"They won’t be selling their story, minister”

That was the headline in the Daily Mail a few days ago and it is true what they say, a headline can grab attention and make you want to read on.

This was about the four British soldiers killed in Iraq and while this raised questions about women serving on the front line in Iraq, this blog is going to focus on the hostages that were freed after being captured in Iran and especially the two that “sold” their stories. Arthur Batchelor or “Mr Bean” as he now seems to have become known and Faye Turney who was Leading Seaman which has resulted in this .

Although the Sun newspaper has defended its decision to pay for her story and Mr Batchelor said he was under the impression that everyone was going to sell their story, he only spoke to a local paper and he received only a tenth of what Faye Turney received it has still caused uproar.
The Daily Mail article cites examples of postings from www.rumnation.co.uk and www.arrse.co.uk which are military chatrooms and lists some of them and the feelings towards the selling off the stories.

This has a lot of people talking and sharing a lot of different views, like this one from Kate Bevan: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/tv/2007/04/trevor_mcdonald_deserves_more.html
and this one from Toby Harnden: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/foreign/tobyharnden/april07/disgracefiasco.htm
and this one from Alison Ford:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/04/selling_stories.html
This is another blog with a brief insight into quite a few perspectives (might have to scroll down a bit!)
http://joesharkeyat.blogspot.com/

They both present interesting views but the general feeling of consensus seems to be that the stories should not have been sold, they should not have made money out of their ordeals but is it their fault for sellin the stories or the MOD’s for letting them sell their stories?
I mean, we can all criticise from our position can’t we? But we haven’t been through what they went through as I am sure it was hard. However, that does not (in my opinion) give them a free right to sell their stories to the media, ”tell” their stories and let the media use its public watchdog and fourth estate roles can be recognised but to offer money…it just shows the competitiveness in the industry and how financially influential it is becoming.

Whatever the moral high ground here is, the fact remains that the stories have been sold and told whether it was right or not. This does highlight the need to control this though because personally I do not think it was right for serving military personnel to be allowed “exceptional circumstances” to sell their stories…what about the families of people that have died serving in wars and those injured..if one group of people can why can’t everyone? I don’t think that would be good for the media or the image of Britain.

I’ll leave you with the below blog link and it leaves you with some interesting things to think about in the industry that we all hope to represent in a few years:
http://www.wordblog.co.uk/2007/04/09/while-sailors-sell-their-stories-parents-are-barred-from-telling-of-nightmare/