Thursday, 07 Aug 2008

What to do when dodging a hail of bullets

After watching my copy of the Bourne Ultimatum the other day, I started wondering how a newspaper like The Guardian feels about being portrayed in such a film. Via one of the footnotes in the Wikipedia entry, I found my way to an article on their website on this very topic:

Obviously, I would have preferred to see this Guardian journalist do a little more ass-kicking, or indeed any ass-kicking … Nevertheless, he gets to show a fair bit of courage under fire. He and Bourne are shadowed by a creepy CIA surveillance spook who has already given a chilling order to “prepare rendition protocols”. Huh! Bring it on! Guardian journalists aren’t scared of Guantánamo.

The best part was the insight into the newspaper’s style guide:

They wind up in Waterloo station where they have to dodge bullets from a CIA sniper, that of course is the sort of thing which happens to us all the time. But there are inaccuracies. The Guardian stylebook clearly states that if you are under a hail of bullets in a public place from an assassin run by a deniable intelligence unit, you have to duck into the nearest internet cafe and start blogging about it to keep the readers informed.

The BBC’s website, by contrast, advises readers not to risk themselves when submitting comments from dangerous places like the scene of a protest being violently suppressed by the faceless state police, or when an earthquake is destroying the building they are in, or when walking down the streets of London. How can we possibly defend democracy in the face of such reticence?

:)

AfC

Comments have been disabled so that readers do not endanger themselves replying to this blog post.

blogging-the-hail-of-bullets, posted by Andrew Cowie in mlp/humour at 2008-08-07T05:34:05Z

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