You may have read recently that Keble’s undergraduate body voted decisively not to spend £193 on a portrait of the Queen to be placed in the JCR, with Daily Mail journalist Ian Garland vented his spleen over the issue earlier in the week. The content of the article was adequately summarised by its headline: ‘Students at top Oxford college refuse to hang picture of the Queen because doing so would promote ELITISM’. It fits into the standard tabloid Oxbridge model: we all belong to a narrow social elite, which means that our opinions on issues of elitism and privilege are invalid.
Comments on Mail Online such as ‘do these dipsticks really have the mental ability to attend such an establishment?’ demonstrate a funny situation in which Oxford as an institution is granted respect and deference by the general public, but the people who inhabit it are not. Oxford students aren’t given much of a chance. Either we are toffs and reactionaries, elitists and traditionalists, or we are whinging left-leaning typical students. If the latter is true, it is only interesting because we are meant to be the former.
Many of the issues regarding tabloid articles about Oxbridge in general were elegantly pointed out this week by a lengthy response in Cherwell’s rival newspaper. That answered the question ‘why was the article bad?’ However, we must also ask the question ‘why was the article written?’ Journalism is in essence comprised of two roles which can sometimes pull against each other; finding the news, and reporting it. A lot of the time, there simply isn’t very much news. Oxford is a small place. Britain isn’t, nor is the world, but the things which people want to read about are rarely the same as the things which are important to our lives, or the things that are valuable for us to know about.
The same phenomenon is apparent in student newspapers, although suggesting you flick through this copy of Cherwell to verify that claim would be disloyal. Sometimes there is no story to be found, so there is no story to report. The Keble JCR motion is clearly not a national news story, but people want to read about it because it reinforces existing prejudices and gives a platform to anti-Oxford sentiment. For better or for worse, as Oxford students, people are interested in us and what we do.
Similarly, those on the Oxford student press’ trawl list are encouraged to exaggerate stories about minor JCR incidents into full blown press stories. Sometimes, it’s hard to know the limits as to what constitutes ‘news’. What if people are interested in it? How about news stories which severely jeopardise people’s future prospects? When there is no news, should we create it? Maybe we should just print something telling the truth: ‘Sorry, there isn’t any news today.’
