Continuing my challenge for the title of “Most unwieldy headline on a blog”, this post was inspired after watching the BBC’s Breakfast programme this morning. It included a number of items on serious issues, where the people invited in to discuss the issues were from interest groups.

Now, there’s nothing new with that you may think, and you’d be right. But in light of the BBC’s internal report yesterday suggesting that there may be an unconscious bias in the corporation’s reporting, along with recent debate about whether bloggers qualify as journalists, the interviews got me thinking.

In one of the pieces on BBC Breakfast, 2 guests discussed the decision to ban a video game for being excessively violent ( a decision that even others in the gaming community seem to be in agreement with). One of the people discussing the issue was from the charity Kidscape, which campaigns against bullying & child abuse. This is obviously a very worthy cause & one which no right-minded person could possibly disagree with.

But what caught my attention was the fact that the spokeswoman from Kidscape at one point stated as fact that research showed that such violent video games do induce violent behaviour, her comment running along the lines of They have done research and it shows such games do cause increased aggresive behaviour. When queried, she couldn’t remember the name of this research.

Now I would imagine that she may well have been referring to the research carried out by Iowa State University, which does indeed suggest that violent video games can increase aggresive behaviour. But she couldn’t actually reference it, and used the generalisation that they had proved it. Whereas I, using a lowly blog, can reference the research & quote it in context.

I think that this raises a serious issue, in that there is often a danger on TV that people invited to comment on an issue may not have access to all the relevant information, and indeed may not actually be qualified to talk on such issues. But because they have been asked to speak by an organisation as respected as the BBC, the public will often assume that they have a deep understanding of what they are talking about.

And yet bloggers, simply because they generally work outside of the mainstream media, are assumed to have no integrity, and are often sweepingly dismissed as being cranks, with their comments deemed to have no value. What all of this of course goes to show of course, is simply that you can’t make assumptions on someone’s suitability to comment on an issue or topic based on the medium on which they express their views, but only on what they have to say, and how they back it up.

I should also mention that the other item which caught my attention was a piece on global warming where the commentator was from an organisation called The Manifesto Club. But her comments, along the lines of It’s too much of a drag to take individual actions to try & reduce global warming - we should just wait for the scientists to sort it out were so trite and embarrassing that I felt hard pushed to subject them to any sort of serious review. They seem to be a serious organisation, but their spokeswoman sounded more like a temperamental teenager than a serious commentator and I thought that they & the BBC would probably want to draw a veil over the whole sorry affair.

As a final note, I should just like to add that this is in no way intended as any sort of criticism of the excellent work that Kidscape carry out - rather the media companies who ask them to comment on issues, without placing those comments in context. Anyone wishing to make a donation to help Kidcape in it’s very worthy work, can do so here.

I’d also like to add that I don’t think of myself as a journalist - I don’t drink enough.

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