus side, I suppose it reinforces the Guardian branding of the wallcharts, and allows the reader a wry smile…