The Guardian......or, Abri's Views Are Validated

Making up for the silence of this week...

Mom arrived safely, and Dad is on his way, too. Caelah and I took Mom to a nice little deli near her hotel and ate a late lunch before I had to meet some of the guys to walk to The Guardian. It was really great just eating and talking with them. :) The three of us haven't had a meal just us in a while. At 3, I met up with Max, Michael, Mason, and Greg to be the navigator for The Guardian. I had written down the directions because I really wanted to walk since it was such a nice day out.

This was definitely one of my favorite classes. We didn't get a tour of the newsroom like they said we were going to, sadly, but we did get to talk to a cool guy, Martin Kettle. He writes a lot of their opinion columns. I really liked hearing his opinions because they echoed a lot of my own.

The Guardian, like any respectable paper, believes that fact and opinion should be kept separate. They even go so far as to create a distinct section of their paper, like most papers do for editorials and opinions...but they let their reporters write opinions that are contrary to what the editor feels. I thought that was cool. They think that every person in the newsroom should be able to have their own opinion and not have to subscribe to an overarching one.

Kettle explained more fully why the nature of UK papers as being national papers is important: they report less on local issues because they are reporting for a wide audience, also it's more typical for them to support parties because it's national politics that matters and not local elections. It also makes it easier for the government to regulate the broadcast media, but that means that they have to be more careful in their coverage. I was really happy that Kettle agreed with me that government regulation of media is a bad thing. :)

Kettle also thinks that privacy laws should be tightened. Now, I know that most journalists would say that a regulation on privacy is a bad idea, but I think that in the UK it would be a good thing because it would force certain papers (like The News of the World) to report on important issues and not create scandals to discredit politicians. Here, privacy laws would force real, investigative reporting rather than attempts at journalism by fake reporters trying to trick politicians into confessions.

Oh no, I don't have an opinion at all. :) I really don't like tabloid reporters giving journalists a bad name. I did think it was interesting, though, that Kettle said most UK journalists don't feel that journalism is a serious profession the way that US journalists do, so most of them don't make a big deal out of ethical and legal issues. Made sense to me with what I've seen so far with UK journalism. Kind of sad.

I went to dinner with Max and Lavinia after that. We found a restaurant specializing in Singaporean (is that a word?) food. It was reallllllly good, and I got to show off my chopstick skills. After that I watched the finale of LOST. Umm...yeah....ABC is pretty much destroying my life between LOST and Grey's. Even the finale of October Road was a little messed up. Perhaps when I watch season 3 of House, Fox will redeem my faith in television shows.

That said, I can't wait until fall when the shows resume.

Except LOST doesn't resume til 2008.

Sigh. Majorly.