Thursday, January 08, 2004

Article: BBC NEWS | UK | Education | Fees message lost on teenagers

Of course, when a media organisation at last decides to actually talk to the people a new policy will affect, instead of just staring at their own navels whilst "analysing" the political fallout, they have to be patronising. So when the BBC talked to a couple of smart 16-year-olds [actually, first point of contention: why make a conclusion only from talking to two people, as was done in this article? There was no survey done to back it up. Poor. And then to use it as a headline? Inexcusable, if unsurprising] who basically said that higher fees wouldn't put them off going to university, even though they are poor (in other words, they had each just given a counter-example to one of the anti-fees movement's loudest complaints, which is that working-class youths are too stupid to work out whether taking on a debt is worth it or not [you'd be surprised, if you're not from the UK, how much middle-class people undervalue working-class people, although of course they dress it up as liberal concern]), what do the BBC decide to use as a headlline? "Fees message lost on teenagers". Yes, ladies and gentlemen! We have here two teenagers, (one more than necessary to prove our point, as they're all the same!), who, as you suspected, are too pig-ignorant to understand what the hell is going on concerning fees! This shows all teenagers are too stupid to do anything! Why don't we make everything free, if only so they don't get confused? Of course, that way, it'll be too expensive to have too many university places, so these peasants won't marry our young Charlotte or Edward. Once you read the article, you realise it's not quite like that (although there are numerous blatant "out-of-context quotings" and "angles")... but from just reading the headline, most people will be misled. And the BBC's not supposed to stand for that. The article itself is a little biased, but no more than I'd have expected, so I won't rant about it. [Sigh]. At least they ran the piece, I guess.

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