May 16: Guest Lecture
I was not excited to make the climb up the multiple flights of stairs to our classroom, but I pushed through the cracking in my knees. The lecture was on Media and the Troubles, which you can see from my title. Basically how media was affected during the Troubles period which was 1968-1998. One thing I found interesting was that about 3,700 people died during that time period. Me and Mel had an interesting conversation about whether or not that was a lot of people (in the most respectful way possible). On one side, that is a huge amount of people compared to their population of 1.7 million. One the other side, as many as 40,000 people were physically injured. That means out of the 43,000 people harmed, 3k died. We also learned about the different parties during the conflict. You have the Catholics (Irish), and the Protestants (British). The lecturer talked about the roots of the conflict. You have, the 1177 Norman invasion of Ireland, the 1800 Act of Union where Ireland merged with Great Britain, Civil Rights Movements, and Discrimination.
Broadcasting during this time was hard because a lot of words and phrases were considered inappropriate. They could not use the words, shootings, deaths, and massacres. They also called Bloody Sunday, Londonderry Killings. BBC started being viewed as the mouthpiece for the British Government. The British Government wanted them to “fight terrorism” but telling them what to talk about. This leads to a lot of issues and the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1974. Eventually it got to the point where the British Government manipulated BBC and ITN to produce false stories thinking they were real. It wasn’t until eyewitnesses came out and said that it wasn’t true, and there was footage backing them up. There was also a Broadcasting Ban in 1988. This banned Sinn Fein and 11 other organizations from reporting events. They would suspend the ban for democratic elections only. Sinn Fein’s people could appear on radio and T.V. but could not talk. If they did, they would dub over their voice with someone else talking. The editors would delay to voiceover, so it doesn’t appear they are breaking the ban.
I am glad we had this lecture because we would not have been able to talk about all of that during our short walking tour the next day. It was pretty interesting even though I am not interested in media or broadcasting. I did retain a lot of information which is pretty unusual for me. I am very excited to see Belfast, knowing all the history we just learned!
I don’t have pictures of us at the lecture, so enjoy these pictures of Mel on our walk!
