Journalists' Rights Day

Apparently today is Journalists' Rights Day. Now I'm all for "rights" in general, but this is a profession that, in my limited experience, doesn't make good use of the rights that they have.

Take UK journalism. The best way to sell newspapers, apparently, is to make up scandals. Any journalist who fabricates a story just to create sensation, or sets a trap for a celebrity, loses his entitlement to any rights.

Then we have the blatently biased reporters, both in the UK and in Portugal. They record interviews when they have already defined their personal objectives for the resulting article. That's hardly the best way to ensure that their rights are respected.

As for the journalists who write and present articles that they have no technical competence for..... Need I continue?

Admittedly, journalists rights are threatened in many countries, even in Portugal from time to time (particularly in Madeira), but perhaps the journalists should reflect more on the way those rights are wielded.

Portuguese Losers

I feel obliged to "destacar" the awful headline from one of Lisbon's free distribution daily papers today - the Portuguese are losing millions on Euromillions! Over the last three weeks, the difference between the amounts bet and received by Portuguese punters is more than 64 million euros. Brilliant!

Lets see. If 20% of all bets are lost in tax and the jackpot has not been paid in that period, associated with a sharply increased level of bets due to the huge jackpots, where's the surprise? It would be newsworthy if the Portuguese loss ratio were higher than other countries, but that would have required some serious research. Even so, a little work must have gone into arriving at the 64M€ figure - shame it only qualifies as news for its sensation value.

Personally, I got a 11-1 payout last week - enough to keep me betting for another three months. I wonder where the big prize will finally go - luck of the Irish again, or Portuguese underdogs?

Blunted knives

Having been on the wrong end of a piece of journalism last month, I now feel slightly uncomfortable about anonymously being rude about public figures.

As I said to the journalist at the end of my interview, when asked if she could quote me, "Quoting me is the least of my worries. What matters is the way that you quote and the context that you put it in." Sure enough, the quotes attributed to me in the published article were selective, taken out of context, and inaccurate.

As a result, I feel more sympathy for the people in the news who see their words taken out of context, like poor old Benedict XVI (okay, maybe not!) and may put away my sharpened knives for a while.

In fact, I may do a 180º turn and support somebody occasionally, such as secretary of state Castro Guerra, who appeared in very poor light on the TV this morning because of the Johnson Control factory that will close in Portalegre. It's not his fault. In my contacts with him when he was Chairman of IAPMEI he came across as an honest, concerned manager, not as a politician. He used all the tools available to him to secure foreign investment and Portuguese jobs. If globalisation means that once the State benefits expire the multinationals move to cheaper locations, he's not to blame.