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Jeremy Lee on Media

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Astonishingly there are more people out there who find the sight of Gordon Ramsay humanely catching then killing a puffin and eating it more offensive than that of a Palestinian man being shot in the head by an Israeli soldier.

That's the latest revelation to emerge from Ofcom, which subsequently spent an unknown number of man hours determining whether or not The F Word had breached any of its programming codes about the ‘generally accepted standards broadcasters must ensure that material which may cause offence is justified by the context'.

While I'm not necessarily a massive fan of Ramsay, the fact is that eating puffins in Iceland - where the piece was filmed - is apparently a common practice, which is something I didn't know. Unfortunately, the shooting of Palestinians is also a common practice in Israel but perhaps people are so immune to it that they couldn't be bothered to ring in and complain.

Published Sep 15 2008, 03:00 PM by Jeremy Lee
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  September 16, 2008

This is quite a disingenuous headline.   The Palestinian, to whom you refer, was only shot in the head by an off-duty policeman because he had just gone on the rampage in a bulldozer, killing three people in the process.  Had he not been shot, who knows how many more deaths he might have caused? Of course the BBC should not have broadcast it but it probably didn't illicit as many complaints as the F Word because 1) it was on the news rather than an entertainment programme and 2) was hardly an unprovoked killing given what had happened just before.  I'm sure had it been unprovoked, many more complaints would have been made.

Your wording implies that you are talking about the killing of Palestinians in general which the OFCOM complaints were not about.  I'd expect far more care to be taken by an associate editor given the sensitive nature of the subject matter.  

So perhaps you should rename your headline to: "Is screening the killing of puffins really worse than screening the killing of a rampaging killer"?  But of course, that wouldn't have the same impact would it?

  September 16, 2008

I agree that the headline is misleading but it is deliberately provocative.

I stand by the argument that people are more likely to complain about seeing an animal die on television than a person, whether that be the Palestinian mentioned in this Ofcom report or indeed any of his victims as he drove the bulldozer.

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