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The Crawley News defence

December 9th, 2006 · Posted by Skuds in Life · 4 Comments · Life

I had an interesting e-mail from one of the Crawley News staff. A shame it wasn’t a comment on my post about the conflict between their editorial stance on escort agency advertising and their commercial policy to carry such adverts which could have generated some stimulating debate.

Anyway, this e-mail makes a decent point. It was made semi-tongue in cheek but I like it: carrying those stories displays some sort of editorial independence in that it shows the paper is not afraid of carrying stories which might upset or attack advertisers. But of course we already knew that: Crawley Borough Council must represent a large chunk of advertising sales with its Crawley Live insert every couple of months and all the public notices and we know that the paper has never been afraid to pile on the criticism of the council – at least while it was under Labour control. Its a good argument in principle but I imagine that the few tiny ‘adult’ adverts in the paper don’t amount to a huge proportion of their advertising income.

A retort which was hinted at though not put in these terms was that if we found out that a local paper had a story about something which many people in the town (rightly or wrongly) would find upsetting but decided to not print it in case they upset an advertiser what would the response be? We would accuse them of bias and of letting commercial interests set the news agenda, so in effect they are in a no-win situation…

…but only while they continue to run such adverts. That sort of thing is handled by head office but there is no reason why the editor can’t drop them a line saying that while they are carrying such adverts they run the risk of being a bit of a laughing stock. But running the risk of upsetting advertisers is trivial compared to upsetting or criticising the upper echelons of your own employers, unless they are a lot more enlightened and forgiving than the owners of newspapers tend to be.

Personally I don’t have any great moral objection to some people deciding to trade services for money. If they are doing it freely and don’t have a problem then why should I? What I do have a problem with is that many of those providing these services are not doing it freely and some of them may have a problem with it but are forced to carry on anyway, having been lured in. So my objections are to the way the workers are being exploited and abused rather than the nature of their work. On that basis, fair play to the News if they try to expose the exploitation, but they do distract from this if cannot be certain that their own advertisers are not similarly expoitative.

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4 Comments so far ↓

  • Richard

    Courageous ‘exposure (investigative) journalism at Crawley News would expose the dealers in porn and prostitition (akin to drug/arms dealers).

    For a journalist to phone ‘Mark’, whose number was on a tacky card outside Tilgate shops, doesn’t really count as real ‘exposure’ journalism, does it ? But it does sell more papers.

    Sex sells. Always has done, always will – especially in this titillated-obsessed country. I think generally we have a very screwed-up, immature, childish, unhealthy, ‘dirty raincoat’ idea of sex in England – and the papers exploit it to the full.

    I lived in Paris for some years, and I personally found the French approach to the whole subject so much more mature and refreshing.

  • Danivon

    Can you forward the email to me? My email address is not on my blog (I get enough spam as it is), had they wanted to respond to me without using the comments section

  • Skuds

    Ah. Unfortunately I deleted it after I read it…

  • Richard

    Sounds like a line out of Mission Impossible 😉