Feeding a vulture culture

Counter Culture Leonie Caldecott
I'm not going to tune up the violins for Cherie Blair, but I have to say that I have found the baying press pack on the tail of the Prime Minister's wife utterly nauseating. It is obvious that she has made not just one, but several mistakes. And a body of people who have been continuously fed propaganda and spin from the Downing Street press office have gleefully extracted their revenge. As you sow, so shall you reap. Someone said recently that it was extraordinary the English haven't got their own word for Schadenfreude, when it seems to be one of our favourite sentiments.
Perhaps the fundamental lesson in all this has to do with the dangers of becoming too wrapped up with the very things that lead to lies, cover-ups, spin-doctors and the rest. We have become a culture obsessed with image and sound-bites. But we are also a culture which is easily blinded by propaganda and ideological mindsets. It is rare, even in the quality press, to find coverage of something you know anything about, which actually matches the full truth of what you know.
I myself have been touched by this, since the Whitbread-award winning author Philip Pullman decided to turn some words of mine in this newspaper three years ago into a publicity gimmick. At the time, I was writing a piece in defence of JK Rowling, who was being attacked by American fundamentalists. I was writing around Hallowe'en, and I was dwelling on the "things that go bump in the night" — those things which genuinely occasion fear, particularly in children. Whilst defending Harry Potter, in his fight against the fiendish Voldemort, admittedly quite a dark theme, I noted that Pullman's books really did deal with issues that for a child are the "stuff of nightmares": parents who do not care a damn about you, priests who are nothing more than murderous gauleiters, a God who is a liar and an impostor. If angry parents in America really wanted to go in for book burning (not an activity I would endorse!), they could find many such books far more worthy of the bonfire than poor old Harry.
A year later, to my astonishment, Pullman's publicity machine issued, along with the fulsome quotes on the Dark Materials trilogy, the following: "Far more worthy of the bonfire than Harry (Potter) ... a million times more sinister. Truly the stuff of nightmares. The Catholic Herald." And this supposed "quote" has headed up more feature articles and interviews with Pullman than I care to remember. As recently as a few weeks ago, the Daily Telegraph repeated the old chestnuts in a piece about the forthcoming BBC dramatisation of the books.
The point about all this is that people rarely go back to the original source to check what they are quoting. Nor are journalists famous for wanting to understand both sides of a story (I guess it wouldn't be such a good story then). But this tendency, at its worst, can do enormous harm, like a poisonous game of Chinese whispers. How rarely do people say: "I am not 100 per cent sure about this, but please enlighten me if I have got this wrong." How often even Catholics are prepared to leap for the easy conclusion without carefully checking their facts. Whether it's delating Bishops to the CDF, or just gossiping contemptuously about other members of the flock, there are few of us who have never been guilty of some lapse in the balance between truth and charity. Yet the former without the latter quickly becomes its opposite.
How much calmer, less stressful, less faction-driven and war-torn the world would be if this gentle, courteous attitude prevailed. There may not seem to be much we Christians can do to counter the prevailing acidic fallout, but in this season of good will as we re-affirm our commitment to the Lord who humbled himself to be born not only as a man, but as a powerless, persecuted and poor man, we could make some resolutions to try and act differently from the vulture culture around us.