{"id":19888,"date":"2016-08-09T17:15:51","date_gmt":"2016-08-09T16:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=19888"},"modified":"2016-08-09T17:15:51","modified_gmt":"2016-08-09T16:15:51","slug":"biased-olympics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=19888","title":{"rendered":"Biased Olympics"},"content":{"rendered":"

I can\u2019t be doing with the Olympics. You don\u2019t know who is competing honestly and who is\u2026 well, getting a bit of outside assistance from the pharmaceutical industry. For some countries, the latter course of action would appear to be more or less mandatory if recent news reports are anything to go by.\"PIlls<\/p>\n

However, I did notice this story today<\/a>. It concerns the men\u2019s 10m synchronised diving competition, in which GB won a bronze medal. As the name suggests, the participants in this sport are not singular in relation to each country \u2013 they\u2019re plural. You see, it wouldn\u2019t be called \u201csynchronised\u201d if there was only one of them. The upshot is that two divers dive off a platform, do stuff while they\u2019re falling \u2013 this is where the synchronised part comes in, you understand \u2013 and then hit the water together. The more synchronised they are, the better their score. And whatever the result, barring a complete cock-up by one of them, they are both equally responsible.<\/p>\n

All of the foregoing is only true if you\u2019re not a newspaper editor, though. You see, the GB pair who won the bronze medal consists of Tom Daley and Daniel Goodfellow. But in most of this morning\u2019s newspapers – and as you\u2019d expect, the Daily Mail was at the front of the queue \u2013 only photographs of Tom Daley were shown. Daniel Goodfellow\u2019s mother is understandably upset over this, and well she might be.<\/p>\n

In the BBC story I\u2019ve linked to above, they quote \u201can expert\u201d from the media \u2013 Bob Satchwell, from the Society of Editors \u2013 who makes the one comment (in bold) which appears so suddenly that it is guaranteed to mean exactly the opposite of what it says:<\/p>\n

\n

Often an editor will make a decision according to the space available, and in this case most likely needed something ‘tall and thin’. <\/p>\n

I don’t think there’s anything more sinister than that.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Yes, Mr Satchwell. I\u2019m absolutely certain that Tom Daley\u2019s well-publicised lifestyle choice (which has hardly been out of the bloody newspapers since the last Olympics) didn\u2019t enter into it, and it needed you to make that clear for everyone right out of the blue like that. The truth is that if it hadn\u2019t been for all that coverage about Tom Daley\u2019s sexuality over the last four years he wouldn\u2019t have been singled out like this \u2013 his diving partner is just as photogenic. Tom Daley is what he is as far as media targets go because<\/strong> of the coverage of his private life – and because the world is currently trying its damnedest to show how tolerant it is. And that is<\/strong> somewhat more sinister than you suggest. <\/p>\n

The saddest part is that the media and those loopy Olympics hangers-on are wetting themselves over what is only a bronze medal, after all (I know, I know \u2013 but let\u2019s just be honest). The two people who should really should be proud and excited by it (because they<\/strong> won it) are Tom Daley and Daniel Goodfellow. Thanks to the Daily Mail and the rest ballsing it up because of their warped agenda, the event of a lifetime has been ruined for one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I can\u2019t be doing with the Olympics. You don\u2019t know who is competing honestly and who is\u2026 well, getting a bit of outside assistance from the pharmaceutical industry. For some countries, the latter course of action would appear to be more or less mandatory if recent news reports are anything to go by. However, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[87,107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-sport"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19888"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19888\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}