Proud of Bias?

Andrew McFarland > Blog > Proud of Bias?

September 23, 2004

At the moment, I'm working on a series of articles about contemporary conflicts. The two I was working on were abortion and gay pride. Both are fairly topical in Belfast at the moment. There is an irregular anti-abortion picket outside the Family Planning Agency's offices, and the "Stop the Parade" group recently tried to prevent the Belfast gay pride march going ahead.

Abortion is one of those issues I have no strong opinions on, except that I am thankful nobody close to me has ever been in the position of being affected by it. The anti-abortion protests have had a curious effect on me. Every time I go past the pictures of the aborted foetuses the protestors hold up I become marginally more in favour of abortion, by which I mean I become more accepting that some people may need abortions. This is largely because I feel if these are the best anti-abortion arguments they can come up with their overall position must be pretty weak. Pictures of the aftermath of, say, open heart surgery would be equally as revolting, but that doesn't make it morally wrong to have a bypass.

For the Belfast Pride/"Stop the Parade" article, one of the groups I approached for an interview was Belfast Pride itself, via their press office email address. The response I got surprised me just a little. 

As a "journalist" I would expect you to be unbiased but the 
content of your web site does not indicate this.
 
Yet again we have more verses from the bible rhymed off such 
as the article entitled "The Sin of Sodom" ... Have you never 
heard of the concept "Love thy Neighbour" and "Judge not, that
ye be not judged".

You might think that god wished that the Bible be used to 
discriminate and harass gay people, I disagree.

Why did this surprise me? There is after all an article called The Sin of Sodom on my website. The thing is it isn't about anything gay at all. The title of the article comes from Ezekiel 16:49-50, where it is specified that the sin of Sodom was "pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness". Even more oddly, that is the only article on my site that has even the slightest relevance to same sex relationships.

I can think of two possible explanations:

The first is slightly worrying. I've had lots of feedback about that article, and so far everybody else has understood it. In my heart, this is the explanation that I want to believe, because this would mean the guy from Belfast Pride was simply mistaken. Of course, this doesn't explain why he thought there were anti-gay verses "rhymed off" on my site.

The second is more worrying, because it means the guy from Belfast Pride, an organisation that should be fundamentally opposed to all forms of prejudice and bias, judged me based on just four words that formed the title of an article on my website. If he had read even the first two paragraphs of the article he would have known that it was nothing to do with homosexuality. I really don't want to believe that contacting the press office of Belfast Pride would result in a reply from biased individual, but that seems to be the only reasonable explination.