It seems this is not a parody.
It sure as hell looks like a parody, wouldn’t you say? But it seems it’s not. The BBC is treating it as not-parody.
Mr Wallis was arrested last year on suspicion of driving while unfit, following an incident where a car hit a lamppost at Church Road in Llanblethian, Vale of Glamorgan.
What car? Driven by whom? What does the incident have to do with Mr Wallis?
“When I crashed my car on the 28th November I fled the scene. I did so because I was terrified,” he wrote.
Oh, so it was his car, and he was driving? Then why did the BBC say “a car” as if owner and driver were both a mystery?
“I am sorry that it appears I ‘ran away’ but this isn’t how it happened in the moment,” he said.
He identifies as not having run away.
Women’s Equality Party is quite overcome with emotion.
Comments
20 responses to “He identifies as driving sober”
Why is it that his courage sounds more like CYA?
And the subsequent pronoun announcement is extraordinary, I didn’t think he could be any more courageous, but then he just was. It’s like OMG, what a hero. :P
Here >> https://mobile.twitter.com/JamieWallisMP/status/1509122636810440709
So he retains male pronouns, and, I presume, a male body and male dress. In short, he retains his male privilege while being special…one of the “most marginalized” groups ever!
Trans is the new black.
Except claiming blackness usually requires being, um, what’s the word … Oh, yes: black. Claiming transness requires only that one be stunning and brave.
Or stunned and brazen.
Nullius @ 5
Claiming blackness requires a black ancestor. (In a number of important cases, “claiming whiteness” was denied because of a black ancestor.) Dolezal’s error was not having an identifiable black ancestor.
But if no one is going to challenge the claim, either “black” or “trans”, it doesn’t require anything but a claim.
Re the OP
Slightly related: a really good essay from Lesbian and Gay News about a woman who calls herself a butch lesbian and says she lives with gender dysphoria, but she does NOT call herself trans because sex can’t be changed and lifelong medicalization is not a good thing. Maybe Mr Wallis could learn from her. Probably not.
Lauren Black: “I am a butch lesbian. I live with gender dysphoria. I do not believe my deep discomfort with my female body means that I should take steps to change it.”
Fair enough.
“When I crashed my car […] I fled the scene. […] I am sorry that it appears I “ran away” but this isn’t how it happened in the moment.”
What a born politician he is.
They’re echoing the way the police talk about incidents – very non-committal and deliberately vague. “A male has been arrested in connection with an incident”, “a vehicle was involved in a road traffic accident” and so on, never anything that might give a clue to identity before the investigation is complete.
I suspect the Beeb do it as part of their effed-up notion of what constitutes “balance” and “impartiality”.
Yes, but that wasn’t exactly the way I meant it. I was referring to the changing trends in fashion, as in black being the color adopted by a certain “in” group. It wasn’t referring to skin tones or ethnic backgrounds..
iknklast @ 11
Silly me, I should have caught that. “… is the new black” is quite common. (As in the TV show “Orange is the New Black”, which features a trans-identified male actor playing a trans-identified male in a women’s prison, so even more relevant.) Duh. A dozen self-inflicted lashes with a wet bundle of bucatini pasta for me.
I think there must have been a law brought in, way back when, which put a stop to newspaper, TV, and radio reporters writing or saying anything about any incident which might be prejudicial to an enquiry, or future court case. Out went “Joe Bloggs, M.P., crashed into a car driven by Mrs Someone’s Wife, aged 36, mother of three, when he was driving drunk on the M25” and in came “Two vehicles were in collision on the M25”.
I’m actually surprised that the BBC thought that they were allowed to write “…an incident where a car hit a lamppost…”. After all, it might have been that the chap was stone cold sober, and fully compos mentis, and the lamppost attacked his car as he was passing.
The reason the Beeb (and the police) are vague as to what happens with these incidents is that the police cannot report someone as guilty, or even describe the incident in a way which makes them appear guilty, and the media cannot prejudice a trial in the same way. The only thing they can state are the established facts: there was a collision and an arrest has been made. They often don’t even name the arrestee. In this case the person has made a public statement connecting themselves to the incident, which can also be reported. Anything more than that will need to be decided at a trial.
https://www.bbc.com/editorialguidelines/guidelines/crime/guidelines/
https://www.app.college.police.uk/app-content/engagement-and-communication/media-relations/#respecting-suspects8217-rights-to-privacy
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/reporting-restrictions-guide-may-2016-2.pdf
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1981/49
It’s really not some conspiracy to make this specific person look less guilty. They do it in all cases where an arrest has been made, and referred to the CPS for potential prosecution.
I fully understand cynicism about the BBC – I say this as a licence fee payer – but here the BBC don’t, IMHO, deserve the criticism. I suspect the author of the piece knows full well that the items:
“arrested on suspicion of driving while unfit”
and
“a car hit a lampost”
tells us all that yes indeed the man was in fact driving, barring some surprise evidence in court regarding a doppelganger, a time machine and/or deepfake cctv footage:)
Yes, media do have a duty to be careful in reporting so as not to (1) leave themselves open for a defamation claim, or (2) prejudice a potential trial. They don’t have to obscure facts and use ultra passive voice that hides meaning.
Take the classic US “Officer involved shooting.” Was the officer the shooter, the victim or a bystander? As written it’s so passive as to be meaningless, which frankly I think is probably the intent. There are many such examples. It’s entirely ok to have a headline that says “Man shot by police.”
In this case there would be nothing to prevent either the police or the media from saying “Driver of vehicle fled the scene after crashing into a lamppost.” It’s factual, doesn’t identify the driver and so doesn’t allege any particular person did something the facts don’t establish. More to the point, the BBC quote above is post-trial “Mr Wallis was arrested last year on suspicion of driving while unfit, following an incident where a car hit a lamppost”. Given Wallis has admitted to that being him, the report could quite legitimately say “… following an incident in which he crashed his car into a lamppost.”
iknklast:
I was being intentionally literal, because I felt like being “cute”.
Points taken about the reasons news organizations are careful about the wording of allegations about crimes and the like. Still, I think they could avoid the problem more skillfully than by saying “an incident where a car hit a lamppost.” A car was driven into a lampposr perhaps, or someone drove a car into a lamppost. Not pretending a car did it all by itself – too confusing and/or too risible.
Unfortunately Ophelia, *all* facts in a criminal case have to be established in court. If a car and another car are in a collision,then they cannot state who hit whom, because that implies legal liability which only a court can establish. I get that it is weird when a car interacts with a stationary object, but that is the standard, and I can see why you should not impose your own judgement onto it before a potential trial.
The alternative is much worse, in my opinion. I would rather have the police and media refrain from anything but established facts in a criminal case. And the only standard for what *is* the established fact should only come from a magistrate or a jury.
It makes for some clunky news reports, I don’t disagree. But I can see why we got here. And I can broadly agree that it is better than what we had before.
CCCC, sorry, but I call nonsense on your first paragraph. Think about it. Police could never appeal for witnesses to most crimes because by your reasoning they couldn’t give a meaningful description of the incident. In fact, none of the links you provided in your first post would restrain accurate, fair, and impartial reporting such as the examples below. Yes, these are from NZ, not the UK, but we have very similar laws, legal practices and media practices to the UK.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/116764631/several-seriously-injured-after-fleeing-driver-crashes-into-car-in-christchurch
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/300554516/police-arrest-three-after-sandringham-auckland-shooting-that-injured-seven
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/300554924/auckland-police-seek-jeremy-simm-who-has-20-warrants-for-his-arrest
The BBC, and many other outlets, use ultra passive and obscuring language because it’s an editorial choice they want to make, not because they have to.