Lazesharp.net

1. Work for a large organisation
2. Pretend to represent affiliated organisations
3. Repeat

Apparently professional journalists these days are becoming sloppy in their ability to sniff out the truth. Either that, or they just don’t care unless it involves late Princesses or Z-list celebrities.

Since October the ECU issues that have arisen here in Exeter have begun to hit the news everywhere. Not in a big way, but generally appearing as small articles in papers or deep in websites. Being in charge of the Student website here has opened my eyes to the ineptitude of journalists around the country, not only in researching the facts but also in attaining quotes.

In almost every publication covering this story you will find a quote from “Emma Brewster, CU worker”. Only thing is, she isn’t who everyone thinks she is.

Emma Brewster isn’t and has never been a student at the University of Exeter. So how can she be a worker for the (E)CU here? Simple, she’s not!

Google her and you’ll quickly find that she’s actually the South West regional representative for the UCCF (Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship), an organisation that the ECU here are affiliated to.

So, given that she doesn’t in fact represent the ECU, but instead the UCCF, how can she make statements on behalf of the CU claiming to be a worker for them and implying she’s a student here?

Further more, is the current action being taken even the will of the Exeter ECU? After all, with Emma doing all their talking for them, how can we know what it is they really want, especially since the President of the ECU stated to the student newspaper Exepose that “we will respect the decision of the student body that we should be called the ECU”.

Sounds like the UCCF are starting a fight no one here wanted in the first place, lets hope the ECU do the right thing and tell them where to stick their wholly unchristian, anti-democratic bully tactics.

On the flip-side, the UCCF and ECU aren’t entirely to blame for the cock ups of the countries media. Sure, they may have purposefully mislead them, but its the responsibility of journalists to check their sources and get the facts right, otherwise, how can they expect people to believe them? I’m seriously considering sending a letter to all the news organisations at fault with nothing more than the dictionary definition of “research” written on it. After all, it couldn’t hurt.

The Evangelical Christian Union have this week filed a “Letter before Action” with the Students’ Guild of the University of Exeter.

My position within X-Net (for those who don’t know, the online student media for Exeter University) has forced upon me the pure facts surrounding the issue. This is essentially a good thing as it has meant that our News team has been able to cover the story without bias, however, other news websites have not been so fortunate.

Interestingly, it seems that almost all of the websites covering the story are Christian news sites. Not particularly unexpected, however, it seems that almost all of the reporting of this story by Christian news sources either manipulate the facts or get the story almost entirely wrong.

In fact, the most balanced and in fact correct coverage I could find on this issue, beyond X-Net of course, was the BBC News coverage.

Not only are news sources getting the facts wrong but the Exeter ECU themselves don’t seem to know what’s going on. During the recent referendum over the final name, the president of the ECU, James Harding, was interviewed by our News Editor, Kathryn Nott. Some of his initial statements were flat out lies; at one point stating “It is a myth that the Christian Union are affiliated to the UCCF”. After phoning the UCCF, we confirmed that they most definitely are affiliated. To which we got an apology and an excuse: “I forgot that we were affiliated to the UCCF”.

Yeah, we believe you.

Couple this with the inaccurate reporting of various Christian news sites and I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that large Christian organisations will only promote virtues such as equality and morality when it benefits them. So, just like any other organisation really.

I for one sincerely hope that the Students’ Guild don’t buckle under the legal pressure being mounted on them by the ECU, after all, it should be fairly obvious to them that they don’t have a legal leg to stand on.

I’ve now moved by blog over to Mephisto, a powerful new Rails blogging platform. Generally, it seems to offer a fair amount more flexibility over Typo and is a lot faster, although I need to use it for a while longer before drawing any real conclusions.

I very much doubt that I’ll get much on here in the coming months, University and in particular, X-Net, are keeping me very busy. Hopefully I’ll be able to write the odd reasonably insightful entry here and there, but frequent updates are a few months off at least.

I’m hoping to come up with a half-decent non-default design at some point in the next few weeks, Mephisto seems to make theming fairly painless so it’s not something that’s likely to demand too much of my time.

In other news, I’ve discovered that our VPS host Adiungo, has finally upgraded their virtualization software to allow the 2.6 series of Linux kernels to run. It’s about time.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to backup and reinstall everything on the server right now, a task made more complicated by the two people I share it with. Still, we may get around to it eventually, hopefully then we’ll be able to see the back of Fedora Core 2…