Right, I'm going to weigh in on the Lisa Cameron MP situation and current media trends in the UK right now...
It feels like UK journalism has a real problem right now when public figures do something demonstrably bad, of instead of reporting that as news for the community to be aware of and informed by, journalists go directly to the public figure in question and let them mount a defence, defend, or otherwise excuse in advance their actions in the vein of putting across their side of the story... and thus in the process only platform that side of the story.
Enter Lisa Cameron, MP. Lisa was elected several years ago after standing to represent SNP, Scotland's prominent left-wing party. She's recently jumped ship to the Tories, who in Scotland are a party with minority support, and are strongly right-wing. Because of the law of the country, Lisa gets to keep her job representing the local community - although the party she now represents is diametrically opposed to the views of the party she was elected to stand for. She was elected in the first place because a majority of electors in her district wanted a leftwing party to represent them in government - and now that person that they elected will represent the minority of rightwingers in her district only, and is completely unashamed about this and unwilling to consider re-running an election or standing down.
How is the British media reporting this? Across the board, even in leftwing media...
"Poor Lisa, she's been getting threats and abuse from the nasty public. She has to go into hiding now because of all that abuse she's getting." (with of course no reference to why that is happening, leaving the implication it's because she's a powerful, successful woman, or independent minded etc.)
Making that focus so ridiculously overdramatic, as well as totally focused on the wrong aspect weakens the story, and detracts from what's real news - as well as, most importantly, also taking away the weight from real abuse and criticism that people who don't deserve it face; racism, ableism, sexism and other associated genuine discrimination based on prejudices, rather than angry words spoken as the result of actions someone has openly chosen in order to benefit themself and harm people in their community.
This kind of coverage has also arisen recently with the family of Captain Tom, another UK public figure who was a well-known charity fundraiser, whose family later claimed to continue his work after his death - but instead shifted quietly into for-profit work using his image and likeness, without drawing attention to this fact. Hannah Ingram-Moore, his daughter, was revealed to have personally profited from the sales of Captain Tom's autobiography, written with the aid of ghostwriters after he became a high-profile figure based on his charity endeavours, which strongly implied itself to be a book written and sold in order to raise more money for charity... but actually wasn't. Hannah and her family have been doing the media circuit in defence of this decision, pulling the 'my hero father just wanted to provide for his family' angle (who are all, may I add, working adults in their 50s)... and have been getting very little critical pushback for that! Despite the core story here being literally what seems to be a case of unscrupulous family members profiting off the charity work of a veteran.
Going back to Lisa, generally leftwing paper The Guardian just published a fawning article painting her as the victim - and carefully not asking her any hard questions that would go between the lines of the image she is deliberately crafting.
Quoting below, Lisa - who was elected in no uncertain terms to represent a particular political position and set of policies, supported by her voters, defends herself thus:
In the interview, Cameron said that because she repeatedly opposed the SNP’s “progressive” political positions, she had been blanked by party colleagues in the Commons’ tea room and corridors and was forced to seek help from a counsellor and her GP after experiencing panic attacks and loneliness. “I found it to be quite a psychologically coercive situation,” Cameron told the Times. “They are always right. If you question things you are wrong and you’re isolated.
But Lisa, if you don't agree with any of the SNP's positions on anything and disagree with all of your colleagues on every subject, then it begs the question of why you are actually standing as an SNP MP in the first place. And I suspect based on what she isn't saying here, that the 'isolation' and 'loneliness' she felt here came because people legitimately put this question to her.
Is it psychologically coercive to actually represent the people and political positions that you were elected to, folks? Are your colleagues bullying you when they ask why you aren't doing the job that you applied for and are getting paid circa 100k a year to carry out? Why isn't that the story here? Why are we being asked to feel sympathy for people who break the social contract in order to personally profit?
