| TO WHAT EXTENT should an attractive journalist make herself part of the story? The question looks meaningless in the age of Polly Filler columnists, whose stories are cut to make space for their picture bylines, but it is still difficult if you have to answer it yourself.
No sane person would wish to be known by his or her newspaper clippings, and yet sometimes a personal presence is just what a story demands.
This is a long way round to the story of Riazat Butt and the brutal misogyny of Mecca, but I cannot have been the only person who read it and wondered why it was on The Guardian’s website four months after it happened rather than in the newspaper the very next day.
“On arriving at the pilgrims’ terminal in Jeddah, I looked for the man who was supposed to meet me, but when he failed to materialise, airport officials kept me in baggage reclaim for five hours. Showing them my papers — including a visa, a list of contact names and numbers, and a letter from my employer — made little difference. I asked to leave so I could get a cab to Mecca, only to be told I would be stopped and turned back at checkpoints lining the route.
“Restricted movement was the least of my concerns, however. I was sexually assaulted three times in Mecca — the least distressing incident took place near the Ka’aba when a male pilgrim mistook my breasts for a balustrade and used them to hoist himself up the stairs — and was met with indifference when I complained. Being sexually assaulted is, I learned, an almost occupational hazard for the female pilgrim.”
Obviously, such writing risks exposing not only her but her religion to hostility. The next admirable thing she did was to wade into the comments posted about her piece, and deal with them as if she were at a public meeting — ignoring the loonies, and engaging with the sane and intelligent ones. One way and the other, it was a considerable piece, the best she has done since starting the job as religious-affairs correspondent.
THE Daily Mail has turned decisively against Dr Williams. Here’s how it’s done: “The Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday backed the idea of salary caps to curb the pay of the rich. . .
“Dr Williams, who earns nearly £70,000 a year and lives rent-free in Lambeth Palace, made his remarks during a radio interview which he followed with a speech to the House of Lords in which he criticised excessive levels of debt and urged new rules to rein in loan sharks.”
THE MANCHESTER REPORT on women bishops was ignored entirely by The Guardian news desk. The new, slimline Telegraph reported it in two sentences on the end of a piece about the Act of Succession: “The Church of England is unable to consecrate a woman bishop before 2014.”
The Times splashed on it: “‘Gender havens’ to avert split in Church”.
The story started: “The Church of England is proposing to tear up hundreds of years of tradition by establishing spiritual havens for opponents of women priests and bishops. In a desperate attempt to stave off a schism over female ordination, church leaders have suggested the creation of new dioceses based on gender rather than geography.”
The website also showed an earlier, very much longer version of the story: “A ‘church within a church’ is proposed in a new report as a way of finding a home for the opponents of women priests and bishops in the Church of England.
“A series of new dioceses that would transcend geographical boundaries and be havens for men and women opposed to female ordination is the radical proposal set out in the long-awaited report on how to proceed with the Church’s desire to consecrate women bishops.”
The later version has been subbed to be very much better. Only a pedant would ask whether it were true — not in the sense of wondering whether these proposals are in the report, for they clearly are, but so are proposals to do the opposite. The question is which are in the least bit likely to happen.
That is the kind of thing specialist journalists are supposed to know, but I have read the story backwards and forwards, and I still cannot work it out. It is all very well to know that Forward in Faith welcomes its own proposal, and Watch welcomes its own, since the report contains both. But what do the decision-makers think? There are no quotations from anyone who might know. The only reliable fact is that nothing whatever will happen before 2014. No wonder The Times needs something else to make a news story.
|
back to Media
previous story
|
next story 
%235%23.jpg)
.gif "Caris Magazine for girls aged 11 to 16 © site")
