The bees today

This is definitely a Postcards item and not for Soliloquies.  The headline as tweeted by the BBC is "UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan urges "everyone with a gun" in Syria to stop fighting".  My immediate thought on that, as I posted on facebook, was so apparently rocket launchers, grenades, knives, vicious hamsters are all still in?

Then I felt the need to clarify that I do not find the situation in Syria remotely funny, however the tweet is badly written and grossly trivialises the situation.  It's the kind of headline Have I Got News For You dreams of.  I can hear Paul Merton's voice in my head now.

There are a couple of bees in my bonnet as a result of this.  One follows on from Celebrating Stupid which I penned this morning and buzzes that you have to be so careful to clarify everything you say on social media because people, well, they'll get bees in their bonnets too.  When I see headlines like that one, I have an involuntary response to them.  Even if I manage to keep my mouth shut, my left eyebrow arches in a most pointed and sarcastic, indeed flippant attitude.  Many people still do not quite get my sense of humour, which is a blend of sarcastic and sardonic with a twist of plain dark and is on the whole dry as a bone.  My face is too busy being wry and wrestling with my eyebrow to arrange a cheery grin to offset the sting that trips off my tongue before I can stop it.  I spend a lot of time clarifying and some apologising.  Some people get me and react accordingly.  Social media actually makes it harder for me to say what I would say in person.  In this case, it would have been as trivialising as the headline itself to add :D but why shouldn't I say what's on my mind?  Clarifying comments ensued.  The bee though is still buzzing.

The other bee is bigger but like all bees, the bigger they are, the less aggressively they go about their business.  It's buzzing loudly though about ambiguity in journalism, particularly headlines.  It's all very well to use headlines to grab attention.  The headline didn't start life that way though.  It came into the world to help distinguish one story from another and only when it was seen to aid sales did it become bigger and bolder and all too often red.  Big letters aren't enough though.  They have to be worded in a punchy, thought provoking way, that thought being ideally 'buy paper now'.  How often do we read a headline that actually tells us what the story is actually about?  How often do they place importance above sensationalism?  It really bothers me that even an institution like the BBC can so grossly trivialise situations.  Yes, it was a tweet and has to be brief.  But even fewer words would have been better.  Kofi Annan urges Syria to stop fighting.  Simple and not at all open to mockery by the likes of me and my eyebrow or to misinterpretation.  But how many people read the article?  It sounded so ridiculous for a UN envoy to say such a thing and I'll bet there are many conversations over a pint in the beer garden today about the headline and not the article.  These people lead public opinion and wield a frightening amount of power yet the majority of people will not look beyond the big letters at the top.

I guess my bees are from the same hive and it's a hive named public information.  They'd really prefer people to stop reacting to only the heading and start thinking about the content, whether it's a status update or a news headline.  But who listens to bees?